This House Believes Ontology Necessitates God!

Since Pro laid out his arguments in a structured format I will follow the same layout. Some of Pros points I either agree with or don't find necessary to address, so if I skip them then it can be considered a concession to the point.1. General Clarifications:(1.2) I do not necessarily dispute Pros contention that all false ideas are imaginary. What I dispute is Pros argument that if God can't be imagined then he must be true. I explained why in detail in my "God is a non-idea" argument, which I will uphold below in section 4. However, recall that I also argued the alternative which is that God can be imagined. I find it curious that Pro did not address this argument in the past round as this was my major contention. Either he cannot be imagined for reasons other than being true (non-idea), or he can be imagined. And if either of those options are true, Pros entire argument in this debate collapses.So once again, depending on how you define God, he can absolutely be imagined. But since Pro did no refute that point I will simply extend my arguments.(1.3) Pro still does not accept my claim that experiences are necessarily tied to understanding. This is about as simple a concept as it gets. I brought up time for example. When we refer to time, what are we talking about? To try and describe time one might say it is a set of events happening one after another. But what is an event? What does "after" mean? Asking these questions one after another is a futile exercise which will only result in reaching the problem of infinite regress. Words can only take us so far in describing reality. Sooner or later the only thought we have left is that of some experience we had in reality. There is no other means of having the thought. If Pro disagrees then he needs to provide a counter argument. I can't make it any simpler than that.2. Ontology(2.1) I never argued that a priori/purely theoretical knowledge is meaningless. I argued that it alone is an insufficient means of determining what is consistent with reality. To illustrate this point imagine that there is a new stadium being built in your city or town. Now imagine we decide that we are going to determine what this stadium will look like, however rather than seeking out the blueprints or trying to walk into the construction area to see how big it is, we instead decide that we are going to sit around and conceptualize the stadium until our minds determine what it will necessarily look like. As absurd as this sounds, this is exactly what Pro is trying to do with God. The statement "God exists" means that God's existence is consistent with reality. How can anyone determine what is consistent with reality without comparing our conclusions to reality? Simple, we can't. The very idea is completely nonsensical.(2.2) Pro seems to think that using math can get around this idea of requiring demonstrable proof to accept something as true. It does not. There are two different tools that allow us understand reality. One is reality itself (as our senses perceive it), the other is logic. This creates two possibilities when talking about truth. Truth can be that which is consistent with reality, or that which is consistent with its own concept. The latter is a logical truth.Earlier I used an example to illustrate how we can use reality to determine if 2+2=4 by taking two marbles in one hand and two in the other and combining them. This time, I will ask you all to try it at home and see if 2+2 can actually =5. Continue reading once you have tried"So did it work? You might say no, however that depends on what you meant by 5. If you actually tried this then you probably did what anyone would do and begin with a concept of 5, then counted the marbles to determine whether your held concept matched the result. In that case you used reality to determine whether your concept was consistent with reality. Now if on the other hand, if you are defining 5 as "the result of 2+2" then in that case you are allowing reality to determine what the concept is, therefore reality cannot prove it logically false. The only way that the statement can be logically false is for the person conceptualizing 5 to conceptualize something not 5 at the same time, which is of course absurd. Thus the proof that the statement is true is the fact that the person doing the conceptualizing is only thinking of that one concept. So to answer Pros question, whether x=-4 is true depends only on what we mean when we say "x". Reality itself has nothing to do with it, therefore it can never be determined to be true or false if we are talking about truth in the sense of being consistent with reality. Until we assign a reality based definition of X, the statement can only be true or false according to logic.3. The definition of ImaginationPro still fails to provide us with a reasonable definition and instead focuses on affirming his point I already agreed with that all false idea are necessarily imaginative. A quick Google search gives us the following:im'ag'ine: form a mental image or concept of.https://www.google.com...I fail to see how Pro can dispute this simple definition. Moving on...4. The Idea of God is a Non-IdeaFirst of all I no longer have any idea what Pro is talking about when he says that God cannot be imagined. If his argument is that God cannot be imagined because the concept in our minds was not in fact made up, then he has to prove that case. He has to prove that the actual being placed the idea in our mind or that our idea was picked up by our senses in response to reality. Pro has not argued any of this.The only other way for Pro to make this point is to say that we cannot imagine God because God is necessarily true, therefore our ideas do not qualify as being imaginary. That would be begging the question, which is insufficient for Pro to uphold his burden.I see no other options, Pro needs to enlighten myself and the readers what he has actually argued and how he has justified it.(4.1) Pro does not understand my argument. As I made clear, the reason the word God has meaning to us is because we give it meaning by attributing positive traits to it. Most of us think of some bearded guy in the clouds sitting on his throne. Whatever comes to mind, it is necessarily positive traits and it necessarily resembles something that we already understand. If, on the other hand we do not attribute such traits to the word then we have nothing to conceptualize, aka a non-idea. Once again, if I say I am not walking, there is nothing to conceptualize because in order to do that you must necessarily conceptualize something I am doing, which would not be logically consistent with the statement because whatever you are thinking is not what the statement refers to.(4.2) The word "transcend" alone is not a negative trait. It becomes a negative trait when you combine it with something that is all we know, time for example. We know of no other form of existence because we are necessarily tied to this reality in which time is based. To say that God transcends time is to say he does not exist within it. In other words, not time, aka a negative trait.(4.3) Pro seems to be debating in his sleep and arguing with the opponent the dreamt up. Nowhere have I argued anything close to: "that since a priori ideas (ideas which cannot be conceptualized but exist) do not exist, and so a priori ideas do not exist". Pro needs to explain his made up circular argumentation allegation.(4.4) I never attacked Pros "imagination can only yield complex ideas" argument because I found it nonsensical and irrelevant. To say that we cannot imagine simple ideas is absurd. I am imagining myself being happy. Was that complex? Either way Pro answers that question, if he holds his contention then he is not speaking English.(4.5) Way too much to say about this one point. I will simply state that any idea about reality that is not empirical is imaginative. This all follows from the definition of empirical and imaginary.5. The Third Law of Thought:(5.1) I explained in detail how Pros argument connected to belief. Pro should read my argument. And no, an idea is not merely limited to true or false as demonstrated by the proposition: "this statement is false". This is exactly what I was talking about when I referred to the law of excluded middle not applying to thought. Since the statement does not qualify as either true or false, we must create a 3rd or "middle" category to place it in. In order to now turn this into a binary proposition we have to change the options to "true" or "not true". Or we can go with "false" or "not false". This is why I brought up this point in the first place. Pro tried to claim that disproving the negation makes the statement necessarily true. No, it doesn"t. Because disproving something is entirely about the minds perception, which is not limited to those two options. Accepting Pros argument there would effectively force me to prove the negation true, which is nothing more than a clever way of shifting the burden of proof.(5.2) The third option does not exist in reality, that"s why the law applies to reality.ConclusionPro claims it is funny that I find his argument self-contradictory. I find it funny that Pro makes such a claim without responding to the argument I made to show this. Pro describes his burden as beginning with a conceptualization of a being, and then proving that being exists without using empirical evidence. In other words, he is beginning with a thought and then using only his thoughts to reach an image of this being. In English we have a word for that, it's called imagination. Yet Pros entire claim in this debate is that the image he has reached cannot be imagined. That is alogical contradiction, aka self-contradictory.