God is the Most Logical Conclusion for our Existence

God can exist: 1. Refutation 1: Empirical Evidence is Necessary to Prove God This is false. The idea: 1. Unless Empirical Evidence proves something to exist, it does not exist. 2. God cannot be proven using Empirical Evidence. 3. God does not exist Problems: Using this logic, the existence of other minds, morals, and even the idea that the scientific method is the logical way to prove something exists is faulty. Because there is no empirical proof that or scientific evidence that states that all true beliefs that must be validated by empirical evidence, the argument I faulty. It proves itself wrong, and therefore is not valid. God can be proved using evidence other than empirical evidence. 2) Refutation 2: The Existence of Evil Proves God Cannot Exist Argument: 1. God must be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. 2. An all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being could eliminate evil. 3. Evil exists 4. Therefore, God does not exist. Problems: There is a missing piece to this argument that is necessary. The argument must be rearranged thusly: 1. God must be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. 2. An all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being could eliminate evil. 3. Evil exists 4. God can have no good reason to allow evil to exist. 5. Therefore, God does not exist. This is the only way the argument could properly work. If God has morally sufficient reasons for the existence of evil, however, then God can exist. Refutation: God gave us free will to prevent the world from being a world full of robot-play things whose lives have already been planned out. Since we have this free will, we can deny that God is responsible for sin. He did not program us like robots. Instead, we freely choose to create evil in the world. If he eliminated this free will, however, we would all be good. The problem? We are now robot-playthings of no value. Our actions would have no meaning, and God would have robbed us of our opportunities to be our heroic best. 3) Refutation 3: Pointless Suffering Disprove God The essentials of this argument are simple. While God might tolerate some evils for a greater good (such as free will) there are other evils that seem to serve no greater good and are not a result of free will, such as Cancer, Hurricanes, and other things that kill millions a year. Therefore: 1. If pointless evils exist, then God does not exist. 2. Pointless evils exist. 3. God does not exist. Answer: God has good reasons for allowing natural evils to exist. This is not to assume that we always know reasons that a particular evil has occurred. There are general reasons that show why God cold have for allowing us to suffer. Examples include building our character and developing virtue, something that is impossible in the "toy world". Many virtues that make the world a better place are practiced in responses to evil. Consider: Courage: Doing what is right in the face of danger Compassion: Suffering alongside someone Love: Putting your own needs ahead of your own Some refute this way of thinking by saying, "Saying that God hurts me because he loves me is exactly what battered wives say when their husbands beat them." This analogy does not succeed. An abuser hurts his spouse with the intention of causing her pain, because he enjoys the pain he causes. God does not desire the suffering of people on Earth just so He can watch them suffer. Rather God uses the suffering in our lives because he desires the greater good that can come from the suffering. Overall Conclusion of Section 1: God can exist. So the questin arises.. Does he exist? Is he the most logical Conclusion? Consider: 4) Promotion 1: Why is there Something rather than Nothing? This question, while simple, has many different aspects that can be argued. The basis for God is such: 1. Everything that exists has an explanation for its existence in itself or in something outside of itself. 2. The universe does not have an explanation for its existence in itself. 3. Therefore the universe has an explanation for its existence outside of itself. In the above argument, premise one and two support the conclusion that the universe has an explanation outside of itself. That conclusion is then joined to another premise and yields the final conclusion: 4. Any explanation outside of the universe is God. 5. Therefore, God exists. Remember that the universe is just the total collection of all space, time, matter, and energy. Any explanation outside of the universe that involved more time, matter, space, or energy, would just involve the same universe whose existence we are trying to explain. Therefore any explanation beyond the universe must be beyond space, time, matter, or energy"or what we call God. In other words, if the universe has an explanation, and cannot explain itself, it follows that God explains why the universe exists. Since this logic is deductive, it means that if each of the premises are true, then the answer must be true with 100% accuracy. By the principle of sufficient reasoning, the universe does have an explanation. To say that the universe explains itself is to make the strong claim that the universe doesn"t just exist, but that the universe has to exist as a result of its own nature. Tow look further into this, look at God"s nature. Some say that God needs a creator, who needs a creator, who needs a creator, and so on and so forth. Therefore God does not exist. This is not true, however. God does not need a creator because of his nature. God is a being who explains his own existence. Asking what the existence of God is like is similar to asking what causes fire to be hot, or what causes triangles to have three sides. The answer is explained in the nature of the thing itself. Fire has a nature to be warm, triangles have a nature to have 3 sides, and God has a nature to exist. Now consider the question: Why does the universe exist? Does it more closely resemble the question "Why is a triangle red?" or "Why does a triangle have three sides?" We can imagine that triangles aren't red, but trying to imagine a triangle without three sides is impossible. Because of this, the universe is more like asking why a triangle is red, since we can imagine a blue triangle as well as the universe not existing. Since the color of the triangle is explained by something outside a triangle, and the existence of the universe is as contingent as a triangles color"it follows that the reason the universe exists must be found outside of the universe. Note that explaining why each part of the universe exists, even in a "circle of explanation" (such as the multiverse theory or the Simultaneous Causation Theory), does not explain why an entire universe exists at all. That would be similar to trying to explain why a baseball game is being played by explaining what each player does. Does the Explanation have to be God? Well, if the explanation were another contingent object that existed in space and time, such as a parallel universe, then the explanation would itself be subject to the contingency argument. This is why multiverse theory, and other theories like it cannot work. This leaves the most logical explanation to be God. 5. Promotion 2: Did the Universe begin to exist? This argument is called the Kal"m Cosmological Argument. It is as follows: 1.Whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. 2.The universe began to exist. 3. The universe has a cause for its existence. This argument also relies on the Causal Principle: Out of nothing, nothing comes. Everything that we have observed has had a cause, and anyone who"s taken Chemistry knows that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Therefore all things that began to exist have to have had a cause, such as the universe. This works only if the universe is not eternal, in which, since the universe never had a beginning (like God), it would not have to have a cause. The discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, however, proved that the universe cannot be eternal, therefore the universe had to have a beginning, meaning that the universe has to have had something to cause it to happen. 6) Promotion 3: Is God the Cause of the Universe? Lets look at other explanations. Did the universe create itself? No, because no individual can bring about its own existence, because no individual can bring anything into existence unless it already exists. The universe obviously cannot have been created by nothing, as shown earlier by the Causal Principle. The universe could not have been created by a "Force". First, forces exist within the space-time universe, so they could not be responsible for the creation of other objects in space-time. Secondly, the cause of the universe could not be some impersonal force because prior to the creation of the universe there could only exist a timeless, spaceless, unchangeable state of affairs. An eternal force can"t choose to make a non-eternal universe. Only a person can do that. Various other arguments (short because of my limited characters): 7) Various aspects of the universe are designed specifically for intelligent life such as: 1. Gravity"any manipulation of gravity, and we wouldn"t be here. 2. Strong Nuclear force"if manipulated just 2% in either direction, everything would be Helium or Hydrogen (depending on the route you take) 3.Density of Matter: If the density of matter in the universe was slightly more or less dense, then we would either be spread out to far to create life, or crunched together in a compact orb of matter (dead). 4. The expansion rate of the universe: If the expansion rate was slightly changed, then life could not exist. Sources: all statistics and research are quoted or modified from "Answering Atheism" by Trent H. Terms for further debate: 1. The BoP is on pro, to show that God is the most logical explanation for our existance 2. FF's, count as conduct. 3. The Debate is considered a serious debate 4. This is the Catholic God