It is unreasonable to not believe in God.

Thanks, Pro.SkepticismForgive my lazy language, it is true however, that the same argument does not apply to scepticism, which takes a prior stance of “all positive claims being more likely false than true”.Pro seems to ignore what I explicitly stated, which is that this argument only seeks to establish a prior position. It is the position of belief one would rationally take if each and every argument for God failed. Or if the evidence for God is very weak. Pro attempts a reducio by claiming it would lead to us not accepting the existance of humans.Guess what, Pro is right!If one did not have reasons to accept the existence of Human beings, then one would rightly reject their existence. If somebody had never seen a human, or evidence of a human’s existance ever, then the prior epistemological stance of non-existacne of humans would apply. The same would apply to any of the infinite other possible definitions of life-forms.Similarly there are philosophers who really do reject the ontological existence of humans, which is why solipsism, idealism, etc. are ontologies that persist (and they reject the existence of all of physical reality). Precisely because they do not believe the positive claim of the material world can actually be substantiated.In any case Pro makes no effort to actually refute my logical argument here, and hence the conclusion of the prior stance follows.Application of Skepticism to GodPro is still lacking a meaningful definition of God (more on this later), but he does agree that at the very least God is the creator of the universe. Given THAT much to be the case, the application of scepticism is still easy to apply, since this necessarily entails that every single other possible positive claim for the creation of the universe (be it an intelligent, or personal cause, or an impersonal cause) is false.If we do not have positive reasons to accept that a God as Pro has defined him to have created the universe over any other possible explanation, then we should assume our prior stance of improbability.God is meaninglessThis is now a positive argument against God’s existence. As I asserted in the previous round, to assert that a ‘Fod’ exists is logically unsound, since the word ‘Fod’ has no meaningful content. Meaningless terms cannot refer to anything that does or does not exist in reality, as they do not even form coherent concepts which can be related to reality.Pro attempted to define ‘God’ in two different ways: 1. “Absolute Perfection” 2. “complete,” “mature,” or “faultless” according to standards set by an authority” I already argued in the previous round that the first definition is meaningless, since perfection is necessarily a subjective statement. Similarly “complete,” “mature,” or “faultless” are also entirely, and necessarily subjective statements. How can one be complete, if we don’t have ‘complete’ defined, also complete with respect to what>. Completeness always refers to some real concept, such as a complete chair, a complete debate, a complete journey. With these we have some notion of what we are measuring, but God is necessarily objective, which causes the word “complete” to lose all of its meaning.The exact same points apply to “mature” and “faultless”, which are necessarily subjective terms.Hence, Pro’s definition of God simply begs the question. There are only 2 ways in which Pro can try to affirm a coherent definition of God in terms of “perfection”. 1. To appeal to a standard that is God, or within God 2. To appeal to a standard external to God #2 fails because it strongly implies that God is contingent on an external standard, which contradict’s God’s own nature as Pro has presented so far. #1 also fails because it just begs the question, and also means the term remain’s meaningless. It would be akin to me saying “I am myself”, which is perfectly true, but doesn’t mean “I” is any more meaningful, and certainly doesn’t allow one to make content claims as to what I am.Similarly, even if Pro could break out of this dilemma, he still suffers from the fact that Pro cannot make ANY content claims about what God is, including his personality (if he even has one), if God is even intelligent or conscious, if God is potent, let alone impotent, or has any causal agency, etc.Given that God is a completely meaningless term as presented by Pro, we should reject such a being’s existence out of hand because of such. None of the arguments presented so far can hope to prove God’s existence if we have no concept of what we would expect if God even did exist.Pro’s Four ArgumentsBecause of cognitive reasons, all these arguments fail before we even look at any of the premises because ‘God’ is a meaningless term. If ‘God’ is a meaningless term, then Pro cannot hope to prove any of the premises true.Ergo IF one accepts my argument for non-cognitivism, or the argument that “God” is meaningless, then this effectively undermines all of Pro’s arguments, and hence the debate should be awarded to myself.First ArgumentThis argument hinges upon the following premise:“P3) The Earth is intelligently designed.”Which Pro has given no reasons to accept as true.Moreover, Pro has not defined God to have any designing capability or agency, so it’s not obvious how God could be the designer even if life was intelligently designed (challenging P1). I argued in P1 that arguing from fine tuning that the Earth is designed is unsound because of the assumptions Pro makes (the ways in which any life could arise, the conditions that are possible for the universe to adopt, and the number of ‘trials’ or ‘attempts’ that are available to satisfy these conditions.Moreover this isn’t even a criterea to determine ‘design’, but rather to determine improbability of physical means. However if Pro wants to use probability calculations for such, then he needs to first demonstrate that the God hypothesis is even possible, let alone more probable than natural means. I daresay this will be a futile exercise.Second ArgumentPro simply re-asserts his original argument here and ignores my rebuttal, especially on emergent phenomena. The physical laws we have describe nature, they do not prescribe it.Consequently there are a plethora of reasons why emergent descriptive laws result without the need for a law-giver. If there WAS any law giver, then it was us, Humans! These laws only exist because we use them to describe the behaviour of physical reality. They are no more representative of a ‘law giver’ than the fact a concept of a tree exist is evidence of a ‘tree-concept giver’. Pro simply gets things backwards here.Pro can make the claim that any universe is more likely than not follow any form of physical laws. As a matter of fact I remain agnostic on this, it may or may not be true. Even if it was true, and I would happily concede it would be, it doesn’t demonstrate anything beyond that, since Pro has not demonstrated any significance to this fact. Given that everything that we know about life is that it requires physical laws in order to exist, then this argument would likely fail due to the anthropic principle, which states that we would only ever find ourselves in a universe capable of giving rise to us, the observer.IF it was necessary for a “law-abiding” universe for observers to exist, then even if such universes were unlikely, the universes that do have laws would eventually be the ones that give rise to us.Third ArgumentThis is Pro’s definition“A writing on a rock would be considered “complex meaningful information” if it is complex (has more than one letter), and meaningful (the order the letters are in has meaning). “In this case, good luck to Pro in demonstrating that DNA has any “meaning” (what does it mean for it to have meaning). “Meaning” is an entirely subjective term and as such makes for a weak argument at best.By this definition any random oligomeric molecule with differing monomers (such as a random polypeptide sequence) would constitute “complex meaningful information”, and even these can occur naturally.[1]Fourth ArgumentThis argument hinges on the premise:“P3) Those who’s brains function properly seek for God.”Note that this has the implicit assertion that anyone who’s brain that doesn’t seek God is not functioning correctly. Which Pro is trying to affirm.Let us assime that everything Pro asserts here is 100% true. It is a fact that atheists generally are selfish, live stunted lives, suffer from despair, and die younger.Even if we assumed ALL of this to be true, it doesn’t even begin to demonstrate the the “atheist’s brain isn’t working correctly”. In fact, the very notion that atheists are capable of experiencing such emotions is abundant evidence that their brains ARE working correctly, for it could be argues that brains that do not work correctly may not experience all these emotions.If an atheist brain were not capable of experiencing negative emotions, stress, desires, selfishness, then that would be very good evidence that the atheist brains generally are not working correctly. Pro is asserting the exact opposite.Whether or not theists live happier lives is irrelevant to the correct function of the brain. I could concede very readily that theists are generally happier, but that does not prove what Pro wants it to prove. Equally unsupported explanations such as “theists live in blissful ignorance of the harsh truth of reality”, or “theism is the opiate of reality” would themselves be equally valid ways of arguing theism is a “mental illness”. But just that, unsupported.References 1. http://www.researchgate.net...