It is likely that a God or gods exist

I'll get right to it. First, I'm going to address the arguments made by pro The Cosmological Argument: Pro appeals to an age-old argument for the existence of God by constructed three simple, but seemingly obviously correct premises - 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause, 2. The universe began to exist, and 3. The universe has a cause of its existence. If the premises are true, the conclusion must follow logically and necessarily, so in order to show the argument is false, I will need to deconstruct one or more of the premises. Fortunately, we have good reason to doubt both of the premises of the argument. I'll do each in turn. 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause This is undeniably true for things in our universe, and the law of cause and effect seems to be constant and universal. However, this gives us no reason to think that the argument applies to the universe itself. In other words, just because we have a law of cause and effect in the universe, it does not follow in any way logically that therefore the universe itself is governed by cause and effect. If this seems implausible, consider light. The speed of light is regarded as a kind of cosmological speed limit, that is, relativity tells us nothing can travel faster than light [1]. But we know that a number of galaxies are receding from us faster than the speed of light - in fact, any galaxy with a recession rate of Z > 1.4 is moving faster than the speed of light. How is this possible? It's because the speed of light is the maximum speed for things within the universe, but the expansion of the universe itself is not self-contained. In other words, this speed limit does not apply to space-time itself, which is indeed expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. This gives us good reason to believe that the universe itself is not subject to the laws and limits of what is contained within it. Therefore, we can at the very least challenge the assumption that the law of cause and effect applies to the universe itself, which means we have no obligation to accept premise 1 in the context of this argument. 2. The universe began to exist There is actually good evidence that the universe did not begin to exist. I am not claiming that the universe is past-eternal (it might be, but I'll deal with that later). But pro makes the same mistake he did in premise. The word "began" implies a temporal sequence of events, that is, it entails something happening over time. "X began to exist" means there was some time T in which X did not exist, but at time T-prime X did exist. Time, however, did not exist before the big bang, as time is a dimension contained within the universe. This would be like saying the universe had a length or a width before it began to exist, which of course it did not. So while the universe does have a finite age, according to most theories, sequences of events (beginnings and ends) are only coherent post-Big Bang. Pro also expands his argument by citing the Boarde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which states that any universe in a state of cosmic expansion had to have a finite beginning. There are a few problems here: first, the BGV theorem only applies to classic models of the universe, that is, models grounded in relativity. In other words, what the theory actually says is that our ability to describe the universe classically breaks down at some point in the past [2]. From that it does NOT follow that the universe therefore could not be past-eternal (it does not disprove it, either, of course). Given what I think is a sufficient refutation of premises one and two, I see no reason to address pro's conclusion about the nature of the creator of the universe. The FIne-Tuning Argument First, it's not clear that the universe is "fine-tuned" for life. Fine-tuning necessarily implies a teleology of the universe, that is, for something to be fine-turned it must be fine-tuned for some purpose. But what is the purpose of the universe - to support life? Here pro attempts to prove his case retrospectively. This can be illustrated with the mud-puddle example. Suppose there was a pothole that filled up with water during a rainstorm. All the excess water would flow off the top, so when the rain stopped, the pothole would be filled with the exact amount of water that it could hold. But it would, of course, be absurd to conclude that therefore the purpose of the pothole was to hold exactly that amount of water. Rather, the exact amount of water (the fine-tuning of the water, as it were) is an illusion created by the nature of what it is contained in. So of course it would seem an enormous statistical improbability that it should rain just enough to fill the pothole, but it is obvious that this would be a misapplication of probability. How does this apply to life? Here's how: it is tautologically true that the universe exists in a way such that it can support life precisely because we, as life, are here to make such claims and observations. But it would be fallacious to assume that therefore the universe's purpose is to support life. If we do not assume a teleology, as pro does, then it seems more accurate to suppose that life has adopted given the conditions in the universe. In other words, life exists incidentally in the universe, not because that is the goal of the universe. So to say that the universe is fine-tuned for life is tautologically true (because if it were not, we could not make observations about the universe as we would not exist) and is therefore not a good argument. (Additionally, the statistical improbability of a life-sustaining universe, even if it were significant, would only apply to a single universe. Multiverse theory, while certainly not proven to be true, gives us at least a good reason to think that that might not be true. ) Argument from religious experience Here pro appeals to what might be called properly basic beliefs, or beliefs that seem to present a priori but are nevertheless very real to very many people. These should not be outright dismissed, but we certainly should not try to extrapolate anything from them. That many people have religious experience does not, of course, prove that God exists or that those experiences are the result of God really being present. The human mind has evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to recognize patterns and to find reasons for things. Science has only existed in any real sense for a blink of an eye on the time scale of human existence. Prior to that, we had to posit God or Gods for the questions we could not answer by direct observation (of which there were a lot). Feeling like there is a God is no more proof of God than feeling that human beings are basically good is proof that they are. And the elephant example does not work for pro here because it presupposes the existence of something to come to different conclusions about. The atheist argument from contradiction contests that there is an elephant at all; what we suppose is that the blind men are feeling a boulder (or whatever) and concluding that it must really be an elephant. So that example begs the question and can be easily dismissed. I'm running out of room, but I have no reason to make a case of my own. Pro's resolution is that God probably or likely exists. The negation of that is not that God does not exist; in other words, taking the con position does not make any positive claim or truth-assertion, it simply provides reasons to think that the pro position is not true. Thank you, I look forward to your response. [1] [2]