The God Hypothesis is the best scientific explanation for the origins of existence

THE GOD HYPOTHESIS I did provide predicitions and explained how you can falsify this hypothesis, but perhaps I wasn't clear enough. If the God hypothesis is true, it would show that the universe had an absolute beginning in the past and that it came from nothing with a cause. There is a Heinzeinberg experiment called the "Uncertainty principle", where subatomic particles come in out of existence. If CON can show through this experiment that these particles came out of nothing without a cause to produce our universe, it would falsify the God Hypothesis and violate the law of cause and effect. THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE In a place where the curvature in space-time is infinite or near infinite the laws of physics break down and do not apply. This is called a singularity, it occurs in black holes and of course, the Big Bang Singularity which created most of the matter in the Universe. The aforementioned first law of thermodynamics does not hold inside a singularity and matter may be created or destroyed, as was demonstrated by the Big Bang: http://en.wikipedia.org... OMNI-PRESENT, ETERNAL, AND IMMATERIAL NOOOO, I did not conclude that God could only fill these divine attributes. I concluded based on empirical oberservations (fine-tuning, human minds, etc) that it was an absolute/disembodieded mind. Computers are understood to be designed concrete objects that require time. If CON is going to say that this is a special computer that can self design and is abstract, then what CON is actually calling a computer is really god. It just becomes another word if you rob it of all the attributes that make it a computer. Right now, All CON is doing is throwing out logically incoherent and scienifically unsupported assertions and asking me to prove them wrong. Thats not how it works. CON needs to prove his own assertions and these claims have to be falsifiable as well so I can respond to them adequately. THE FINE-TUNING 1) CON cannot just redefine words arbritrarily at will. What I meant by fine-tuned for life is that we would not be able to evolve at all or have environment where life can evolve. Therefore, I am referring to any kind of life whether its life as we know it or other kinds of life we don't know that fit the generic definition of life that scientist define. If it does not fit this definition, then it cannot be called life. He has to be logically and scienfically consistent. Moreover, The term finely tuned is just a scientific term scientist use to describe the measurement of the laws and constants. We know that present day particle physics have a whole lot of adjusted parameters like the mass of certain particles along with the strength of certain forces. We know through math that most of the values in the parameters will not allow life to exist if these values were smaller or larger. My point is we don't need to know what values don't produce life, just the relevant values of the constants that do produce a life permitting universe. 2) Again, even if we assume there are many other universes, CON's "lottery" example does not show an example of chance but another form of design. God would just be the person buying the trillion or so tickets as a way to "purposefully" win the lottery. The same can be said here: How could God get a llife-permitting universe from a trillion or more universes that were not life-permitting? because God created that many universes. He needs to explain exactly how you can get a fine-tuned universe from a finite number of universes that could not be fine-tuned itself or else he would not be able to negate the null hypothesis. However, since There is no evidence of other universes overlapping ours, there is no way he could demonstrate this with any transparency. The BGV theorem only provides evidence that multiple universes will be created from eternal inflation in the "future" not the past. Now, It does imply that there still could be other past universes that were before our universe but again there isn't any evidence to make us think this. 3) Well first off, his "3-d" blob example is not an accurate one because it implies that the laws and constants were fine-tuned through an unguided evolutionary process. For instance, there are people who believe that God started life and then allowed the molecules to evolve into a complex life form through natural selection and random mutations. This is not the case with the fine-tuning of the universe. These finely-tuned laws came into being right after the big bang from the very beginning. These values are still the same and have to continue to be in place for any kind of life to continue to exist. Thus, there is no reason to think that this cause is no longer involved. SUBSTANCE DUALISM Let me clarify what I said about Substance Dualism. What I meant to say is that while the mind is attached to the living brain, the mind is not independant from the brain. Although, Dualism does claim that when the brain dies, the mind/soul will live on. CON's split brain example just reiterates what I said in round 2, which is the mind being intrinsically connected to the brain. At the most, it just proves that while the mind is connected to the brain, it cannot be independent from it and leaves us with no reason to think it does. CON would have to provide an additional argument to prove that the mind cannot be independent even without the brain. Now, CON claims that his split-brain example also proves that the mind does not have causal power, but I fail to see how this is the case. Again, it only demonstrates that the mind is causally connected to the brain. I have never ignored the scienctific research on this. What neuroscience has done is provide us with a more detailed picture of how the human mind is influenced by certain events in the brain. It has not changed the general nature of that picture. The fact that much of what happens in our minds is influenced by what happens in our bodies was something known by the first self-conscious human beings. However, not everything that goes on in our minds is causally determined by what goes on in our bodies. Sometimes what goes on in our bodies is a result of what goes on in our minds. For example, the movements of my fingers as I type this response is ultimately produced by mental events. Here we have mental-to-physical causation. What explains both this choice of mine and the physical events in my body that are ultimately produced by this choice? The explanation is the purpose that I provide a response to CON'S objection. A purposeful explanation is a teleological explanation. In addition, free will is also a mental event. Unlike with animals. We can make decisions apart from what the brain and body tells us A famous scientist named Wilder Penfield conducted studies that are consistent with my point that choices are undetermined events with a teleological explanation. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following: When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex of one hemisphere, I have often asked him about it. Invariably his response was: "I didn't do that. You did". When I caused him to vocalize, he said:" I didn't make that sound". You pulled it out of me....." Penfield goes on to note that, "There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient . . . to decide (77). Penfield concludes the following: For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements(80). Now, these studies are outdated but the point is that in order for CON to prove that the mind has no causal power he has to show that there is a region in the brain that causes these events.