God Exists

In this debate I will make the case that there are good reasons to believe that God exists and that there are not comparably good reasons to believe that God does not exist. It is not my intention to provide conclusive proof, But rather to show that the Theist is on good intellectual grounds for his belief. Although I am a Christian, I am not defending an exclusively Christian conception of God. To do that I should need to write on the historicity of Jesus and his rising from the dead, Which is outside of the scope of this debate. It is useful to cite sources for factual claims, But the substance of each argument should be contained within the body of our responses. We should not have to follow a link to look up part of the argument being made. One must contain their entire argument, Including their reasoning, Within the body of their response. The task of my opponent is twofold. He will need to first tear down each of the arguments I have constructed. In each argument he will identify which premise is wrong or how the conclusion does not follow from the premises. It will be up to the audience to determine which is more reasonable to believe, The premise or his objections to it. My opponent"s second task will be to construct an argument or arguments of his own in favor of his non-theistic worldview. My first argument is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It can be formulated as follows: 1)Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2)The universe began to exist. 3)Therefore, The universe has a cause. Most will accept the truth of premise 2, So I"ll focus on premise 1. Consider what the denial of premise 1 would mean. This would mean that something can come from nothing, Which is absurd. If it were true that something could come from nothing, Then it becomes impossible to explain why just everything and anything doesn"t come from nothing. Why don"t we expect things should just pop into existence all around us all the time? If someone were to deny premise 1, Then they should also deny the entire scientific endeavor. Scientific inquiry relies on the notion that effects can predictably come from causes. If we should unmoor effects from causes, Then it becomes impossible to have any confidence in scientific conclusions. Why must the result have come from the experiment? Why could the result not have suddenly popped into existence, Uncaused, At the time that we measure? In the face of the counterintuitive results of denying premise 1, It seems more reasonable to believe premise 1 than to reject premise 1. So why must this cause be God? Remember that this first cause brought into existence all of space, Time, Matter, And energy. It must, Therefore, Be immaterial, Space-less, Eternal, And powerful. We can also deduce that it must be personal. This is because, Apart from the creation of the universe, The first cause existed in a timeless state. Whatever cause is impersonal brings about its effects whenever the sufficient conditions are met (it does not "decide" to produce its effect, But it simply does so when the conditions are met). Since the first cause existed timelessly with no beginning, We should expect that an impersonal cause would have brought about its effect timelessly with no beginning. The fact that we encounter a universe that came into existence rather than a timeless universe strongly disconfirms the notion that the first cause was impersonal. We can summarize our reasoning this way: 1)If the first cause is impersonal, The universe is timeless. 2)The universe is not timeless. 3)Therefore, The first cause is not impersonal. God is the best candidate for an eternal, Immaterial, Powerful, Personal creator of the universe, And thus the beginning of the universe gives us good reason to believe that God exists. My second argument is the Argument from Contingency. Everything that exists either exists contingently (owing its existence to something outside of itself) or necessarily (owing its existence to nothing outside of itself). An iPhone, For example, Owes its existence to the manufacturer. The manufacturer may owe its existence to the inventor, And so on. Ultimately, We must come to a stopping point, Something that does not owe its existence to anything outside itself, That provides the sufficient reason for contingent reality to exist. Think of a chain suspended in the air. Each link is suspended from a higher link. You must eventually come to a link that is not hanging on more links, However, For the chain to be suspended. There must be a fixed link that does not owe its suspension to more links. The argument can be formulated this way. 1)Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, Either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. 2)If the universe has an explanation for its existence, That explanation is God. 3)The universe exists. 4)Therefore, The universe has an explanation for its existence. 5)Therefore, The explanation for the existence of the universe is God. Why must the explanation of the universe be God? Once again, We see that the explanation must be timeless and immaterial. The only candidates for immaterial objects are either an unembodied mind or an abstract object (like a number). Abstract objects don"t stand in causal relationships, However. The number 5 never put $5 in my pocket! By process of elimination, This being must be an unembodied mind. In addition, The same argument we used for personhood in the cosmological argument above will work here since this being will have brought about the beginning of the universe. The third and last argument I will present here is the Moral Argument. It is composed of three steps: 1)If God does not exist, Objective moral values and duties do not exist. 2)Objective moral values and duties do exist. 3)Therefore, God exists. If God does not exist, Then there was no purpose to the existence of human beings. Since we weren"t created for a purpose, There is no way we ought to be. There is just what we are. When we use moral terms, We are using the terminology of "ought". You *ought* to be kind or generous or compassionate. If humanity is without purpose, However, Then there is no objective answer to how you *ought* to be. Without purpose there is no "oughtness" and moral terms like good or bad just don"t apply. We also see that if God does not exist then it seems the mind is either the same thing as the brain or is directly caused by the brain. This means, However, That our thoughts are not free but are dependent on our neurochemistry. You may have the impression that you are making decisions, But your brain is just undergoing successive brain states. These brain states don"t change according to your will, But rather they change according to the laws of physics. Without free will, However, There can be no such thing as "wrong" or "right" decisions. It is meaningless to say that you ought to have chosen to do right if you were not free to have done otherwise. You do not have any moral duty to do what it is impossible for you to do, And if God does not exist then it is impossible for you to do anything other than what your brain chemistry compels you to do. Finally, If God does not exist then there is no ultimate moral accountability. Whether you live like a saint or a sinner, Like Mother Teresa or Hitler, It makes no ultimate difference. In the end you will wind up in the same place. If God does not exist, Then there is no weight to your decisions because they don"t ultimately change anything. Whether you feed the homeless or exterminate them, They were all going to die in the end anyway. Sure, It might matter to them subjectively, But it doesn"t matter in an objective sense. If one person prefers feeding and another extermination, Neither view is morally better than the other. There is no objective difference in the end. Without purpose, Free will, Or moral accountability there can be no meaning to objective moral values and duties. However, We have a very strong firsthand experience of objective moral values and duties. We experience, Firsthand, That some things really are wrong. Things like child abuse, Rape, And murder really are wrong and the perpetrators should be punished even if they think they were in the right. Our own firsthand experience of objective moral values and duties gives us good reason to believe in them. Since they can only exist if God exists, However, Then this counts as a good reason to believe in God. I have made three arguments. I have argued that God is the best explanation for how the universe came into being, That God is the best explanation for why something exists rather than nothing at all, And that God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. It is the burden of my opponent to tear down each of these arguments. He must show that God is not the best explanation for each of these phenomena. He must also build an argument or arguments of his own that lead to the conclusion that God does not exist. It will be up to the audience to determine what they find most reasonable to believe. I trust that you will find that it is more reasonable to believe that God does exist than to believe that he does not.