God probably does not exist

I think the first place we should start in any debate is by defining our terms. Pro has done that to a degree; now I think I'll have a crack at it. I'll start by saying some things about what I mean when I say "God". I'm going to try to keep it somewhat simple for the sake of our debate. God is a self existent being (needs nothing to bring Him into existence or to keep Him in existence) God is an eternal being (He is not limited or contained by time) He has the ability to call physical energy and matter and space as well as spiritual reality into existence by His will alone. All that exists in the Universe and in Heaven are fashioned from these materials. Therefore God is the source of all being. He is also the source of all continued being. All things depend upon God in order to exist and to continue to exist therefore God is the supreme power. Another way to put that is by saying He is omnipowerful or all powerful. Because God is the source of all things all possible outcomes of events are known to Him from the beginning. We could say He has all knowledge or that God is omniscient. Another title that God would be given would be Creator. The Universe is the only physical reality that we have any evidence of. It has an estimated age of 13.7 billion years. It began from what is called an infinitely (not literally) dense and hot point. What could roughly be called an eruption occurred and began a process of expansion. At first it was uniformly energy and space and time erupting into existence. At some point a flash point was reached that caused space to hyper expand leaving a much larger space. The massive energy event continued. When "cooling" occurred along with disturbances in the smoothness in the expansion; the energy started to manifest itself as matter. We normally experience only the reverse of this with nuclear fission. It does occur on the quantum level with quarks in a process called quantum chromo dynamics. This is expressed mathematically as E=MC2. These processes continued until we have all we find today. It is also important to understand that time it self did not exist nor did it start until the Big Bang began. Time and space are intimately connected. Why do we believe the Big Bang occurred? For these reasons: The second law of thermodynamics (shows that the universe can not be infinitely old, or else it would have run out of usable energy, i.e., it would have reached heat death, or maximum entropy) The observed expansion of the universe (which, extrapolated into the past, indicates that about 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was about the size of the period at the end of this sentence, and before that it didn"t exist "i.e., it had zero size.) The predicted (and observed) background radiation in our universe (confirms that the big bang really happened). The predicted (and observed) ripples in the background radiation in our universe (confirms that the big bang really happened). The general theory of relativity, predicts an expanding universe (i.e., a universe that contracts as we look into the past, until it reaches zero size, and ceases to exist). The space-time (singularity) theorem of Hawking and Penrose shows that not only all physical matter and energy and forces, but also all physical space and time of the universe came into existence at the instant of the "birth of the physical universe" (i.e., the singularity at the beginning of the physical universe.) http://www.big-bang-theory.com... Normally Cosmologists will say that the Universes emerged from "Nothing". Some have argued that this is a live possibility. They point to a phenomenon called a quantum vacuum. This is a pervasive energy field throughout physical reality that exists at the quantum level and is detectable when you remove all other matter and energy from an environment. The difficulty is that it is dishonest to call this nothing. Secondly, the laws of physics cease to exist when the universe is near the singularity so that should include the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum is a product of this Universe. This Universe cannot logically be dependent on it's own product to bring it into existence. The same why you cannot be dependent on your children to travel back into the past, mate, and give birth to you so you can give birth to them. Without the Universe there would not be a quantum vacuum nor any other vacuum. There would literally be nothing physically speaking. Other people have suggested a chain of universes going back into the past. That would eventually give rise to ours. That fails for two reasons. One reason is entropy. In any process you lose usable energy over time. If you think it through energy would be this way in all the other universes before as well. If it didn't have the habit of decaying it wouldn't have decayed in our Universe either. What this means is that the chain backward can't be infinite. If it were then logically the chain forward would be too. The second reason is based on the work of three scientists named Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, Alexander Vilenkin. They developed a theorem that says that unless certain special conditions were present in the beginning of the Universe then a chain of creation events could not have gone on back infinitely into the past. Alexander Vilenkin has talked about why he thinks the special conditions are unlikely and said this: "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning" (Many Worlds in One [New York: Hill and Wang, 2006], p.176)Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org... OK, we're starting out with no materials, space, energy, or time to work with. We want to produce a Universe that includes allot of all of those. I think we can safely say we have eliminated a purely natural or physical cause for the singularity and it's proceeding Universe. Can we get some idea of what the cause of the Universe is? We can. One cannot live within and be dependent on time, space, and matter/energy and yet be the ultimate source of them. One way of looking at it would be Macbeth was capable of killing his king but could not kill Shakespeare. Our maker is unaffected by time. Space is no limitation to him or her. For example; Macbeth is in his castle and his mortal enemy is sneaking up on him outside pretending to be a forest, but Shakespeare is everywhere in the play at once because he wrote it. All things came from the maker so all knowledge and power is inferior to his or her power and knowledge. Finally: am I all on my own here? Does anyone else see it this way? "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced sharply and suddenly at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy" (Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, p. 14). The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole. - Arno Penzias (Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1978) Scientist George Smoot (who was the scientist who lead the team of scientists who first measured ripples in the cosmic background radiation) says: "There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing". (quoted in Fred Heeren, Show me God, p. 139.)