God exists

Pre-ontology “To be, or not to be--that is the question.” Philosophers are eager to present their arguments that a certain thing exists or that a proposition is true, such as the theistic philosophers who argue that the proposition “God is real” is true. However, this is ‘jumping the gun’ methodologically. By arguing for the existence of god, Dylan is turning his philosophy straight into issues of ontology without working out the issues surrounding pre-ontology. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously asks in Being and Time, “Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all.”[1] In other words, philosophy has not answered the question of the meaning of being, or the difference between entity and non-entity. Human beings have an average, everyday approximation of what it means to be, considering that we are always thinking of our future possibilities in terms of the meaning of being (we think about beings in the future, so clearly we must have some prior concept of being), yet the meaning of being is still elusive, and escapes exact conceptual explication (i.e. we cannot explain what it means). If the meaning of being has not been established, then how can a statement about the existence of an entity be meaningful? What does it mean to say that an entity is, if we do not know what “is” means, or what the difference between entity and non-entity is? Because these issues in pre-ontology have not been worked out, we are necessarily on a weak foundation when we jump from pre-ontology to ontology. Plagiarism Furthermore, one should not jump from pre-ontology to ontology by plagiarizing somebody else’s jump from pre-ontology to ontology. As an ethical debater, I am obligated to point that Dylan plagiarizes portions of his opening statement from Christopher Langan. For example, Dylan copies the following writings from Langan and Langan-associated websites verbatim in his last round: “Prior to the moment of creation, the universe was not there; afterwards, the universe was there. This represents a sizable change indeed! Unfortunately, it also constitutes a sizable paradox. If the creation of reality was a real event, and if this event occurred in cosmic time, then cosmic time itself is real. But then cosmic time is an aspect of reality and can only have been created with reality. This implies that cosmic time, and in fact reality, must have created themselves!” - Christopher Langan, “A Very Brief History of Time” [2] “In other words, reality comprises a "closed descriptive manifold" from which no essential predicate is omitted, and which thus contains no critical gap that leaves any essential aspect of structure unexplained”[3] This plagiarism should count against Pro considerably when it is time to vote. Creation Ex Nihilo Dylan argues that nothingness is actually an unbounded, infinite ontological potential. Given this definition, anything and everything that is logically possible could actualize itself from this unbounded, infinite ontological potential. If only a certain type of entity could actualize itself from this unbounded, infinite ontological potential, then “nothingness” would be constrained, which Dylan seeks to refute in his opening statement. Furthermore, if only a certain type of entity could actualize itself from this unbounded, infinite ontological potential, then it is not really “unbounded” or “infinite” in any usual sense of the terms. Therefore, we must conclude that anything and everything that is logically possible can actualize itself from this unbounded, infinite ontological potential. However, this entails that Dylan’s position is rather than absurd. For if an entity like god can actualize himself from this infinite, unbound potential, why can’t all kinds of beings actualize themselves as well? The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig satirizes this dilemma by asking “Why not leprechauns, or unicorns, or Shakespeare?!” Pro’s position reduces to absurdity. Dylan hints that he understands this dilemma by stating that all “lesser possibilities” (I have to assume he is talking about things like leprechauns) are either excluded by god or contained within god. However, this doesn’t escape the dilemma! It’s absurd to think that god would have any reason to stop entities like leprechauns and unicorns from actualizing themselves. What difference would it make to god? This means that we can do with away the possibility that they are excluded by god. Now, the only option left is that these “lesser possibilities” are contained within god. Since god is synonymous with reality in Dylan’s ontology, then it would follow that these lesser possibilities still exist, so the problem of unicorns and leprechauns also still exists. Ontological Argument Dylan offers an argument for the existence of god based on a form of the ontological argument. Based on what I can gather, his reasoning is more or less this: Denying the existence of god entails that there is something external to god which prevents it from existing, but since it belongs analytically to the definition of god that he cannot be constrained by something external, it is not rational to deny the existence of god. However, this argument fails because of the first premise. Denying the existence of god does not necessarily entail that there is something external to god which prevents god from existing. As the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued, “there are only two possible explanations for a thing’s non-existence. The first is that the thing is prevented from existing by something external to it. The other possible explanation is that something doesn’t exist because its nature is internally inconsistent.” [4]It follows that the first premise of the argument is false, because it does not exhaust all explanations for a thing’s non-existence. This argument also suffers from the fact that none of our R1 definitions define god as “unrestrained” or “without constraint”, so Dylan’s statements that this property belongs to the definition of god are entirely unfounded in the context of this debate. The Euthyphro Dilemma Dylan argues that god is the basis of objective morality. This contention is subject to the famous Euthyphro dilemma: “Is it good because god chooses it, or does god choose it because it is good?”. If the second horn is true, then objective morality exists whether or not god exists, and the existence of god is irrelevant to the existence of good. If the first horn is true, then the theist is left in an absurd situation. As the philosopher Tim Maudlin remarks, “The notion that what makes something right is god’s approval leads you to a very strange and bizarre situation. It suggests that god can’t have any moral reasons for approving of things. It’s as if in trying to write down the Decalogue, god can write ‘Do not steal’ or ‘You should steal’, but before I approve of one or the other, there’s no right or wrong. I can’t make that decision based on what’s just or unjust, fair or unfair, good or bad. There is no good or bad until I decide! But that means god’s decision would have to be arbitrary!” [5] The theist is stuck between god’s decisions being arbitrary, and god’s existence being irrelevant to the existence of good. Neither is helpful to Dylan’s case. Reality I will offer what I consider to be a “knockdown” argument of Dylan’s position which combines the definitions as stated in R1 and the statements in Dylan’s first round. The argument goes like this. P1: An infinite, unbound ontological potential exists P2: God cannot be the cause of this infinite, unbound ontological potential. P3: The definition of god is that god is the cause of everything that is real P4: By P1 and P2, there is a real entity that god did not cause C: By P3 and P4, god does not exist I personally have no beliefs about the existence of an infinite, unbound ontological potential. However, Dylan argues that such a thing exists. It is necessary to Dylan’s case that an infinite, unbound ontological potential exists because he gives it properties. For example, he states that it is the thing from which god actualizes himself. Therefore, it would simply be incoherent for Dylan to deny P1, because this would entail that god actualizes himself from something that doesn’t actually exist. In regards to P2, god cannot be the cause of this infinite, unbound ontological potential. Why? Because it is absurd for an entity to be the cause of its necessary conditions. This infinite, unbound ontological potential is a necessary condition of god’s existence because god requires this “sea of potential” to bring himself into being. By looking at concrete examples of necessary conditions, it is absurd for an entity to be the cause of its necessary conditions. For example, a necessary condition of my birth is that my parents exist, so it is absurd to suggest that I am the cause of my parents. Since the infinite, unbound ontological potential is a necessary condition of god’s existence, and it is absurd for an entity to cause its own necessary conditions, it must follow that god cannot be the cause of this infinite, unbound ontological potential. P3 is true by the definitions offered in R1. P4 follows logically from the truths of P1 and P2. P5 follows logically from P3 and P4, since if god is defined as the cause of everything that is real, and there is a real entity that god did not cause, then we must conclude that god does not exist. Therefore, using Dylan’s own statements and the definitions in this debate, god does not exist. References Being and Time, pg 1 http://tinyurl.com... http://tinyurl.com... Fundamentals of Philosophy, pg 299 “Cosmology, Theology, and Meaning” lecture at the Greer-Heard Forum. Available on YouTube.