The God Hypothesis qualifies as the best scientific explanation for the origins of existence

Thanks to Kenballer for the topic. Given PROs account, it would seem sufficient for me to knock over the evidence PRO offers to successfully defeat PROs resolution and win the debate. If PRO doesn't like this, I'll happily introduce positive arguments (like evil) in later rounds. I don't intend to challenge simplicity or Occam's razor issues: we don't need to talk about simple hypotheses when God doesn't explain the data. PRO points to three lines of evidence: The 'beginning of the universe' Cosmic fine tuning Origin of life Suggests each of these firstly are inexplicable on naturalism, and also do some work filling in the properties of the divine creator. Let us defeat these in turn: The beginning of the Universe PRO asserts that, "Logically, there cannot be an infinite regress of causes, which means there has to be an uncaused first cause. Since this is the case, this cause would have to be limitless and have no flaws or weaknesses. In addition, This first cause could not be the universe itself because if time was infinite we would of never of gotten here." This seems wrong on all counts. There seems nothing logically impossible that there be an infinite regress of causes - I can conceive it without contradiction, and some sets just don't have a first member (cf. the negative integers). Further, we don't need to say that the universe being first cause entails a past infinite, and even if we did that doesn't mean we'd 'never have gotten here', as we can have (for all we know) hypertasks and things like that. So PRO has simply provided no support that the only option to explain the beginning of the universe is God, let alone this is more plausible than other counter-offers. PRO also urges that this cause must "have no flaws or weaknesses", "omnipresent, eternal, and immaterial". Yet none of his reasoning demonstrates these conclusions. There's nothing to say that the cause of the universe could just be some naturalistic phenomenon (there's nothing saying there can't be a physics of the singularity), or a quirk in the aether (there's nothing demonstrating this cause need have any sense of agency), or even that it still exists now (maybe our cause was expended in the Big Bang). Until PRO provides reasons to rule these out, then the cause of the universe does not need to have suitably God-like qualities. Cosmic fine tuning Pro points to cosmic fine tuning, "The fundamental laws and constants of nature came into being immediately after the big bang perfectly calibrated ,within an infinite set of values, to allow the existence of intelligent life." Yet PRO (or anyone else) has no idea about the range of values, or what proportion of these are life permitting. The best he could offer is "as far as I can tell, life is rare in my local field of epistemic possibilities given the laws of physics as we know them". Yet this is woefully insufficient to motivate his case. So we have no evidence of 'fine tuning' in the sense PRO requires. Even if he did have such a case, another putative explanation would be a multiverse ensemble that exhausts all relevant possibilities. PRO has said nothing to rule it out. It also strikes me as obvious you don't need to omniscient to know what the relevant values of the constants are to have a life permitting universe. So even if we accepted cosmic fine tuning, that wouldn't demonstrate the omniscience of the fine tuner. Origin of Life PRO mashes together a variety of concerns to make his origin of life case, "Life could not and did not exist around the time the singularity expanded and "life comes from life?" , according to existing data. In addition, Information only comes from minds and outside of a system and the DNA has an unbelievable amount of information. This along with every other empirical oberservations [sic] show that only intelligent life can create other intelligent life." No argument from me there wasn't life at the big bang. However, we have a pretty neat (albeit incomplete) account of how life kicked off and developed billions of years later: evolutionary biology and abiogenesis stuff, respectively. The evidence for evolutionary mechanisms is pretty overwhelming, and although mechanisms of abiogenesis are controversial, there seem several plausible candidates with tangential evidential support (RNA world, PNAs, etc. etc.) It seems PRO would need to show not only are these accounts wrong, but that we should believe there is no prospect of any satisfactory account being made. PRO's case doesn't do that. We don't have direct empirical observations of abiogenesis, but we also don't have direct empirical observations of metamorphic rock formation, gravitational forces between superclusters, or the french revolution. Yet we allow ourselves to piece together what happened based on clues we can observe - so there's no in principle objection to natural history, and any in practice objection needs to engage with the field (which PRO has not done). Standard information theory says nothing like "Information only comes from minds" (maybe ID does, if so: so much the worse for public conceptual literacy). On standard measures of information (like Shannon Entropy, Komolgorov complexity, and others), you get information all the time as an inverse of entropy. Low entropy states (like crystals) have high mutual information as you can infer where other atoms in the crystal are from the fact it is a crystal; conversely, high entropy states (like gas), have low mutual information, and so a lot is unknown. In the case of DNA, the information (in the sense scientists use the term) of the string can be increased by duplicating it and fiddling with the 'second copy', amongst many other things, without recourse to divine intervention (you could also do it by scrambling repeat sequences, adding on more bases, etc.) As an aside, DNA doesn't have an 'incredible amount of information' - I can store the information in your genome, wholly uncompressed, with a couple of gigs of hard disk space. Further, PROs case, even if it was show, does not demand some moral agency choosing life as he suggests. Non-conscious vivogenic principles in the universe (or aether) are epistemically possible. The story so far None of PROs putative evidences are remotely plausible. Even if they were, they do not go far enough in suggesting a God in any recognizable (let alone Theistic) sense of the term.