Belief in God is reasonable

Opening Arguments: I would like to thank Pro for offering the debate, and I would like to open by reviewing Pro’s definition for God: “Any supreme being that was the creator of the universe” The key component that distinguishes his God from anything else in nature is the term ‘being’, which requires a mind/intelligence akin our consciousness. Since my opponent is arguing for this definition, I will be mostly focussing on rebutting my opponent’s assertion that a mind is what is required for the creation of the universe. Burden of Proof: The title of the debate is “Belief in a God is reasonable”, which sets the Burden of Proof on Pro’s side, since Pro is the one making the positive claim that a God exists. Now Pro opens with his contention: “The main opposing argument against intelligent design is evolution. By pointing out some of the inconsistencies of evolution, belief in God becomes more reasonable. I will use some of these inconsistencies as part of my evidence.” I would like to point out that arguing against evolution does nothing to establish the truth of intelligent design. It is true that some interpretations of Intelligent Design are mutually exclusive propositions to the theory of Evolution, but it is not a dichotomy. There are potentially an unlimited number of other unsupported, unimagined explanations for the diversification of life which are also mutually exclusive claims to this right. Therefore, Pro would have demonstrate the implausibility/impossibility of every single alternative if he is to demonstrate his positive claim by the ‘process of elimination’. I would argue that this is essentially impossible, and therefore any positive claim needs to produce positive evidence to support its conclusion, and stand on its own merits instead of the failings of an alternative hypothesis. This fallacy is can be illustrated by the following adaption of the Russel’s Teapot analogy: It is known that there is a small object in a precisely 300km orbit above Mars. Con claims it is a celestial teapot, based on the spectroscopic study of the object through various telescopes (the object is too small to resolve its shape) which show the object is likely made of ceramic. Con essentially claims it is a Cat, and only cites the failings in the evidence/aruments that supports the claim it is a Teapot in his argument for the existence of the Cat. If Con could conclusively disprove the claim that it is a Teapot, does it make the claim it is a Cat any more likely? The answer is no. As there are a potentially unlimited number of other objects that fit this bill. The same applies to evolution & intelligent design. The problem gets worse than this. Even if I could conclusively demonstrate, without a trace of a doubt to Pro that evolution was absolutely true and accurate. Would it do a thing to disprove a God? The answer is no. Because one could always argue that God used evolution to get it’s desired results via. natural processes. Thereby ‘God’ in this sense becomes an unfalsifiable claim that in the process of being capable to explain anything, actually explains nothing. This mean’s the claim of a God is untestable, and untenable until Pro provides additional attributes for his God. Rebuttals: 1. “The first law of thermodynamics states that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. There is matter that exists. Therefore it is reasonable to believe that it was created by a supreme being.” Logically, this argument is a non-sequitur. What a strict interpretation of this argument actually yields is the suggestion that matter & energy are eternal instead of created. Matter cannot be created or destroyed Matter & energy exists C. The matter & energy that exists was not created, and cannot be destroyed. Incredibly this works opposite to Pro’s own contention that matter has to be created and actually provides a positive argument against his God! One important point that Pro may have missed is that scientific laws are descriptive, not proscriptive. In the laws of thermodynamics these laws have applied without fail, but they do not describe the how or why questions of the laws themselves. While it seems intuitively true that matter cannot just appear, and a car does not suddenly accelerate without an input of energy, the observation of this occurrence is likely telling us something we didn’t know before about the underlying principles at work. Zero energy universe: Because Gravity exists, empty space itself is inherently unstable. Virtual particles spontaneously pop in and out of existence on timescales shorter than the planck time. The law of conservation of energy is not violated because the particles when they exist form a negative gravitational potential on a short enough timescale within the planck time. When you have a patch of empty space which is itself boiling with temporary virtual particles, then the end result is that patch of empty space actually has an overall mass, and therefore a net energy content. This is thought to be one of the major factors involved in the ‘free lunch’ hypothesis put forward by inflationary theory. Which depicts that sum of all the energy in the universe, subtracted by the negative gravitational potential, gives exactly zero[1]. The predictions that this theory makes, regarding quantum fluxuations in the early universe, and rapid inflation are realized in the CMB measurements. The size of the patches are in agreement with the universe being geometrically flat (the only conditions upon which the met energy content of the universe can equal zero) and also consistant with a rapid period of inflation that ‘froze out’ the small early quantum fluxuations into large macroscopic features of the universe which we can observe today. Therefore, there are experimentally supported theories which explain the origin of the energy content of the universe without need for a God. 2. First of all, this argument seems to just be an argument ad ignorantum. As it provides no positive argument for his God except to say there’s a potential hole/unknown in a competing theory. Second of all, Pro unfortunately makes a horrific misunderstanding of what entropy is. The second law of thermodynamics is more accurately stated as: “The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.” [2] Entropy does not equate to disorder, as this is a very gross extrapolation of the law. While it is true that things, when left to time, will decay, wear, decompose. When there is a positive influx of energy, the system is no longer in equilibrium. It is in fact the ‘drive to achieve equilibrium’ that the second law of thermodynamics that is the driving force for the evolution of life! Without life, there would be a very large stress (imbalance) of energy on the planet in the form of high energy molecules such as sulphides, silicates, amino acids etc. Life processes are by far the best known to catalysing the conversion of these high energy molecules to lower ones, with a release in energy and therefore an increase in entropy. Therefore, particularly for the origin of life, the tendency of a system to drive to equilibrium is likely whole driving force behind its origin in the first place. Pro acknowledges that the Earth is not a closed system. But even this is not the whole picture, as life only exists on the Earth’s crust. The Earth’s crust is an open system to both the heat & reactive molecules ejected from within the Earth’s mantle and of course from the Sun, and radiates into space. Therefore the Earth’s crust can never equilibrium, and structures as complex as life can indeed arise. 3. "Natural laws" are laws such as gravity, thermodynamics, physics, and so forth that are universal and unchanging in nature. If the world had a spontaneous cause, there would be no logical explanation for any universal, unchanging laws of order to exist whatsoever without an intelligent designer.” His third evidence is a subtle shift of the BoP. As pro did not attempt to demonstrate why the Unchanging Laws of Order’ would defy any logical explanation. An important thing Pro misses out is the fact the natural laws are descriptive, not proscriptive. They are a description of our observations of nature and how it works, and work to model the system to an understanding. But Laws by definition to not describe the underlying principles that cause the laws to be as they are, that role is reserved for scientific theories. 5. Here Pro argues that the conditions on Earth are ideal for Human life. I actually agree with Pro, everything about the Earth’s fundamental conditions are good for our survival, the right temperature for our finely tuned bodies, the right atmospheric composition, and so on. However this is not an indication of design. I will attempt to demonstrate why with the following analogy: In glass moulding, molten glass is blown into a steel mould akin to blowing a balloon inside of a bottle. The balloon will expand to perfectly fit the contours of the mould it is blown into. All the bumps and dimples on the insides of the mould are fully moulded around by the expanding glass. Now after a short while, the glass cools and solidifies. Imagine what would happen if one were somehow capable of changing the shape of the steel mould with the moulded glass still inside of it, the glass would inevitably crack. This is not so different with Human life on Earth. We have evolved to fit and take best advantage of our environment, not vice versa. Furthermore, this argument is made with the assumption that Humans are the target of a process, where instead it is thought that Human’s are just one of millions of outcomes of an undirected process that is evolution, and to think otherwise is perhaps a little arrogant. I will address the arguments 4,6 & 7 in my second rebuttal. References: [1] Lawrence Krauss – A Universe from Nothing 2012 [2] http://simple.wikipedia.org...