May Regular Tournament: God Exists

I thank Mister_Man for accepting.C1) Kalam Cosmological Argument Apologist and analytic philosopher W.L. Craig reformulated the Leibnizian cosmological argument for God’s existence by combining it with Al-Ghazali’s variation of the cosmological argument to form the kalam cosmological argument, in respect of Al-Ghazali’s Islamic orthodox sect of the kalam [1]. It is rendered as a brief syllogism as below [2]. 1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe begins to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. From the above premises, a new syllogism is drawn based on ontological analysis of the properties of the cause [3]. 1. The universe has a cause. 2. Then, the cause of the universe must be, sans the universe, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, beginningless, personal (thus intelligent) and enormously powerful. That “everything that begins to exist has a cause” is rationally intuitive knowledge, derived from a critical first principle of science, the causal principle, based on the axiom from Parmenidean ontology: ex nihilo nihil fit [4]. While one may argue that this commits the fallacy of composition, there is good reason to believe the universe has a cause, if the universe did begin to Cexist. Something cannot come into existence without a cause, as it defies the First Law of Thermodynamics, and even sans physical laws, there has to be an explanation for the universe’s origin [5]. Craig writes, “Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise 1, you’ve got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.” [6] Physicists often defend themselves from this premise by using the example of virtual particles, arising from vacuum fluctuations, but these rise from the quantum vacuum, which has minimal amounts of existent energy. Since the universe is defined as all of spacetime, energy, matter and antimatter, this energy is part of the universe, thus must have had a cause. The alternative to a universe having a beginning is the universe existing eternally. Most physicists reject this straight away, and this premise is rarely very controversial. This is because of the Big Bang cosmological model, which states that time and space had an outward “explosion” (not exactly an explosion, rather swift expansion) approximately 13.8 billion years ago [7], and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem that traces the expansion of the universe back to a beginning, devised by physicists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, demonstrating that the universe is past-finite [8]. The Second Law of Thermodynamics predicts that the universe will, at some point, experience ‘heat-death’, a finite amount of time after the beginning of the universe [9]. Craig writes further, “If, given enough time, the universe will inevitably stagnate in a state of heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death? If in a finite amount of time, the universe will reach equilibrium, then, given infinite past time, it should by now already be in a state of equilibrium. But it’s not. We’re in a state of disequilibrium, where energy is still available to be used and the universe has an orderly structure.” [10] Thus, the first conclusion, that the universe had a cause, follows. Since the universe encompasses all of time, space, matter, energy, and change, it logically follows that this cause, prior to and outside of the universe, is atemporal, spaceless, immaterial and changeless. There are only two conceivable things that can be atemporal, spaceless, and immaterial--minds, which are not material, and abstract concepts. Minds are obviously not made of matter and energy, and abstract concepts are, by definition, subjective. Abstract concepts cannot have the slightest physical influence, but minds can interact with matter--it is our minds that propel us to perform actions. Thus, God would have to have a mind, thus is intelligent. Now, since (a) the universe was caused, and (b) there is a finite number of caused objects, the cause of the universe would have to be uncaused, and would never begin to exist as timeless. Thus, a transcendent, intelligent, supernatural, and powerful cause of the universe, i.e. God, exists. C2) Ontology necessitates God’s existence If I can demonstrate that God’s existence is probably necessary, in a modal sense, I have demonstrated that God exists. Here, I shall attempt to affirm a transcendent, powerful, supernatural entity’s existence, as I have already demonstrated the creator and intelligent aspects. What is an ‘idea’? Philosopher Immanuel Kant defined an idea as “a concept of reason, whose object can be met with nowhere in experience.” [11] I will use ontology to affirm that the idea of God was derived due to objective reality. P1: If an idea is within cognition, it is either false or necessarily true. P2: The idea of God is within cognition. P3: An idea of cognition is false if and only if it is imaginative. P4: God cannot be imagined. C: God’s existence is modally necessary. P1 is rationally intuitive and logically true; all ideas are either true or false, whether or not we can derive whether they are true or false. P2 is easily justified, as the idea of God is conceived of by myself and, surely, my opponent, to participate in this debate at all. P3 is true as the mind is limited, in that it gains knowledge either empirically or rationally, and both generally lead to accurate conclusions that cannot be denied. A faculty outside of observation and reason would be imagination, that allows the mind to gain ideas that can be false or true, but if an idea is false, it is imagined. P4 is demonstrated as the idea of God is a simple idea, that can be conceived conceptually, but not imagined by providing it imaginable characteristics, thus is simple. As Hume notes, a simple idea cannot be imagined at all [12]. Thus, God’s existence is modally necessary, thus God likely exists. The resolution is resoundingly affirmed. Con must only present their case in the next round, and rebut mine in the following one, in accordance with the debate structure. 1. http://plato.stanford.edu... 2. W.L. Craig and J.P. Moreland (2009). The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, p 102. 3. Ibid, p 194. 4. http://en.wikipedia.org... 5. http://www.newscientist.com... 6. W.L. Craig (2010). On Guard, p 75. 7. http://www.esa.int... 8. http://arxiv.org... 9. http://journals.aps.org... 10. W.L. Craig (2010). On Guard, p 93. 11. http://www.philosophy-dictionary.org... 12. http://tinyurl.com...