God exists

(I omitted the section debating the Euthyphro dilemma, as I was running low on characters and had to sacrifice a part of my argument. I chose to eliminate this section because this isn’t a debate about whether or not god is the foundation of objective moral values. Such a trait is not even found in the definition of god in R1. Therefore, I found it to be the best section to remove.) PlagiarismDylan makes no attempt to defend his blatant plagiarism of Christopher Langan and Langan related websites, so I am forced to conclude that he has nothing to say in his defense. Therefore, Dylan’s plagiarism should be taken into account when voting. If the DDO community does not deter plagiarism in debates by counting against it when it is time to vote, then we will in effect be sanctioning acts of plagiarism by refusing to take any action when they occur. It is vital that debates on this website do not become nothing more than copy and pasting from other sources without attribution.Contrasting MethodsA part of effective reasoning is to justify all of your assertions in your argument. In other words, it is not wise to commit the fallacy of bare assertion, or when a premise or assertion is “assumed to be true merely because it says that it is true.”[1] Unfortunately, this practice of bare assertion is common throughout Dylan’s last round. While I attempt to justify all of my assertions using reasoning and quotations from outside sources, Dylan merely asserts things to be true with no quotations or outside sources as justification. For example, no reasoning is offered to justify the assertions that “only possibilities with an intrinsic capacity to define and maintain their own existences can be actualized”, “In order for there to be a real difference between two things, both must be embedded in a common medium providing the metric of separation”, “. Without two-valued logic, distinctions are impossible.”, “His "complexity" is not a hinderance [sic] to self-actualization, but a sin qua non of existence itself. “, and “An infinite, unbound ontological potential is not real in the sense which requires a cause.”. Dylan, at many points, offers nothing more than assertions without any actual argumentation. I will ignore any statements that Dylan makes which are not justified, as it is too tedious for myself and the audience to point out every instance where bare assertion fallacies are made (this plays into the UBT discussion greatly).AmbiguityAnother part of effective reasoning is to make your meaning clear. Ambiguity is not inherently bad, as poetry and literature would show, but ambiguity in a debate is bad because your opponent and your audience can’t understand what you’re talking about, which makes it difficult for your opponent to refute your argument and for the audience to weight the quality of your arguments. It is not the obligation of your opponent or the audience to define your terms for you. If Dylan wants to convince us that something is true, he should make sure that we actually understand what he’s talking about by presenting definitions for his terms. Dylan leaves us wondering what terms like “UBT”, “self-actualized”, “unbounded”, “protomedium”, “meta-paradoxical”, and “self-determinative” are supposed to mean. This takes away from his case significantly, as precision and clarity are superior to ambiguity in a debate for reasons already given.Pre-ontologyI argued that if issues surrounding the meaning of being--that is, the difference between entity and non-entity, are not solved, then any jump from this “pre-ontology” to ontology itself would be necessarily preemptive and on a weak conceptual foundation. This argument is not about whether or not existence has meaning, but what the difference between entity and non-entity is. We are inquiring about the difference between entity and non-entity, or “Being” in Heidegger’s work. We are not asking about the meaning of existence. The meaning of existence is a question about the meaning of entities, while the meaning of being is not. As Richard Polt clarifies in Heidegger: An Introduction, “When we ask about Being we are not asking about any particular thing, nor even about the totality of things in the universe , we are asking why all of these things count as beings in the first place.” [2] Heidegger himself writes in Being and Time that the meaning of being goes beyond the highest generic concepts applicable to entities. [3] While Dylan is correct in stating that we already have some prior conception of the difference between entity and non-entity, as we are able to say something exists and rule out its non-existence, this only shows we have an intuitive approximation of the meaning of being that comes from beings ourselves, not that we have a full of understanding of being. Why? Because despite this intuitive approximation of the meaning of being, the meaning of being still escapes exact conceptual definition. Our intuitive approximation of the meaning of being only ends up showing that we still have a long way to go in pre-ontology.Creation ex nihiloDylan is adamant that only two-valued logic can make distinctions possible. First, this assertion goes without any justification at all. Secondly, two-valued logic is outdated given quantum mechanics. A logical system is two-valued if it follows the principle of bivalence, which means that for any declarative sentence expressing a proposition, it has exactly one truth value [4]. As I stated earlier, this type of logic is not consistent with the empirical findings from quantum mechanics. The physicists Birkhoff and von Neumann, by treating observables in quantum mechanics as propositions, were able to create a form of logic called quantum logic . Quantum logic, however, is a many-valued logical system. Contrary to the principle of bivalence, propositions in quantum logic have more than two truth values [5]. Considering this, quantum mechanics shows that Dylan’s preferred logical system is outdated and inconsistent with empirical findings. Speaking more on logic, a large part of Dylan’s ontology depends on the notion of possibility (e.g. infinite, unbound ontological potential). The relevant logic for dealing with possibilities is modal logic. In modal logic, there is such a thing as “modal collapse”, where all possibilities are removed, and everything exists by necessity [6]. If modal collapse occurs, then there are no possibilities, and only necessities. Therefore, Dylan’s ontology assumes that modal collapse has not occurred. Dylan has only made the assumption that modal collapse is not true. In order for us to take his ontology seriously, he needs to show that modal collapse is not true. Otherwise, his ontology is based on unfounded logical assumptions. Ontological Argument It does not matter what Dylan sees a trivial observation. If a premise in an argument is false, then the argument is unsound. Dylan's argument has the premise that denying the existence of god entails that there is something external to god which prevents god from existing. I provided an example of how this premise is false by pointing out that denying the existence of god could entail that god is a logically inconsistent concept. Dylan does not refute this alternative, so the first premise is false. Therefore, the argument is unsound. Reality In my last round, I offered an argument constructed from Dylan’s own words and definitions which concluded that god does not exist. Rather than spend time addressing every statement made by Dylan in regards to this (I found many of them to be red herring), I will only analyze each premise of the argument and determine if the argument still holds at this point. Dylan does not challenge the logical validity of the argument, so we can already conclude that the argument is at least logically valid. But is the argument sound (i.e. all of the premises are true)? Let’s take a look. The first premise states that an infinite, unbound ontological potential exists. I believe that this premise is obvious based on Dylan’s own statements. For example, in his last round, Dylan ascribes numerous properties to what he calls the “UBT” (I assuming this is intended to be synonymous with the infinite, unbound ontological potential). He gives it the properties of “lacking structure”, “not real in the sense that it requires a cause”, and existing “qua existence”. Dylan himself states that “we were never really dealing with nothingness to begin with, but UBT”. Dylan’s own words make it clear that the infinite, unbound ontological potential is not nothing, but something which exists and can be described with numerous characteristics. From these quotations, Dylan’s last round only helps to support the first premise of the argument. The second premise states that god could not have caused this “UBT”. My argument for this premise was that it is absurd to suggest that something can cause its own necessary conditions. It’s like saying that you can cause your parents to come into being, when you depend on their existence to come into being in the first place! This argument was not addressed by Dylan, so we can affirm the second premise as true based on this alone. However, from what I can interpret in Dylan’s last round, he has supported this second premise himself! He states things like “An infinite, unbound ontological potential is not real in the sense which requires a cause” and “UBT does not need a cause”. These statements only serve to help the notion that god cannot have caused the UBT, not to refute it! The rest of the premises are either true from the terms in R1, or follow logically. Therefore, god still doesn't exist. References http://tinyurl.com... Heidegger: An Introduction, pg 28Being and Time, pg 4http://tinyurl.com...Dalla Chiara, M. L. and Giuntini, R.: 1994, Unsharp quantum logics, Foundations of Physics,, 24, 1161–1177.Einstein, Relativity, and Absolute Simultaneity “A radical rethinking of quantum gravity”