My 100th Debate: God Exists

Since my of my opponent's Opening arguments mix with my 2nd contention it will be addressed there. Contention 1: TA Argument"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. " [1]I began with a quote here from St. Thomas here to show the intensity of this argument at the point. Here St. Thomas argues that each thing on the planet has a purpose. No one really does not know they purpose, but there is something that directs us towards this. Of which this thing is related to God. We can also see that when we apply this to living or even non living objects that there is a direct morality argument being made whether we like it or not. This shows the fact that whether we like it or not there is an outside force acting upon us. My opponent brings up evolution and natural selection which, as he argues, shows that teleology would fail and there would be no designer. This is false though. Here I will counter will the Watchmaker argument. The Watchmaker argument is that once the universe and the creation was created then, like a watchmaker, walked away and let the technology go off on its own. [2] This was an Enlightenment idea that was to get people to improve soceity as since God no longer interfered with our affairs it was "our" job to fix the world that God had built. With this in mind we can see that with the creation of the universe and the world amongst other things, like the Watchmaker argument pertains. God left things along and left them to their demise. Does this leave room for evolution? Absolutely, even Pope Francis admitted that and it still works with this argument as well. We can see that this is simply pure Objectivism since we can both argee with a lot of these things as they are scientific fact and even my opponent agrees with a great portion of what I have to say here. Contention 2: KCAThough my opponent's argument is partially true, but it actually proves my own argument as it shows that since God opperates outside of the space-time continium which is the 4th demension as my opponent brought up earlier in R2. With this almost like concession it goes and shows that God can and did create the universe on that grounds as it opens up that door alone permitting me to automatically prove this premise without much difficulty. A statement is a priori = one can see that it is true using pure reason and given an understanding of the meanings of the words in it. We don’t need empirical evidence to know that it’s true. A priori statements seem to be true necessarily. A statement is a posteriori = our evidence for its truth is empirical, or based on data that we receive via sense experience. [3]My opponent states that everything must be physical and thus God cannot exist. However, this is completely false on the grounds that of simply looking at feelings. We must first observe that if these expirences were all physical that I would be able to view them in third person, but since I'm not able to do such a thing then we can see that these expierences aren't physical. We can see the very fact that all physical expierences are in third person, but since there are first person expierences we must also be able to expierence that are not purely physical. On top of that we can see that this is a posteriori. Not to mention that since God in this case is already a priori the Occam's Razor is bunk in this case, but even in showing in the most simplistic terms we can still see that God has to be a Mind and that is a driving ground for a great deal of things as we can already see how the Mind has affects on a lot of the surrounding world as my opponent has even agreed with. By this standard we can see that this would tend to result and agree with the current status quo of God having no choice but to exist. We have to continously acknowledge that since God is a mind that he works outside of the bounds of the current world, but that is completely possible as there can be a possible 5th dimension that we are unaware of which is where God exists, but we known that God exists outside of the spacetime continum which is that of the 4th dimension. My opponent claims that the mind is matter and due to this then Solipsism is false, but my opponent is actually just confusing the mind is matter with the mind interacting with matter and reality. We can actually see that the mind, which isn't physical, can interact with reality, but let's take an interesting scenerio for a minute. Since it is Halloween I'll use a like example. Let's say you clone yourself. I don't mean just a twin, but everything like you in everyway, but it will be unable to have a consciousness. This is known as a zombie (excluding the decay and rotting corpse). We can see that it looks like you, talks like you, and it Physically like you, BUT it doesn't have the mind and hence not aware. Thus we can see that the mind is able to interact with reality, because if it wouldn't then we would all be mindless zombies like my opponent's clone in this example. Thus my argument stands. Sources1. Himma, Kenneth Einar (2006). "Design Arguments for the Existence of God", in James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, eds. , The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved 8/24/082. (. http://www.wmcarey.edu...) 3. Anselm, St. , Anselm's Basic Writings, translated by S. W. Deane, 2nd Ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co. , 1962