General Relativity Implies that God does not Exist

We defined god as "the uncaused, personal creator of the universe". The word creator, according to my search term of "creator definition" on google, means "a person or thing that brings something into existence" (. http://tinyurl.com...). Clearly, then, we are talking about a god who brings the universe into being, which is the god addressed by my argument. We are not talking about a god who keeps the world in being as a continuous creator. Perhaps Miles and some theologians have a personal opinion that such a being is worthy of being called a creator, but according to the standard definition of creator used for this debate, it is not so. Therefore, my argument does address the "god" as set out in the resolution. Now, imagine that you're in a debate about whether or not history shows that making abortion illegal only brings women to have "back alley abortions" rather than actually preventing abortions from being performed. Imagine that you spend hours of time collecting examples from history (perhaps you would use Romania under Ceausescu) to support your position that it does, only for your opponent to respond that it's not history which supports your conclusion, but history with a philosophical premise. Historical evidence on its own has no interpretation, you're told, and it requires some philosophy (deductive reasoning, intuition, and some axioms about realism) to reach the conclusion. Therefore, alleges your opponent, you've failed to support the resolution because it's not about what history and philosophy show, but only about what history shows. Obviously, we would see this person's argument as ludicrous, because a historical conclusion is just a conclusion based off of evidence from history. Almost any debate could be derailed with the method that Miles is utilizing: "Statistics don't prove that ObamaCare has been a failure, because statistics on their own are just numbers, and you need to make philosophical assumptions about meaning and interpretation to truly make your conclusion. Thus, strictly speaking, the resolution cannot be affirmed. " Despite the clear absurdity, I find myself in the same exact situation with my opponent in this debate. At one point or another in a debate, there will be philosophical premises. Does this mean that our imagined debate on history is not making conclusions from history? Clearly not. Does this mean that our imagined debate on statistics is not making conclusions from statistics? Again, clearly not. So, does that mean our debate on general relativity is not making conclusions from general relativity? Speaking on the matter of general relativity, Miles is offering a false dichotomy. There is a third solution, which is to affirm that "General relativity applies to the beginning of the universe and states that an initial singularity is physically unreal". This does not fit with option 1 because option 1 states that GR cannot be applied to the beginning of the universe, but it does not fit with option 2 because option 2 states that there really is a physical singularity. As long as this option is possible, then Miles' argument is a false dichotomy, but I will note that my third option is supported by the FLRW metrics, which suggest that a physical singularity is a fictional, mathematical abstraction (. http://plato.stanford.edu...).I argued that if metaphysical time had a beginning, then god would have a beginning as well. Miles objects to this argument by stating that god exists timelessly in metaphysical time, so even if metaphysical time is finite, it still wouldn't constitute a beginning of god, because a beginning requires the existence of something at a certain time to be a tensed fact. Miles has already introduced the concept of metaphysical time, and while I found this concept to be vague and ill-defined (it was defined by what it was not rather than what it is), I was fine with this, as I am not a verificationist who believes that only physical measurements are meaningful. However, his new objection amounts to stating that god exists timelessly in metaphysical time. How can god exists timelessly in metaphysical time? This is nothing but word salad, or a mix of semantically confused words that have no meaning to the listener. By trying to show my arguments to be implausible, Miles has made his own arguments more implausible and more speculative by bloating his ontology, introducing metaphysical time, a timeless metaphysical time, and some abstract-god stuff that god exists in sans the existence of metaphysical time, of which metaphysical time springs into being. The sheer amount of things Miles has to add to his ontology to get around the problem speaks for itself, and gives a rather ad hoc characterization to his answers. I argued for the following principle: "in a given cause-and-effect relationship, if the cause is simultaneous with the effect, then the causal relationship happens at an instantaneous moment. ". Miles refutes my argument for this principle by offering a third option, where something causes something else over an interval of time. An interval, however, is purely a mathematical concept with no ontology. An interval is nothing more than a series of instants that human beings assign an interval to; They have no reality themselves. One may ask if instants are mere mathematical entities as well, but since general relativity takes Cauchy surfaces to be real, and Cauchy surfaces represent an instant, such an objection cannot work in this debate. What we really have in the third option is actually just a cause and effect relationship happening at an instant, and then continuing over many more instants that we can group into an interval. Clearly, this is just the first option I presented happening multiple times. This means that Miles' third option is not actually an alternative to my two options, and is really just the first one occurring multiply. Miles and I have two opposing positions about causality and time; Miles argues that efficient causation does not have to be temporal, while I am arguing that it does. My position is better supported on the grounds that all of the (efficient) causal propositions we experience in the world are temporal. I agree with Miles when he states that this shows temporality to be a general property of causality rather than an essential property, but nonetheless, this argument establishes the plausibility of my position over his. While Miles could object to this reasoning on the grounds that observations within space-time don"t relate to whether or not the cause of spacetime has to be temporal, this would conflict with an aspect of Miles' worldview. Miles believes that since we observe everything within space-time coming into being with a cause, then space-time itself probably has a cause as well. Miles couldn't object to this kind of probabilistic reasoning without contradicting his own world view. I won't bother writing a large closing statement about why my arguments in the debate were better than Miles'. The readers of this debate are intelligent enough to come to their own conclusions about who won. Instead, I will close with some statements about the nature of debate and voting. First, there is a difference between reasoning and rationalizing. If you're going to choose the winner before the debate and rationalize a vote for that person, then don't waste your time. I do not want anybody voting for me out of pure bias towards my position, and I am guaranteed that Miles feels the same way. I want voters who use reason to make their decision, which is to take away as much bias as possible and vote on who truly won. Secondly, I want to call attention to remarks that a DDO user made in a forum thread. The simple fact that another user had more sources than another user does not mean that they deserve a sources vote. Sources are to be judged on their quality and how effectively they were utilized, not quantity alone. In addition to this, arguments should be weighted. The winner of the debate is not a tally of who responded to the most points and who ignored the most points. It's a tally of who won what arguments and how important they were. Debates are not mere mathematical quantification.