"There is reason to believe a God exists"

In this round I'll address my opponents round 3 arguments but before I do that I want to address the topic of burden of proof. I've stated my position on this in the comments of this debate but would like to do so formally. Burden of Proof My opponent, I believe to his credit, Hasn't actually disagreed with me on this but nonetheless it's important to state. My fundamental position is that belief requires a reason, And that without a reason there exists no logical coherence to a belief. I do not, And indeed cannot show that it is impossible that a god exists. I'm simply arguing that there isn't a convincing reason for god to exist. Even if you believe in God because of faith and trust, You can still agree that there isn't sufficient reasoning to prove his existence. Indeed my position doesn't mean you have to believe in God or not. The only relevant question here is are my opponents reasoning sufficiently coherent or are they flawed? If they are coherent, Then there is reason to believe a sentient God exists and my opponent is correct. If they are not, Then there is no reason to believe a sentient god and I am correct. This is the only matter that is being debated here. Applicability of Science My opponent here states: "My opponent [me] seems to suggest (at least in his first premise) that because of the lack of empirical evidence for God measured by the scientific method we should adopt a position of disbelief. . . However, This seems to present a bad idea that many secularists and skeptics have adopted and it is simply that if Science has no say on it then don't believe" Here he commits a strawman fallacy[1]. A strawman fallacy is committed when someone misrepresents an argument so as to make it easier to object to. My opponent seems to object to the argument that if the scientific method does not determine it to be true then it must not be true. However, Not only is that a misrepresentation of the argument I did make, It states something that I explicitly said the opposite of. In my second round I said verbatim that: "If the existence of a sentient God is to be shown, It must be through philosophical argumentation" So when my opponent argues that just because the scientific method doesn't lend itself to the existence of God, God may still exist, He is simply rebutting an argument I didn't make. Cosmic Consciousness My opponent states the following 2 premises in order to prove that the existence of the cosmos implies the sentience of a creator. P1. Contingent minds either have a personal explanation or a natural explanation P2. Quantum Mechanics and other fields of science imply the natural universe is emergent from consciousness Both Premise 1 and Premise 2 have some serious flaws which definitively disprove this argument. Premise 1: Personal or Natural Explanation The premise as stated doesn’t have any flaws. The source of a conscious/contingent mind must, In a binary way, Come from either a natural or personal source. However, My opponent’s support of P1 seems to ignore the natural portion of the premise and focus on the personal source. In support, My opponent states: “Consciousness is fundamental and cannot be reduced to smaller parts like chemical processes in the brain. Add to the fact that we as a species both in of ourselves and as a collective group came into existence a finite time ago. This implies we as in our sentient minds came from a personal source which is sentient in of itself. The Personalism being because we are Personal beings and the fundamental state of consciousness means that source is personal. So P1 is sound. ” Frankly, My opponent claims knowledge on the nature of consciousness which we haven’t yet discovered. He states that consciousness is something fundamental which cannot be reduced into smaller parts as a pre-premise assumption. However, He gives no support for this statement. Indeed, He cannot give support for this statement because the nature of consciousness does not currently have research which supports the view that it is something fundamental. And in fact, Preliminary research points to the opposite position. A study from Harvard Medical School states that the responsibility of consciousness can be broken down into portions of the network of the brain[2], Which find that rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum portion of the brainstem is linked to awareness and therefore consciousness. And further research may very well find the electrochemical processes responsible for consciousness. To treat consciousness as an ethereal realm unconnected to biological processes is not only an assertion without evidence, But contrary to current research. Now my opponent also says in the next premise that the natural world is emergent from a consciousness and so a natural source is a personal source, Which I’ll soon address. But to say that consciousness is fundamental is simply not shown to be correct. Therefore, To say that this insinuates that there is a personal source of our consciousness is also incorrect. Premise 2: Quantum Mechanics Implication that Universe derived from Consciousness To be completely honest, And with respect, My opponent completely misrepresents current research in physics during his argument concerning quantum mechanics and a consciousness derived-universe. He states in support of premise 2: “Physicists at most of them now believe that Space-Time as a reality is not fundamental but that it can be broken down into mathematical information from which such reality emerges. This is called the Holographic Principle. ” While my opponent claims that most physicists believe that we live in a manner as espoused in the holographic principle, He provides no evidence of this. And in fact, He cannot, As the opposite is true. The holographic principle is an incredibly theoretical mathematical tool which makes certain mathematical equations useful in our 3D world. The holographic principle is based off the behaviour of information travelling into a black hole. In an incredibly high-level explanation black holes radiate energy from their event horizon (what can be thought of as the edge of the black hole, Where everything including light is unable to escape), This would mean black holes shrink over time and therefore would delete the information of anything that passed into them. However, Further research found that the “hidden information” or entropy of a black hole is equivalent to the surface area of the event horizon. Therefore the actions inside the black hole can be said to simply resemble the 2D mathematics of the surface of its even horizon hologrammed in a 3D way. This is often how the holographic principle is described. Now it is important to note that the above high-level description I gave of the holographic principle is an incredible simplification of some incredibly difficult physics. I’ll delve into its complexities in a moment, And why it isn’t literally true, But significantly, Even if the simplification of the holographic principle were literally true, It still wouldn’t support the idea that the entire universe is emergent from a conscious mind. Essentially, Even if it were true that holographic universes were possible, There’s no evidence that we are in a holographic universe. It is similar to the idea that we are in a simulation. That is to say that just because it may exist in principle, It does not mean it does exist and indeed may be untestable. Moreover, The holographic principle is fundamentally just a mathematical tool. Whether we exist in 3D space or are actually 2D math being projected isn’t actually that useful because in every way these are equivalent. But what imagining the cosmos as 2D mathematics does is simplify some calculations which can be predictive of our 3D world. To quote astrophysicist Dr. Paul Matt Sutter: “Really what it [the holographic principle] is, It’s a convenient mathematical tool, Because some questions in physics are difficult … and solving it in our full 3 dimensions is really hard but it might be, Again might be, Easier to solve the problems on the 2 dimensional surface rather than the 3 dimensional volume and so it’s not really that the universe is 2 dimensional and we’re living in a 3 dimensional projection of it, It’s just that there’s some convenient mathematical translations that we can take advantage of to make our mathematical lives easier so predictions can be made of how the universe works” [3] That is the heart of the holographic principle. So for my opponent to say the following is incredibly misleading: “Like so our minds are illusional products of perception that emerge from a fundamental consciousness” The holographic principle does not prove that space-time is emergent from the consciousness of a being which fell into a black hole and it does not prove that the natural world is somehow sourced from a personal consciousness. It is a mathematical tool that even now has tenuous connections to reality as implied by Dr. Sutter stating “might be, again might be, Easier to solve the problems on the 2 dimensional surface”. The second premise of my opponent is thus incredibly faulty and therefore to say that the universe we live in is sourced by a sentient god is not proven. Conclusion My opponents rebuttal of my scientific argument was a strawman fallacy therefore ought to be completely ignored. My opponent has serious flaws in the first, But primarily the second, Premises of his cosmic conscious argument which abuse the current understanding of physics to fit his arguments. My opponent therefore has yet to prove that there exists a reason that a sentient god exists. I would finally like to remind both my opponent and voters that the following round may not include new arguments. Both he and I can rebut and refer to our own and the other’s arguments but cannot make new arguments. Sources 1. http://www. Softschools. Com/examples/fallacies/straw_man_examples/496/2. https://hms. Harvard. Edu/news/how-do-you-know-you-know3. https://bit. Ly/2PScVXy