God most likely exists

I'd like to whole-heartedly thank Sswdwm for suggesting this debate and for doing such a great job in it. Give him a round of applause for not being as long winded as me! Best of luck to him in the voting! God My opponent drops my arguments for God. So if I can show that reality is mental, then God's existence follows necessarily. (Since of course, mind is fundamental, and can't interact with non-mind, reality must be mental). Materialism, free will, and explanatory power My opponent wants some clarification on the mind and brain in idealism. Now there's many different versions which could work for this. We could argue that the brain is mental in nature, or that the mind is self-collapsing wave functions, etc. However, I'd rather argue that the mind and the brain are two different things. Not different types of things, but still different things. And affecting one affects the other, since there's a connection between the two. In other words, we are "embodied" minds. Under idealism, disembodied minds, such as God or angels are also perfectly possible.So the brain affects the mind, and the mind affects the brain. However, the brain has more of an impact on the brain than the mind. We have to really focus our minds on something to break bad habits, and it's much easier for the brain to affect the mind through hormones and drugs, than it is for the mind to control the brain.My opponent also admits that if free will is true, materialism is false. The reason is that there just is no place for free will if everything is physical. Whatever is physical is either random or causally determined. There's no "free agents" in physicalism. For materialists, free will can't exist.Now I've asked my opponent: If free will can't exist why is there such a huge illusion of it. He's given examples of times when we think there's something there, but it's not. Well yes, I've admitted that free-will could be an illusion, but if free-will is an illusion, my opponent needs to show how.Either free-will is metaphysically possible or it is not. If it's metaphysically possible, it's the best explanation for what we experience and materialism is false. If it's metaphysically impossible, my opponent needs to show how we can be under the illusion that there exists something which is completely impossible in principle.I also don't understand my opponent's examples of "impossible shapes." The example he gives isn't an impossible shape. It just looks like it. But under further examination, we can see that it's not really an impossible shape, just that is looks very similar to oneNow onto explanatory power. There's..(i) Good reasons to believe that idealism is true. (ii) It makes sense of free-will and the idea of mind being first person and matter third persoBut on materialism...(i) Absolutely no good reasons to believe it. (ii) Can't explain free will (the illusion thereof) and can't explain how there can be "first-person" (a property that physical matter just doesn't have).Arguments against idealism My opponent references a TED talk, but all the talk states is that there's an intimate relationship between mind and brain. That affecting the brain affects the mind. But this doesn't show that the mind just IS the brain.My opponent is affirming the antecedent it seems... (Correct me if I'm wrong) P1: IF mind is matter, THEN there would be an intimate relationship between the two. P2: There is an intimate relationship between the two C: Mind is matter. But this is invalid. If he formulated it P1: If there is an intimate relationship between mind and matter, THEN mind is matter. P2: There is a relationship. C: Mind is matter I'd see absolutely no reason to accept P1 as true. Under one formulation, his argument is invalid. Under the other, the premises aren't shown to be true. Both are unsound. Furthermore, they need a monitor to show the images that they interpret from the information in the brain. This just goes to show that the images and the information in the brain aren't the exact same thing. From the talk... "They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields" Well this doesn't work. Because if the brainwaves just are visual images, we shouldn't need to "decode" them. Occam's razor Yes, idealism posits an extra entity, God, to ground reality since this is needed in principle. But, as I've argued many times, there are good reasons to think that we need this entity, and the idealistic worldview makes more explanatory sense of the world. So Occam's razor shouldn't be applied. Bunnies and chew Now this argument didn't merit much response from my opponent, but let me try to be more succinct. I'm not sure how to put analogous reasoning into proper logical form, so bear with me. P1. The bunny/chew comparison is structurally the same as the mind/brain comparison. P2. We are perfectly justified in inferring that the bunny is not the chew, even if they are causally related. Therefore, we are justified in inferring that the mind is not the brain. Now I've defended both of these. So my opponent needs to show (i) that the analogy does not hold, or (ii) the analogy does hold, but we cannot infer that the bunny is not the chewing tobacco. Let's push the analogy further. Suppose every time that the bunny hops forwards, the pouch of chew gets bigger. When the rabbit turns, the pouch of chew rotates. This happens, every. single. time. Now we can look at the rabbit, and see what it's doing, and then (presumably) infer what the chew is doing. Let's say that there is such a close relationship between the two, that someone even gives a talk at TED that we can monitor the bunny's activity and then find out what is happening to the chew! We'd probably still say (or we should), "Just because they're somehow causally related, this does't mean they're the same thing." Which is what I'm saying here. Just because two things are extremely related, this proves absolutely nothing. Nil. Nadda. All it shows is that two completely different types of things are somehow related to each other. And once again, my opponent is not arguing that the mind is a property of the brain, but that the mind just is the brain. So this argument holds. His internet analogy is also flawed. What does he mean by "the internet"? Does he mean the mental sensations I have when I look at my computer screen? Or does he mean the physical energy of the electricity? He's equivocating the mental images and sensations I have when I'm on my computer with electricity, which is exactly what we're arguing about. This is essentially the old "Well, if you didn't know water was H20, you'd think they were different things!" argument. But, as I've shown above, and as atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel points out, this rests on equivocation. "We ordinarily identify water by its perceptible qualities qualities, but our perceptual experiences aren't part of the water; they are just effects it has on our senses. The intrinsic properties of water, its density, electrical conductivity, index of refraction, liquidity between 0 and 100 degrees centigrade, etc., are all fully explained by H20 and its properties. The physical properties of H20 are by themselves sufficient for water." [1] Also, as mentioned earlier... P1: IF mind is matter, then when we introspect we are examining neurons (doing neuro-science) P2: We aren't doing neuro-science every time we introspect. C: Mind is not matter. Solipsism Due to my opponent's passing over of my above argument, I don't think his objections to my solipsism argument work. He's also dropped his Goldbach's Conjecture example. Let's put it this way. Either solipsism is metaphysically possible, or it's not. If it's metaphysically impossible, then this is either explicitly so, or implicitly so. It's obviously not explicitly contradictory. Also, given the dissimilar nature of mind and matter, as argued above, it's most likely not implicitly contradictory. Therefore, it's metaphysically possible. My opponent's diagram is also wrong. There is a section where some things are conceivable and metaphysically impossible. If something is impossible, it means it's a "non-thing". Our minds only grasp and perceive actual things. This is simple apprehension, the first act of the intellect. When I say "dog" you just simply understand what a dog is. You don't even need to have a visual image, you just understand it. But if "dog" wasn't a thing (as metaphysical impossibilities are) it couldn't exist in your intellect in the way it does. So if something can exist coherently in your intellect, it must be metaphysically possible. Now it might be the case that we can't really conceive of solipsism and just think we can. We might think we can conceive of a square-triangle, but we'd actually be conceiving a triangle with square attributes, or something in between a square and a triangle. But I've already rebutted this. We can easily examine the properties of the mind, and examine the properties of physical matter. So the possibility that we're mistakenly conceiving of solipsism is very slim, since we understand very very thoroughly what the mind is, and its properties. We're not saying that "solipsism is metaphysically possible" because we just don't know enough about the mind. We're saying, that because we know the mind, and we know matter, it's easy to see that solipsism is conceivable. But, as I've defended, there's nothing explicitly or implicitly contradictory about solipsism. This reaffirms its metaphysical possibility. Conclusion So we've been given several good reasons to think that mind is not material. 1. It's not comparing apples to oranges, or bunnies to chew, it's saying that they just are the same thing. 2. Solipsism is metaphysically possible, as demonstrated by its conceivability and plausibility. The premises of my argument remain defended. Mind is fundamental. Reality is mental, and whatever is mental has a mind behind it. Therefore, it follows with necessity that there exist a mind which grounds reality. [1] Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel, p.40-41