Strong Atheism is a Sound Position

T3h Burden Con drops that there must be 100% certainty to carry the resolution, and I argue further to state that a justified stance that God most likely does not exist is enough to carry strong atheism. A weak atheist is by definition also an agnostic, thus does not make a positive claim regarding the likelihood of God existing or not, they simply do not accept the claim “God exists” has been shown to be correct.Thus, one can only consider Con’s rebuttals to my arguments, or his positive arguments for God’s existence to sustain the negative notion.Inference to Best ExplanationPlease note my strategy in the diagram below. During this debate I have argued that naturalism is more likely than theism on abductive grounds. If I demonstrate this much then clearly I have upheld the notion of strong atheism is most likely correct. Especially when we consider metaphysical naturalism is only a subset of atheistic philosophies, if theism is not even more likely than this small subset then it becomes very unlikely. Use of Abductive ReasoningPro doesn’t actually make much of an argument against the concept of using abductive reasoning. He ignores that we use abductive reasoning for virtually everything on some level, including for trivial things such as when we affirm “I am looking at a computer screen”. There are many, an infinite number of ways the colour and sense experiences you perceive form the computer screen could have come to be, however we use forms of heuristics, including abduction to prioritise the most likely explanations from the least likely explanations.It could be today when you woke up that an evil scientist crept into your bedroom during the night, sedated you, and transferred your brain to a matrix. It is epistemologically possible, yet our inferences render such an explanation of the facts highly unlikely. The criteria of abductive reasoning, which I have defended so far, are the main principles involved. The same applies to well-established scientifric theories, when we have a theory that is backed by increasing amounts of evidence, both its explanatory power, and the level of ad hoc reasoning required to deny the theory renders the negation highly implausible.1. Explanatory PowerPro drops the fact that God provides exactly zero explanatory power, for inherent reasons, which was my major point here. Moreover pro also drops my points that essentially we have found within the universe obeys (descriptive) natural laws, if it obeys descriptive natural laws, then they most certainly also obey prescriptive natural laws. Pro goes on a large tangent here attacking the natural laws in practice instead of attacking them in principle, but this is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making here. The claim of metaphysical naturalism isn’t “The universe perfectly obeys our description of the natural laws today”, so attacks on our laws today makes no progress against metaphysical naturalism. The claim of naturalism is that in principle, the universe obeys natural laws descriptively – and evidencing that the universe where we have measured it evidently does obey natural laws is sufficient to demonstrate its enormous explanatory power.Theism, on the other hand, inherently entails none of the observations we have.2. Law of ParsimonyPro completely ignores that Newton’s laws are not an explanation, they are only a description of behaviour. Newton says nothing about the nature of gravity, thus it does not qualify as an explanation of gravity, thus Pro is going completely off-topic by comparing relativity to Newton’s Laws of gravitation.Pro points out exceptions to the law with his log analogy, and I completely agree, however that only discredits the law if it was posited as an absolute, given that it is not deductive (nor is it intended to be), however I provided the epistemological justification for it to be the case. All things equal, the simplest explanation is preferable, thus even considering Pro’s log analogy, sure we do need an external cause, yet the simplest sufficient external causes are still going to be preferable to more complex ones.In the case of naturalism however, we do not have this problem, since the universe can be self-contained within natural laws as-is. Numerous speculative models of the universe which are contained within a mathematical framework exist e.g. Carrol-Chen, Linde, etc.[3,4] which can explain our dataset. While none are accepted as correct, it flat out falsifies that naturalism is not sufficientin principle to explain the universe as we have it. Con would have to claim that naturalism is inherent insufficient to explain the universe in order for his line of reasoning to hold weight.4. Predictive PowerI honestly do not see what pro’s long tangent regarding big bang cosmology etc. has to do with predictive power of naturalism. Again I never argued that our existing descriptive natural laws are predictive, I was arguing the very principle of the universe obeying natural laws is predictive – hence my arguments from an impartial universe.I contrasted theism to naturalism here, that future observations will be found to obey natural laws (and this has successively been the case as we go increasingly fundamental, for example from Newtonion Motion Laws to Quantum Theory, and Newtonion gravitational laws to General Relativity. Moreover, a universe that essentially doesn’t care about life, etc, which I argued was apparent from the sheer amount of empty space, an argument that Pro has dropped. Con completely loses the road here. Moreover Con argues natural laws “break down” yet only makes an appeal to authority here, and also doesn’t give the context of this statement of Hawking and what he means by “breaking down”. What we have found is that natural laws rather become increasingly simple and fundamental, with the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces unifying at the most extreme conditions. Hardly a case of “breaking down”.Pro argues for an external cause, but provides essentially no justification for this, moreover he begs the question of the coherence of a “cause” external to the universe, since our notions of causality rest on preconceived notions of time, entropy, and directionality. Given a four-dimensional block universe (an argument unchallenged by Pro this debate), a “caused” universe is completely unnecessary, since it is more parsimonious for the universe to just exist “as-is” with no further explanation required. Pro’s arguments regarding “the early universe” seem to presuppose that the universe literally had some sort of beginning to its existence, however this only makes sense when presupposing presentism. With a block universe (affirmed by GR), this is entirely nonsense, since the universe was never literally “born” in any sense any more than a ruler was born with its first inch.[5]3. Background Knowledge“The choice is between Natural Laws alone and Natural Laws plus God”Given we have no background knowledge of “natural laws plus God”, yet we do have plenty of background knowledge of “natural laws alone”, clearly the former, not the latter, is within background knowledge. The former we know from our study of behaviour that exclusively obeys natural laws, at no point do satellites suddenly “fail to continue orbiting” and drop like a stone, etc. They obey the precise descriptive laws we have, hence we can cleanly argue that this motion of a satellite moving via. natural laws alone. The latter however is beyond our experience set. Why choose an explanation which we do not need, and which we do not know is even metaphysically possible?Pro again goes completely off-track when addressing this abductive point. He drops my mathematical justification for this point. Where theism involves an uncertainty that metaphysical naturalism doesn’t require.4.1 Absolute truthsCon attempts some sort of epistemological argument but it’s a long way from being remotely cogent. Furthermore, his mathematical argument is logically invalid, since P1 is not synonymous with “all things abstract and immaterial are universally true”, necessary for C1 to follow from P2 via. BARBARA. Thus even if P1 and P2 were both true, C1 doesn’t follow. Furthermore he attempts to give “truth” some form of ontology and his P1 simply begs the question of epistemological scepticism, objective epistemologies are not the only possibility.[1,2]4.2 Warped space-timeCon drops this argument.5. Employment of ad hoc assumptions5.1 Argument from atemporal mindsPro drops my point that all of Pro’s rebuttals here only help affirm the contention, that theism must employ ad hoc assumptions in order to remain coherent. He has done nothing but that in his defence to 5.1. Moreover assumptions are not limited to existing entities, but additional attributes, etc. Furthermore, all of our evidence suggests that time is part of the four-dimensional framework of our universe, thus he would need to go against General Relativity to make this claim. Pro claims it doesn’t invoke any more assumptions than naturalism, by straw manning metaphysical naturalism, again. Now we have “God plus new plane plus natural laws”, sounds nice and ad hoc to me!5.2 Incoherence of a caused universePro again strawmans my position by attacking materialism (wtf). Pro completely ignores my entire argument that even positing a “beginning” of the universe is incoherent due to the issue of ontology of time. He continually insists that the universe had a beginning at the “planck time”, but this ignores my larger point of what the universe is. Again, it’s like saying a ruler has a “beginning of its existence” at its first inch. Yes, the universe may well have a first-moment in time, but that is not to say the universe began to exist here, since on four-dimensionalism the past, present and future all exist at once are are all equally real.[5]References1. http://goo.gl...2. http://goo.gl...3. http://goo.gl...4. http://goo.gl...5. http://goo.gl...