Resolved: The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument is Sound - 4

I start my final round with the same question that my opponent asked: Must the pro defend the God of Christian Theology to win the debate? This is a crucial question and the answer is clearly yes. The LCA, as my opponent presented it, is as follows: 1. Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. 3. The universe is an existing thing. 4. Therefore the explanation of the universe is God. There is nothing in the above that defines what the term 'God' actually means. My opponent claims that 'God' is defined as the 'personal necessary creator of the universe', but this is simply not the case. The argument claims that if the universe has an explanation, then that explanation is 'God', but it never actually defines what or who 'God' is. So, given that the above includes no definition of of the term 'God' it is clear that my opponent intended to define it through the words of A. W Pink, and I have already shown that those words clearly imply 'God' to be the Christian God of the Bible. My opponent has no answer to my analysis of Pink's words, and his argument that I should have looked through his debate history and thereby realised what he was really arguing is simply bizarre and absurd. He also misses the point when he says that I could have asked questions prior to the debate starting. His first post makes it unambiguously clear that the LCA is promoting the existence of the Christian God and I accepted those terms - there was no need to ask any questions. Furthermore, I have now looked through the previous debates and I invite you to consider the first one that my opponent set up on this subject. In it, he writes the following at the start of the second round: [1] "It goes without saying for [con] and I that the God we are referring to is a personal creator, more specifically one of the nature defined by Christian Theology; however, as Socalpinko indicates, a definition may be necessary for the readers. As such, I cite the The Nature of God by A. W. Pink to describe the complexity of the Lord" So, the LCA (as my opponent initially formed it) claimed to prove that the Christian God is the explanation of the universe. My opponent has not provided any convincing arguments to demonstrate that if there is such an explanation, it must necessarily be the Christian God - or one which has his attributes, omniscience, benevolence, etc - and so this is sufficient reason alone to vote against the motion. Moving on, I must once again point out that this debate is about the soundness of the LCA, not modal logic or the PSR. In the context of premise 1, their only purpose was to prove premise 1 true. But since I concede that premise 1 is true by definition (since the term 'necessity of its own nature' is so vague as to cover all cases where the explanation isn't an external cause) there is no point discussing modal logic and the PSR in the context of this premise. Now I move on to premise 2, which, as I said before, is where my opponent starts to make assertions that he simply cannot justify. Of course, my opponent continues to use modal logic and the PSR to try to prove premise 2, and I have already presented reasons as to why his logic fails - reasons which still remain valid. Notice that he has no answer to my point about virtual particles - which demonstrate that it is possible for things to exist, not through an external cause, but yet nevertheless be finite and changing themselves. This counterexample destroys the assumption underlying my opponent's whole argument that any object whose explanation is the 'necessity of its own existence' must therefore be 'necessary' - where he defined 'necessary' to mean 'could not have failed to exist'. Virtual particles exist through the 'necessity of their own existence' while they exist (which is a finite amount of time) but they certainly fail to exist at all other points in time. Without this assumption, my opponent's position collapses. No longer can he claim that 'an infinite number of contingent beings cannot explain their own existence. ' More crucially, he has given us no reason to believe that the universe itself requires an explanation of its existence through an external cause. I have already refuted his claim that this must be so because it contains contingent objects, and he has presented no response to that argument. I do not want to get too bogged down in this part of the debate however, because there is an even more fundamental problem with my opponent's position - one which I have already pointed out. Even if he has convinced you, despite my efforts, that he does not have to prove that God is the Christian of the Bible, even if he has convinced you that a necessary 'first cause' has to exist and that that cause cannot be the universe itself, the one thing he has not done - and cannot do - is prove that this cause is a God. My opponent (eventually) defined God to mean a 'necessary, personal creator of the universe. ' Even if you accept that the universe has a necessary creator, you have no reason to believe that this creator is personal. In other words, you have no reason to believe that this cause has a mind, that it knows about the universe and that it intended to do or create anything. This is demonstrated by my Solar System analogy, which my opponent dismisses without explanation. By no stretch of the imagination did the Sun create the Solar System, he claims - but why not? It was - and is - through the sun's gravitational pull that the Solar System was formed and remains in its current form. It is through its heat and light that life on earth formed in the first place and continues to this day. Simply dismissing this point without justification - as my opponent does - is not good enough. The question that I put to my opponent, and which he has not answered, is this: How does he know that the so-called necessary first cause of the whole universe, which he claims to exist, is not the eternal non-natural equivalent of the sun - some eternal, necessary object that through its power creates and sustains the universe in its current form (in the same way that the sun sustains the Solar System through its gravitational pull, heat and light) but which (crucially) is not actually alive and thus not personal. In short, I was exhibiting an example of an object that could be eternal, uncaused and non-natural, but not personal. To this question, he has no answer at all. In the same way that Look asserted without meaningful justification that God has to be omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent), my opponent asserts without meaningful justification that it cannot be the case, saying, 'As I have already proved that I necessary natural being is incoherent, it must be a necessary personal being'. This misses the point however. Even if a necessary natural being is incoherent, this does not allow us to conclude that the said necessary being must be personal - as my sun analogy demonstrated. In conclusion, the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument is little more than an argument from ignorance. My opponent has no reason to believe that this universe requires a creator. More crucially however, he has no reason to believe that if it was created, then that creator has to be a God. He simply claims that "due to the inability for it to be anything but God, God himself must serve as the explanation of the universe's existence. " Well I presented him with an alternative explanation to God - my sun analogy - and he had no answer to it. His logic - and therefore his whole argument - collapses, and so I must urge a con vote. [1] = . http://www.debate.org...