God exists.

I'll discuss Pro's moral argument, then my argument based on the nature of consciousness, then the problem of evil.The Moral ArgumentPro claims that he has not committed a logical fallacy because he is "using inductive reasoning." But inductive reasoning is not a license to throw out any old set of premises and call it an argument. There are specific rules, like Mill's methods or inference to the best explanation, that an inductive argument has to obey. My opponent's argument overlooks so many alternative explanations for morality that it is very poor as an inductive argument.Pro challenges me to explain why it is contrary to a serial killer's self interest not to kill people. There are a couple of obvious practical reasons for this. First, he might get caught. (He could never know that he would not be caught, only that he does not see how he could get caught.) Second, he will feel guilty afterwards even if he does not get caught. On a deeper level, however, the serial killer should value human life because people can potentially become virtuous, and virtuous people can be valuable to him as friends or work associates, or simply by living productive lives in the same society as him.Pragmatism is not a moral axiom, and Pro has not shown this. All he has said is that pragmatism "seems to offer the only way to resolve the is-ought problem." That is about as far from a demonstration of a moral axiom as it is possible to get. If any old way of getting across the is-ought gap is acceptable, why use pragmatism? Why not just start with deontology, or virtue ethics, or utilitarianism, or rational self interest? By the nature of his argument, Pro cannot answer these questions.Pro writes that "adding additional assumptions to a theory just to make it 'aesthetically pleasing,' like Plato’s idea that we must become donkeys, is irrational and goes against Occam’s razor." Exactly, that was my point. All Pro is really doing is adding assumptions to his worldview (God and the afterlife) in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion (moral universalism). This is a backwards way of reasoning.He even admits that he is engaging in backwards reasoning: "Am I saying it would be awful if God didn’t exist? Yes, that’s essentially my argument." In response to this, I refer the reader to the first round, where I specified that Pro must "establish that it is objectively more likely than not that God exists." A pragmatic argument does not establish objective likelihood, only subjective necessity.ConsciousnessIn the second round, I wrote:"God and the afterlife are both made vastly less plausible by the overwhelming body of evidence that consciousness is dependent on the brain. You cannot have a mind without a physical substrate, because every faculty of the mind in intricately dependent on the operations of the brain to sustain it. Mental states correlate with brain states and stop or are damaged when the relevant areas of the brain are damaged. So it just not true that there are likely to be any minds without brains, whether God or the soul."Pro has not responded to this critical point, which is widely considered a major problem for substance dualism and therefore for the claim that God and the afterlife exist. [1] Sam Harris has a great quote on this subject: "What we’re being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain, and something about the mind and subjectivity is lost, you damage another and yet more is lost, [but] you damage the whole thing at death, we can rise off the brain with all our faculties in tact, recognizing grandma and speaking English!" [2]The Problem of EvilPro uses the free will defense to rebut the problem of evil. There are three problems with the free will defense:(a) It assumes that free will is valuable enough to counterbalance all of the evil in the world. Our ability to make free choices has to outweigh all of the atrocities committed in human history, including by Hitler and Stalin. This is not at all clear.(b) It ignores the fact that we will have free will without ever doing evil in heaven. If it's possible in heaven, it should be possible on earth.(c) It does not account for natural evil, evil that occurs without being the result of a human free choice. Pro's response to this point is that natural evil provides "the challenges [people] need to achieve higher levels of wellbeing in the future." This is a very weak response. People who die torturous deaths from cancer, or drown in a natural disaster like the Tohoku tsunami in 2011, are not achieving any higher level of well being - they are just dying horrible deaths. [3] [1] http://www.iep.utm.edu... [2] http://commonsenseatheism.com... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org...