The Existence of God

Cosmological Argument Yes, you did commit a straw man because you never went after my objection. You just restated the argument. There's no regress problem if an event is uncaused because it has nothing to do with infinity. Sentience If change is making something different, then your argument is refuted. The things I listed do just this. Minds being physical have nothing to do with my argument. Pro tries to say God is an all powerful mind, therefore can make changes. You're removing meaning from "mind". If a mind can create, you're then talking about a mind that has no meaning to us. Pro then says minds are the only thing that can think of different realities.Thinking about possible worlds has to do with causality. There's no link to thinking about a possible world and causing that possible world in reality. The argument is flawed. Natural Cause Pro completely straw mans my hypothetical mechanism. I never said it just suddenly started to make changes. I said it reacts forever. One of those reactions had to create the universe, it was inevitable. Pro hasn't shown a god makes more sense than a natural mechanism. He also tries to shift the burden of proof. The BOP on me was to show God doesn't exist, not that the universe was created by naturalistic means. Epistemological Issue Just because your argument assumed a coherent concept of what was before the universe, doesn't make it so. Someone could make an entire argument on an epistemological error, and in a debate it would be perfectly reasonable to point out such an error. We shouldn't just ignore the error because we"re debating about it. Should we not point out logical fallacies in arguments because it's necessary to debate the argument instead of rejecting it on a logical error? I think not. Pro makes the argument that we must assume that before the universe is coherent because many religions believe so. This is simply the logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum. Just because the majority of religious people believe it, doesn't make it so. Pro hasn't refuted this argument, he just defended that we should debate it. Which was not the main point of the argument. Morality I've demonstrated that to be false. Because I said so How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb? Depends on how you define 'change'. Problem of Evil Pro tries to make a case for free will by saying I obviously choose to debate. This is an argument from intuition. Intuition isn't a good way of determining something about reality. Take this picture for example. http://www.weirdoptics.com... Our intuition would have us believe these two lines are curved. Experimental evidence says otherwise. Go ahead, run your mouse along them in a straight line or take something straight and measure it. The lines aren't curved, they're straight. It is clear, if Pro wants a case for free will, he needs more than just intuition. Determinists say our choices are from background causes and desires from which we didn't choose. This would fit with the appearance of free will, however we wouldn't have it. Pro then tries to shift the burden of proof. I wasn't making a claim that the argument is flawed because determinism is true, I was saying Pro"s argument doesn't work because he hasn't shown free will exists, with a comment that I've never been convinced of it. One can't assume their position is valid because the opponent hasn't shown theirs to be true, especially since I didn't have the BOP of proving determinism. Just because there's some type of evidence for both sides, doesn't mean you can just assume your side. In fact it would be the opposite! The leg of Pro"s argument hasn't been proven. Pro then tries to respond to this question "Why couldn't God make man in such a way that he would always freely choose good?" Pro"s answer is "Well. Think about it. It is free will, sentience, being self-aware and capable of choosing your own path that is indeed the greatest creation in the universe, unless you want to contest this. God has free will, so it naturally follows that He would create the universe with the potential for it." Does any of that seem to answer the question? Obviously you believe a god gave us free will to choose our own path, but we're still limited, as my building example proves. God could've limited free will, yet have evil not exist. Obviously you believe we can't choose to not sin, and you think this is not violating free will. Logically God could do the opposite in making us choose to not do evil without any free will violation. My objection hasn't been refuted. Since Pro believes there's free will in heaven and believes you can't do evil there; why didn't God make Earth in a similar way? Since Pro thinks things will stop you from doing evil, yet have free will, there's no reason why a loving God wouldn't do such a thing. Such things stopping us from evil don't need to have us be aware of them, so people could still choose to believe or not and there would be no evil. This is the kind of world we expect to see if the God being debated existed, why do you see otherwise? Simply because such a God doesn't exist. The free will defense fails, the problem of evil still stands strong. Natural disasters helping shape the planet helps my case. What kind of God would make natural disasters necessary, and have them be extremely deadly? It would seem like the planet wasn't made for life. Does the planet really need anymore shaping? I wasn't saying if God knows everything that he shouldn't create anything at all. I was saying if God knows everything he shouldn't put us through tests of evil. That's completely different from not creating anyone at all. Pro yet again committed a straw man fallacy. Since Pro"s argument attacked a straw man, his analogy is false. An african women isn't all knowing, or all powerful. I think everyone would agree, if this women knows with 100% certainty that her child will have a life of abuse and rape, knows how her child will react in such situations, has the power to give her a great life where slavery isn't necessary, and still sells he into slavery to test her child, then she is immoral. If it's defined that this women is all loving, then such a women doesn't exist. Temporal Minds. God transcending time is what makes this argument work. It doesn't hurt the argument, it agrees with it. Conclusion Pro never answered the quantum mechanics objection to the Kalam cosmological argument. His sentience argument was false on premise 1; change can happen without a mind and a pure mind can't cause things. Pro said minds can only think of possible worlds, but this has nothing to do with change or causality. Pro continued to straw man the hypothetical natural mechanism. He kept going back to it had to start, but I said that it didn't. Pro asks why debate if the epistemology is wrong, which doesn't refute my argument. Then he says we should assume before the universe is coherent because religions claim it is. Clear logical fallacy of the argument from population. Pro concedes on the moral argument, although he still made claims which I refuted. The because I said so argument doesn't explain why pop tarts toast faster in a vacuum. The problem of evil was given the free will defense. Pro never proved free will exists and free will can exist without evil. Pro ignored the latter objection. Pro said God would test people with evil, I pointed out that if God was all knowing he wouldn't need to test anyone. Pro responded to this by stating God would want to create people out of love even though something evil may happen to them. Which was completely irrelevant. Rational_Thinker9119"s argument from temporal minds was never responded to successfully. First he said change could happen without time, when I showed this to be wrong, he just said God transcends time. Thanks again Pro.