Existence of God

A: One prays -----> The prayer is fulfilled Actually my link has debunked it thoroughly, but for clarity's sake, I'll reiterate my point. How do you know your prayers are answered, when the overall results show the answer to be identical to simple chance? If prayer were to be truly answered, why were the ones who were prayed for in the aforementioned study not significantly better off than those who weren't prayed for? "Because you're testing god"? Not so. I've just made the reasonable assumption that if one prays for something, Let me ask you a question- how do you know your question's been answered by god, as opposed to chance simply dealing you a luck of the draw? After all, you'd have a 50% chance off in your favour without god. "How do you know what you were experiencing wasn't a misinterpretation of natural phenomena?" 1.What are the chances that this would happen to me ?> Fairly common. Or are you saying your perception is infallible? <2.What are the chances that someone would post a video who had the exact experience ?> Again, pretty common, given the understanding of how the brain works, tricking it is a relatively simple matter. Or have you not heard of optical illusions? The fact that even a drop in oxygen levels could cause momentary episodes for example shows your case to be nothing more than unremarkable and most importantly not divine. <3.What are the chances when one takes all experiences from all Christians ?> What are the chances when you take the same Christians and examine each "experiences"? You'd end up with contradicting tales. In fact, why I should even accept these claims when NONE have been verified in any way is a question that has not been answered. Part 2: I don't actually need to. Can you similarly refute the invisible dragon in late Carl Sagan's garage? "genuinely mistaken" How is that possible or probable ?> Have you never made a mistake before? < The questions and answers don't apply here since I didn't expect this response. "Would you also argue that because say a Hindu or a Muslim had a religious experience, it also validates Vishnu or Allah?" No, it validates God.> Or it validates nothing, except the fallibility of human perception. Argument from Contingency <"You have an artist who "causes" a sculpture to exist." However, the artist may decide not to carve a sculpture. Wherefore, the sculpture is contingent.> The sculpture is essentially a label we've given to certain forms after the artist manipulates the sculpture. How this helps your case is beyond me, because the point remains that the sculpture was not created, since there necessarily was the pre-existing materials with which the artist manipulated. <"How is the universe's existence as a "necessary being", particularly if we were to define it as "all that exists" any less of a contradiction than calling god one?" You are hard to understand hence I can't respond. However, Ill give it a try: Necessary being = all that exists =/= a dictionary.> God hasn't been established to actually be a necessary being, and in fact is superfluous to all explanations. Your point? "the fact that we are discussing the status of god's existence itself suggests that god's nonexistence is POSSIBLE" Except your premises are not more than assertions considering all that's shown to be "contingent" aren't actually individual discrete things but labels given to particular formations within the whole. Given this, and given the fact that an absolute "nothing" isn't even really comprehensible, isn't it thus logical to say the universe is in fact necessary and a brute fact? Kalam Cosmological Argument <1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause My opponent surprisingly concedes this point.> I actually haven't conceded this at all. For example, there's the vacuum fluctuation in which matter "pops in and out of existence" without cause. More importantly, though, I've actually challenged the notion that anything truly "begins" at all. As I've argued previously in the Argument from contingency, any and all "beginnings" we have evidence of are in fact not "beginnings" at all, but simply rearrangements previously existing materials. 2. The universe more likely than not began to exist. And with what evidence do you back up this assertion? < "It has not been established that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe" A source please ? It is generally accepted that the Big Bang began this universe: http://en.wikipedia.org...... > By began, perhaps again in the mundane sense as outlined previously, ie previously existing material. But so what? This doesn't lend ANY sort of credibility to a god-creator. Either god is the creator of everything from nothing, ie the universe, time etc. Either that, or his requirement as an explanation is deemed superfluous and thus rejected on account of Occam's Razor. And yet you forget that because of quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity is considered incomplete- a problem which becomes significant and its Achilles heel the closer we get to the Big Bang and the singularity from which it arose.