If The Universe Has A Cause, That Cause Is A Personal Mind

This is going to be my conclusion. In the next round, I'll just say, "This space intentionally left blank."I'm going to go ahead and concede the Copenhagen interpretation. What this gains RT is this: In the quantum world, there are spontaneous events with necessary but not sufficient conditions. From there, RT can infer that spontaneous events with necessary but not sufficient causes are possible. But here is where RT makes a big leap in logic. He goes on to say that it's possible that's what happened in the case of the beginning of the universe. Not only that, but it means the cause of the universe was impersonal. Moreover, this is supposedly a better explanation than that the universe had a sufficient personal cause.Granting the mere possibility that there are spontaneous events with necessary but not sufficient causes does not justify you in arbitrarily saying that's what happened in any other event unless they are sufficiently analogous. Imagine you hear your car crank up in the garage, and your wife asks you to explain how that happened. If mere possibility were enough, you could justifiably reply, "Well, the car had gas, which is necessary for it to run, but not sufficient. Then it spontaneously started. After all, it's possible." Nobody would buy that explanation because it's not sufficiently analogous to a quantum event.I gave a few reasons for why the beginning of the universe is not analogous to a quantum event. One of those reasons was that quantum events, like pair production, consist in creation ex-materia while the universe consists of creation ex-nihilo. RT claims this is an irrelevant observation because he was only trying to show that "we can have impersonal necessary conditions without sufficient conditions." As I explained above, that does not justify us in applying that scenario to just any other situation. If it did, you could explain just about anything that way. But in reality, hardly anything is ever explained that way. Quantum events are the only things we know of. So the distinction is quite relevant.I also made the the point that whereas in pair production you have two particiles coming into existence within the universe, in the case of the universe you have all matter, space, time, and energy coming into existence at once, and not from within the universe. Clearly these are not analogous events. RT did not respond to this point.Another disanalogy that I did not mention was that whereas the necessary cause of a quantum event is a physical state of affairs, the necessary cause of the universe could not have been a physical state of affairs. RT hasn't even given us a candidate for what the spaceless, timeless, immaterial, impersonal entity that served as the necessary cause of the universe could be. I at least have suggested a mind as the cause of the universe, and we all know what a mind is. RT essentially is saying, "I don't know what the cause of the universe is, but it wasn't a mind." On what grounds? It doesn't seem to me that RT carried his burden of proof in this debate. He spent the majority of his time trying to undermine my case without making much of a case of his own for the alternative.My first argument from process of elimination assumed a sufficient cause of the universe. RT believes it is undermined by the possibility of an insufficient cause of the universe combined with spontenaeity. But all he has succeeded in doing was to remove the deductive force of the argument. The argument can still work inductively. Being left with a sufficient personal cause and an insufficient impersonal cause, we can then go on to say which is more viable or which is more likely. The fact that a personal cause is a sufficient explanation whereas RT's impersonal unnamed cause is not sufficient should, alone, be enough to favour my explanation over his. In what other context do we ever favor an insufficient cause over a sufficient cause when a sufficient cause is available for explanation? What reason has RT given us to prefer an insufficient impersonal cause to a sufficient personal cause? Mere possibility isn't enough.My second argument also assumed a sufficient cause of the universe. RT's mere possibility weakens this argument, too, but does not refute it. To refute it, RT had to do better than assert mere possibility. Before asking whether the cause was personal or impersonal, we first have to ask whether the cause is more likely to be sufficient or insufficient. With all other things being equal, sufficient causes are inherently more likely than insufficient causes. It is only when we can rule out things like hidden variables that we that we favor insufficient causes. So, with a more likely sufficient cause, my second argument is sound. It may not rise to the level of certainty I originaly argued, but it does gives us a high level of probability.RT spent some time trying to refute my solution to the interaction problem, and I was all fired anxious to defend it against his attempt, but then at the end he granted for the sake of this debate that my solution is how things actually work. So there's no need to defend it against his attack.Having granted that minds create ex nihilo, RT gives two reasons for why this explanation should not be preferred. First, it's because the universe may not have begun ex nihilo; but ex materia. This explanation only works if RT disagrees with how I defined the universe earlier in this debate. I defined it as being all of physical reality, and RT did not dispute that. If the universe as we know it today is the result of being transformed from something prior, then whatever came before must also have been something with physical properties, describable by laws of physics (even if presently unknown). So it, too, would have been "the universe." All we can say is that the universe has undergone some sort of transformation, not that it began. But the supposition of this debate is that it began, which entails that it did not have a material cause.RT's second reason for why a personal cause should not be preferred is because if you sum all the positive and negative energy in the universe, you get zero. I don't see how this amounts to an explanation at all, much less a better one. It's not as if there is zero energy in the universe. There's lot of energy in the universe. Some is positive and some is negative, but it's all real, and it came into existence. To say that the sum of the negative and positive energy in the universe is zeros is not to say that there is no energy in the universe (which would entail that the universe doesn't even exist). So this does not serve as an alternate explanation.My argument remains unrefuted. A mind is the only thing we know of capable of creating ex nihilo, and since the universe was created ex nihilo, a mind is the best candidate for a cause.In conclusion, let me say that we have two options before us as a candidate for the cause of the beignning of the universe. One is a sufficient personal mind, and the other is an insufficient impersonal I-know-not-what. I gave three reasons for why a personal rather than an impersonal cause should be perferred. RT managed to weaken the force of two of my reasons, but he did not refute them. I would submit that he did not even weaken my third argument. Also, besides trying to weaken my arguments for a personal cause, RT made no substantial case for an impersonal cause. His arguments, even if sound, gave us mere possibility.Thank you reader, and thank you especially to RT. I have a lot of respect for RT's intellect, and he was a real challenge to debate. I find him not only to be one of the most brilliant people on this site, but also one of the most interesting. I've been tempted many times to debate him and only caved this time because he sent me a challenge directly. I couldn't resist.