God exists.

I will be arguing that God exists. Simply put, we could not have this debate if God did not exist. Theism is necessary for knowledge. This isn't to say that non-theists don't know anything, only that God is the necessary precondition for knowledge. Atheists have knowledge in practice, even if their belief in naturalism would prohibit it in principle. In order for a human to have knowledge, their beliefs must have been produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly according to a good design plan aimed at true-belief production. I must point out that when I am talking about knowledge, I do not mean true, justified belief. That definition of knowledge has been discredited. Instead, it should be replaced with the concept of warrant. Warrant is that characteristic, enough of which terms a true belief into knowledge. Alvin Plantinga has argued that proper function and a good design plan aimed at true-belief production is necessary for warrant:According to the central and paradigmatic core of our notion of warrant (so I say) a belief B has warrant for you if and only if (1) the cognitive faculties involved in the production of B are functioning properly (and this is to include the relevant defeater systems as well as those systems, if any, that provide propositional inputs to the system in question); (2) your cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive faculties are designed; (3) the triple of the design plan governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or function, the production of true beliefs (and the same goes for elements of the design plan governing the production of input beliefs to the system in question); and (4) the design plan is a good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that a belief produced in accordance with the relevant segment of the design plan in that sort of environment is true. Under these conditions, furthermore, the degree of warrant is given by some monotonically increasing function of the strength of ,S"s belief that B. This account of warrant, therefore, depends essentially upon the notion of proper function. (Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 194. )Plantinga's notions of "proper function" and "design plan" succeed where naturalistic accounts fail because Plantinga's notions provide a teleological normativity that naturalism cannot produce. If naturalism were the case, then no human has cognitive faculties that function properly according to a good design plan aimed at true-belief production. Ergo, if naturalism is the case, no human has knowledge. Given that the reasonableness of the idea that we have some knowledge (for this debate to even happen, knowledge is required), then due to the implausibility of the alternatives, theism is the case. On top of that, I would add another way of looking at why this design would need to be the case to produce knowledge. If no one has comprehensive knowledge of the universe, then no one can have any knowledge of the universe. There are no "brute" facts. A fact can only be understood by understanding it in the context of it's relationship to other facts. This means that the only way (apart from theism) that someone can gain knowledge is by understanding all of the relationships between all of the facts. If you were to try to start with a fact and relate it to another fact without comprehensive knowledge, you could not know if what you purported to be knowledge would be entirely undermined by relationships you had not uncovered. Perhaps you can think of geocentrism as an example of how this can happen. But, you cannot simply argue that the probability of your purported knowledge being overturned is low since your ideas about probability are likewise subject to this dilemma. Only God could have comprehensive knowledge of the universe, by virtue of having created it and defined the relationships between all of the facts. And God is able to create beings whose cognitive faculties implicitly take into account ideas that God alone can know. In this way, God can give humans a reliable way of knowing that they could not otherwise have. One such idea could be the uniformity of nature presupposed by inductive reasoning. Theism seems to be the precondition for knowledge. Naturalism provides insufficient conditions for knowledge. [I owe these ideas to Alvin Plantinga, Cornelius Van Til, and James Anderson. Some of the language comes from James Anderson's paper: IF KNOWLEDGE THEN GOD: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL THEISTIC ARGUMENTS OF PLANTINGA AND VAN TIL, published in the Calvin Theological Journal (April 2005). ]