The Kalam Cosmological Argument is unsound

I agreed in the comment section that since I went first, this would be my conclusion. In the next round, I'll just say, "This space intentionally left blank." That gives us both an equal number of posts.The burden of proof was not established by the rules of this debate, but I think there has been an implicit shared burden of proof. Since Noumena is "Pro" in a debate whose resolution is "The KCA is unsound," he bears the burden of proving that it is unsound. And since I have gone first in this debate, defending the KCA, I have implicitly agreed to bear the burden of proving that the argument is sound.To prove that the argument is sound, it is my burden to show that the argument is logically valid and that its premises are all true, which I did in my opening.To prove that the argument is unsound, Pro had to either show that the logic is invalid or that at least one of the premises is false.In his opening, Pro dropped all points of contention except the truth of the first premise. Since the rules stipulate that drops count as concessions, this debate came down to whether the first premise is true. If I succeed in showing that it is true, then I should win this debate. If Pro succeeds in showing that it is false, then he should win this debate.I pointed out in the rebuttals that Pro had not even attempted to show that the first premise is false. Instead, all he did was try to show that my arguments for the first premise were unsound. In response, he said, "However, my points have gone to show (if successful) that we have no valid reason to think that a metaphysical causal principle exists." There are two problems with this response.First, even if it is true that there is no valid reason to think the first premise is true, that is not enough to say that the first premise is false. It could be true, and we just have no way of knowing it. Pro still has not given us any reason to think the first premise is false, which means he has not carried his burden of proof in this debate. And since the rules stipulate that "New arguments brought in the last round will not be counted," Pro has no hope to win this debate (unless somebody votes improperly). The best he can do is tie the debate, and he can tie it if he successfully undermines my arguments.Second, Pro's points, even if sound, do not show that "we have no valid reason to think" the first premise is true. At best, all they show is that my arguments are not sound reasons to think it's true. There may be other arguments we haven't considered yet.In my opening, I gave two arguments for why we should think the first premise is true. One was an a priori argument, and the other was an a posterior argument. In his opening, Pro responded to the a priori argument by attacking the whole notion of a priori knowledge, and he responded to the a posteriori argument by attacking induction. So, in the rebuttal period, I defended the only things he attacked--a priori knowledge, and induction.A priori argumentIn his rebuttal, Pro said, "Even if Con can show that some sort of foundational beliefs MUST be accepted upon pain of contradiction (for instance the cogito), he still hasn't shown why the causal principle is among these." The reason I only defended a priori knowledge in my rebuttal is because that's the only thing he attacked in his opening. He never attacked the claim that the causal principle was a rational intuition.But he is mistaken to say that I haven't shown the causal principle is part of our a priori knowledge. I did so in my opening. In fact, I did so just as he thought I should--by showing that it must be accepted upon pain of contradiction. Pro has ignored that argument throughout this debate. Since I showed that denying the first premise entails a contradiction, and since Pro has not responded to it, and since new arguments don't count in the last round, I ought to win this debate.Pro insists that I have not adequately addressed the problem of "inter-subjective justification." That is, if you disagree with your opponent on a point that can't be inferred, then at best, you're left at an impasse. But that is not so. You can get somebody to rationally grasp something without inferring it. I used the Pythagorean theorem as an example.Pro goes on to say that you can get around the problem of "inter-subjective justification" by recourse to non-contradiction. But that's exactly what I did in my opening, which Pro ignored. Besides that, the law of non-contradiction is, itself, part of our a-priori knowledge, and we obviously can't appeal to that law to prove itself. Nevertheless, Aristotle does use two illustrations to show that it is true[1], which technique is similar to mine in showing that the first premise is true.Pro's argument is also fallacious because it leads to absurdity. If we must infer every item of contention in a debate, then it would be trivially easy to win any debate in which the burden of proof is on your opponent. Just say, "Nuh uh!" to everything your opponent says. Then, he'll be forced to prove his premises, and you can say, "Nuh uh!" to whatever premises he uses to prove his premises. You can do this throughout the debate, and if he cries foul, you can just appeal to Noumena's "inter-subjective justification" argument.A posteriori argumentIn my rebuttal, I showed that denying induction leads to absurdity because it makes it impossible to learn anything from experience, it makes science impossible, and experiments could tell us nothing. I further explained that all Hume succeeded in doing was showing why induction could not be proved.In his answer, Pro suggested Carl Popper's "critical rationalism" as a way for science to work even given the "problem of induction." But if you read carefully what Pro said, applying the criteria of falsification instead of verification doesn't solve the problem. It, too, depends on induction. The fact that our hypothesis hasn't been falsified in the past is supposed to give us some confidence about whether it will work in the future. That is induction. Whenever you extrapolate your experiences in the past to the future, you are reasoning inductively.Pro misrepresents me in appealing to the readers' "feelings" about the inductive principle, but I made no appeal to feelings whatsoever. Rather, I appealed to your sense of reason and your experiences. I asked you to be honest about it and think of all the cases in your own life where you depend on induction. I also asked Pro to be honest about it. If you'd rather play games and pretend that you don't live your life ever day as if induction were a valid way of reasoning, then I don't have anything further to say about that.The relevance of Hume using induction in his argument against miracles is to show that Hume did not deny induction in spite of having shown that it can't be proved. That was meant to bolster my claim that it's fallacious to conclude that induction is invalid just because it can't be proved.Pro really hasn't given us any reason to doubt the validity of induction. His overriding point seems to just be that it can't be proved. What I meant to argue is that it doesn't need to be proved because all of us, if we'll just be honest about it, already believe it. Even Pro believes it, which is evident in the fact that he uses is continuously. Nobody can live without using induction.ConclusionThank you for coming to tonight's debate. This was kind of an interesting debate to me because it started off in the broad area of theology and cosmology and ended up being a debate largely over epistemology. I hope you enjoyed it.And thank you to Noumena for an interesting debate that deviated from the norm. It is nice to see a new twist on an otherwise tired old debate. [1] http://plato.stanford.edu...