The Argument for/Pro presented in the debate "Atheism is reasonably impossible" is flawed

Below is a quote from your argument in your original debate which I cut and pasted into my second round response. Look again. It is an indication of your deep misunderstanding of the position you which to discredit."Ergo, Atheism requires materialism, the belief that nothing exists but the physical world."I can't believe I missed that quote when looking through my previous argument... It's kind of embarrassing... feel free to deduct points. At the point of writing that argument, I thought my argument only refuted materialism, so I felt the need to prove that Atheists must be materialists. However, through debating my argument I have gained a better understanding of it and now realise it applies to all Atheists, whether materialist or not. I think I have made my current position on this clear in the previous rounds, saying that I don't think all Atheists are materialists. Now onto matters that are relevant to our argument.It does not apply to any kind of atheist, but for different reasons. This can be a separate debate for another time. This is the last round and it requires more time to adequately cover it. I am satisfied that you at least owned up to your mistake.You can restate the same thing five different ways, but it remains your intuition and nothing more. There was a time when it was intuitively clear to people that the world was flat. They were wrong and I have no reason to believe that your intuition is anymore correct.This was not 5 different ways of stating it. This was a chain of logic.1. Inanimate objects cannot make decisions, in fact, they cannot do anything at all.You beg the question in your first premise when you say “in fact they cannot do anything at all”. After that, you are being redundant. On what grounds do you assert this? Site a source. This is what it all comes down to. Does an electron follow a law dictated to it or are the so called laws of nature descriptions of what the electron does. It is interesting that you have argued that intelligence is required for an electron to determine its behavior, but you seem to ignore or fail to notice, that it could be argued that it takes intelligence for it to interpret and understand a law. How would it follow the law if as you say “it can do nothing at all”. If that were true, even if it understood the law, it could not act on it. It would stay stationary. Or do you mean to imply that their are no laws and god intervenes at every instant for every particle? Either way you are gored on the horns of a dilemma.Irreducible complexity would be a problem. Irreducible simplicity is not.Oh, I think it is, at least in this case. From my understanding, this law greatly simplifies the reason why objects move as they do. But it is still a law, one that is both absolute and non-physical, and thus subject to my argument. It may be simple, this law, but it still defines a behaviour.It describes a behavior and a very simple one at that. Holding the position that you do leads to the contradiction I point out above. We can either believe an electron has its own simple behaviors or some magical super human intervenes at every instant for every particle. An atheist very reasonably prefers the former. When I said:There is another problem with your argument. It appears to be completely at odds with empirical results. You claim that matter behaves the same all the time. This is not true. Deterministic Newtonian physics was displaced by Quantum Mechanics more than 80 years ago. Electrons passing through a double slit from a single source do not end up in the same place. At best we can come up with a probability distribution that can account for the pattern. This is not a traditional deterministic natural law.Perhaps it is not traditional, but it is still deterministic, in a way. When the electrons go through the double slits they always get a bit messed up don't they? Always being the key word.Seriously, your response is that they follow a law of “They always get messed up a bit”. So my question to you is if no law determines exactly where they end up, what does? Just because a theory in the past that everyone thought was ridiculous was proved right doesn't actually provide any evidence for multiverses. There is actually no evidence for it. That idea in the article was simply speculation on to how one might be able to tell if a multiverse did exist. They have done no tests, and even if the microwave background matched up, there would still be no conclusivity. This is because if it didn't match, it would not prove multiverses wrong, so if did match, it would not prove multiverses right.Quote:But he notes that a positive detection would be "spectacular". "Such a case would offer suggestive evidence in support of string theory," he says. "On the other hand, no evidence in the CMB data for a collision between two universes would not rule out string theory, it would simply extend the widely held belief in the field that string theory is unfalsifiable."I am not arguing for String Theory. You said Multiverses are untestable. An outline for a test was presented in the article. The multiverse is possible until empirical results prove it wrong. This debate is about whether or not Atheism is reasonably impossible or not. You make your claim based upon your intuition. You made your claim that multiverses were impossible based on your intuition. Flat Earthers hold their position for the same reason you do because of intuition. Your intuition is no more trustworthy than anyone elses. The fact that someone else’s intuitions are at odds with your’s does not invalidate them. Only internal inconsistency or disagreement with empirical results would.One argument I think works well against multiverses is the ol' “Flying Spaghetti Monster” from South Park, an argument which is often used when I am debating Atheists. It doesn't work very well against God, but I think the Multiverse Theory fits it perfectly. Past all the silliness, at the heart of it is the argument if we can't sense something or see it's effects in any way, why should we believe in it? It would be like believing in the flying spaghetti monster. Considering the abysmal lack of evidence for multiverses, why should we consider their existence reasonable? Reasonable being the key word.The multiverse is possible and reasonable to believe because it explains the empirical results of Quantum Mechanics. In fact, it is a recognized interpretation of QM. See: http://en.wikipedia.org...We could not observe the Big Bang, but we were able to confirm it by detecting the background radiation it predicted.We're not here to debate the big bang, but I humbly suggest you use the word “confirm” a little more lightly.Why? This is how the word is commonly used. The competing hypothesis made a prediction contrary to the evidence so it wins.I would like to close by pointing out that my opponent’s sole argument for claiming atheism is reasonably impossible amounts to it violates his intuition. He is claiming that atheism is reasonably impossible so the burden is on him to persuade. He has not cited a single source or defended his intuition. He has simply repeatedly asserted it. Along the way he has not demonstrated that atheism is internally inconsistent or disagrees with empirical results. I have cited sources and shown that his argument does contradict empirical results. He has had to back peddle on his argument more than once as you can see be reading the thread from beginning to end. He has failed to meet his burden of proof. Atheism is reasonably possible.