The Existence of God is unlikely

"Pro argues that God, because he is a being of immensely ordered complexity, must require an explanation. But since this cannot be the case, God probably does not exist. "Pro defines ordered complexity to be a ‘system composed of several parts that are arranged in such a way as to produce some specific function that is otherwise improbable.' With regards to God, he has no parts, he is an immaterial being." The ‘parts' in question that God is made up of are immaterial ones: God is a conscious being who can create, remember, etc. Those attributes require mental ‘parts' which I previously explained: The ability of this mind to store a massive amount of data and for this mind to function in such a way that it can be conscious (consciousness requires lots of mental ‘steps' which I would say are analogous to ‘parts') and design things (again, being able to design requires lots of mental ‘steps' or ‘parts'). "Pro is presupposing God to be a contingent being (Which begs the question). He is by definition a necessary being, such that even if he requires an explanation, it would be that he exists through the necessity of his own nature. The fact that God is a necessary being removes any chance of there being an external explanation for his existence." It is not true that God is ‘by definition a necessary being'; for the theologian Richard Swinburne actually posits that God is a contingent being (although Swinburne, of course, believes God is a simple contingent being). Furthermore, who says that you get to take the concept of an immaterial, all powerful, all knowing being and simply label it ‘necessary' to get out of the problems with the concept of such a being? How do you such a being is necessary? Do you have an argument to show it is necessary? "The traditional theistic response to this argument is that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil, though what these exact reasons cannot be known." First of all, that defense runs afoul of Occam's razor: You are postulating at least one unknown explanation for the existence of Evil (that might not even exist) that you have no evidence for in order to get theism consistent with the data. Naturalism requires no unknown explanation in order to be consistent with Evil. Your argument is unconvincing. Let me explain by analogy: Suppose that I were to say that the existence of weasels contradicts the God hypothesis. You ask me why and I say, "Well, there could be some unknown reason that the existence of weasels contradicts the existence of God. Mere human beings can't say what a God would or wouldn't do if he existed, because our minds are so limited compared to the hypothetical mind of God. For all we know, a God would never even think of creating weasels!" "[A]ll things being equal, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. But what is necessary to explain the phenomena that we have? That is the very fact that we are debating over. Pro seems to beg the question by presupposing theism to be unnecessary in explaining the phenomena that we have." Not at all. Things can be improbable because of the evidence, or because of a priori considerations. Theism is a priori less likely than naturalism because it postulates at least one more entity: God. This means that Theism must have better evidential support than Naturalism in order to raise its likelihood back up to par. If you can present good evidence for theism, your worry will disappear. So present your evidential arguments, and we shall see if they succeed. If they do not, you have lost by default. "Very briefly, we tend to recognize phenomena such as self-consciousness, free will, objective morality and intrinsic value, purpose and meaning to live, real evils, religious experience, and a host of other phenomena to be basic to our everyday experience. Though both theism and naturalism can account for these phenomena, theism's explanation is superior in that it tends to affirm the reality of phenomena that we find basic to life. Using abduction, therefore, God seems to be the best explanation." You need to first define these things, then prove they exist, and then show why theism is the best explanation for them. I accept premise one of the kalam. I do not accept premise two. Saying that the universe began to exist implies that the origin of the universe happened within time (something could not "begin" outside of time because there would be no time for it to "begin" in!). But suppose that there was no moment prior to the Big Bang. The universe existed throughout every moment of time, but time itself comes to an end in the finite past. In that case it would not be proper to say that the universe began to exist. There is a second point to be made: The Big Bang might not have been the beginning of time. For example, Steinhardt and Turok have a written a book called "Endless Universe" in which they propose a theory that entails an eternal universe model that is compatible with the Big Bang. As for your assertion that transfinite operations with infinite quantities are impossible, you have not proven this or even suggested why it means that an actual infinite cannot exist. And finally, a lot of things could bring about an effect without prior determining conditions: If the Big Bang actually began with a singularity, then the singularity would not have any prior determining conditions because singularities are inherently lawless. The inherent lawlessness of the singularity, by the way, is something that argues against the existence of God: It is not simply that human beings don't know how to predict what such a universe would evolve into, but that it is literally unpredictable what would come out of the singularity in principle [1]. Philosopher Quentin Smith argues that God would not create the universe this way because he would not want to ensure that the universe would become life-containing. One obvious objection to his argument is that God could have created the singularity and then miraculously intervened to ensure that it evolved into a life-bearing state. But Smith argues that it is hardly plausible to suppose that an all-knowing being created the universe in a state which would require immediate intervention to produce the result he wanted. As for your second cosmological argument, it assumes that the universe is not necessary. What basis is there for that? I agree that it does not seem like the universe is necessary (I can imagine the universe not existing), but it does not seem like God is necessary either (I can also imagine that She does not exist). And if you insist on defining God as "necessary": what gives you the right to say that I cannot define the universe as "necessary"? Argument from Reason 1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. How is this justified? You say that we would not trust the print-out of a computer produced by non-rational causes. Why not? Suppose that long ago some biological species had evolved the characteristics of a computer for some peculiar ecological niche. Humans noticed the computer species and exploited it for their purposes. Whenever a computer malfunctioned, the humans got angry and destroyed it, so that the only computers that could ever successfully survive were the ones genetically equipped to have little or no malfunctions, and so were the ones that successfully passed on their genes to the next generation of computers. I'd trust a computer like that because it had evolved to minimize malfunctions and outcomes that would not (as a human) be inclined to like. And it wasn't produced by rational causes, was it? [1] Quentin Smith, "A Big Bang Cosmological Argument for God's Nonexistence," Faith and Philosophy, April 1992, Volume 9 No. 2, pp.217-237.