Theism v Atheism

Thanks for accepting, Con. Since this isn’t a publication for a professional journal or a term paper, the arguments discussed will be in a more organic form. Nevertheless they will have citations leading any reader to the trail of thinkers responsible for the argument’s development, but since the term “plagiarism” is ambiguous within the absence of a predetermined guideline for determining something plagiarized, I ask that no nit-picking takes place for debate points. The first argument is a mix of cosmological arguments and leads back to the second, more modal argument. Both should be taken holistically. The former draws from the work of Leibniz and Al-Ghazali and WL Craig’s presentation. The latter draws from the work of Aquinas and Rob Maydole’s reformulation and presentation. Why Theism is More Probable I.Whatever exists is either necessary or contingent, and whatever begins to exist is not necessary, so it must be contingent. If the cosmos is not necessary, then there exists a necessary uncaused cause of the it, who is ultramundane at least without the cosmos. But the cosmos is contingent since it came to be. So the cosmos must have an external ground of its existence found in a necessary ultramundane cause. [4] II. If only a finite amount of things have existed to date for a finite period of time, then not only are such things contingent, but then there was a state when nothing existed. But if there was such a state, then would presently exists, which is absurd. Thus, a causally necessary reality is possibly required since everything has a sufficient reason for its existence. Yet there is also a sufficient reason for the sufficient reason of anything. (Since anything that has a sufficient reason for its existence also has a sufficient reason for its existence that is a sufficient reason for its own existence). But no temporally contingent being is a sufficient reason for the existence of a causally necessary being. And every causally necessary being that is a sufficient reason for its own existence is a being without any limitations. Now if God is unlimited in some possible world and also in some different possible world, then God is greater than any other being in both those worlds; otherwise God would be limited by not possessing a great making property possessed by something else. But since the different possible world is an arbitrarily selected possible world, it follows that it is true in every possible world that God is greater than every other being. And since "greater than" is asymmetric, then God exists. [5,6,7] Lastly, since God is a supreme being, he’ll have certain great making properties. Such properties seem to be, at minimum, the property of knowing all truths (which would ground all abstract concepts), the property of maximal creative power (which the creation of the universe would exemplify this property) and finally the property of all goodness, which grounds objective moral norms. God therefore is a step in simplicity for the three things that have perplexed humans ever since we evolved to reason. God nicely unifies fundamental existence, and this ought to count towards some sort of intellectual virtue. Our diagram then becomes - I shall await to see where Con objects in order to unbox the support for the arguments that I've presented, and I look forward to his case on why it's less probable that theism is true. Sources 4. http://www.reasonablefaith.org... 5. http://www.bu.edu... 6. Maydole, 1980, p.180 7. http://www3.nd.edu...