The Cosmological Argument for God is a bad argument and people need to stop using it

I have enjoyed the exchange and hope my opponent has as well. I would also like to thank the reader for following the discussion this far. For my closing remarks, I will address the overall points covered in this debate. The debate topic - "The Cosmological Argument for God is a bad argument and people need to stop using it" - was chosen because I contend that the argument fails and, because of that, makes a poor defense of the existence of God. I demonstrated the argument's failure by demonstrating that the premises are not true. My opponent decided to focus almost exclusively on the second part of the topic - "people need to stop using it" - to avoid having to debate the actual merits of the argument itself as a reason why people would need to stop using it. My opponent asserted that the topic was not the argument's correctness, but only its worth in a debate on the existence of God. Furthermore, my opponent contended that the only criteria to make it a good argument is whether it provokes thinking and discussion. I think most readers would agree that talking about an argument's worth in a debate, without evaluating the argument's actual merits, is an odd strategy in the context of a debate to logically prove the God's existence. Think about it - if a theist is in such a debate, what would mere thought-provoking or discussion do to help his/her case to prove the existence of God? What would be the point of using an argument whose premises are possibly true instead of actually true? I see none, and my opponent has not shown how provoking faulty thinking with an unsound argument is a worthy endeavor. My opponent's rebuttals seem to largely rest on a poor understanding of formal logic and argumentation. When my opponent gleefully pounced on my admission that the Cosmological Argument was valid, as if that was a self-defeater, I knew that s/he did not fully understand what a premise actually is in formal logic. A premise is not the entire argument - it is a part of an argument that helps support a conclusion (. https://en.wikipedia.org...). It is also a truth proposition, meaning it must be true in order for the argument to be sound. All that is required to defeat a truth proposition is to show that the proposition is not true, that it has not met its burden of proof to be considered a true statement. My opponent believes that because the Cosmological Argument cannot be proven false it is not unsound, and this also betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of an argument. Arguments are not proven false, you show that the premises are not true. Being possibly true is not enough to save an argument from being unsound. In talking about the origins of the universe, I have tried to be careful to constrain my language only to our most accurate scientific understanding, and have pointed out how the Cosmological Argument does not do this. In talking about cosmology and origins, there is a great deal that we don't know, but my opponent thinks this uncertainty means the argument's premises are possible, as if that was relevant. Remember - the premises of an argument, which are truth propositions, must be demonstrated to actually be true, not just possibly true. If the premises cannot meet their burden of proof then they cannot be considered true. I have demonstrated that the premises of the Cosmological Argument are not true statements. As much as my opponent would like to insist, it does not matter in the context of a debate whether the premises are possible or cannot be proven false or provoke discussion. Once the premises are shown to be not true, the argument is dead and unhelpful in a debate. Also, regarding my red card analogy, my opponent seems to think we're assessing whether the red card is in my pocket, when in actuality, we're assessing claims about whether the red card is in my pocket. Judging a claim as 'not true' does not necessarily mean the claim is 'false' - all that is being assessed is whether a claim has met its burden of proof. In the same way, the premises of the Cosmological Argument are truth claims that must be assessed before we can evaluate the worthiness of an argument. The fact that the origins of the universe are in dispute means that the premises of the argument, particularly the second premise (a truth claim about the universe), cannot be considered a true statement because it has not met its burden of proof to be considered true. The difference between Descartes' statement and the Cosmological Argument is that Descartes was stating a philosophical axiom; he wasn't making scientific proclamations in a formal argument, like the Cosmological Argument does. Therefore we must evaluate each rhetorical device differently. The argument veils its fallacies in a shroud of terms that sound scientific but are not, so we use much more rigid, scientific standards to justify discarding it then we would for a non-scientific statement like Descartes'. Take another look at how I used the "Dogs from Jupiter" argument. That fake argument is not a straw man of the Cosmological Argument, it is merely a demonstration of the type of weakness that the Cosmological Argument suffers from - I'm not using that fake argument in this debate anything like a theist would use the Cosmological Argument in a debate about God's existence. And the assertion that there is no concept that fairies are creators of the universe is not true. I just came up with the concept of universe-creating fairies just now in this debate. There is no evidence that God is a "better qualified concept" than fairies; the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument (if it were sound) only supports a universe-creating cause. We could argue over the evidence for God as a "qualified concept," but that would be a different debate (and isn't that the reason for the Cosmological Argument in the first place? ). In conclusion, my opponent's rebuttals fall short due to two main problems: 1. My opponent thinks that an argument's worthiness in a debate is completely divorced from the actual merits of the argument itself.2. My opponent does not understand basic rules of logic and argumentation, particularly regarding formal argument structure and assessing truth propositions. I feel that most honest readers would clearly understand that this debate has been, and always has been, about the Cosmological Argument itself. That my opponent would evade the central issue and choose to focus almost entirely on the "people should stop using it" part of the topic instead of the entire topic is unfortunate. I would ask my opponent - what value is there in using an argument that has been demonstrated to be unsound and that promotes a poor understanding of science and cosmology? If the answer is to promote thought and discussion, while those are not bad things in and of themselves, that is most certainly not the goal of the theist in a debate about God's existence. The theist will want to logically demonstrate that God is not merely a possibility, but an actuality. The Cosmological Argument does the theist no help in this regard, and should be discarded. I feel that I have successfully defended my contention that the Cosmological Argument is a bad argument for God and should be discarded by theists. I have shown that the premises of an argument are not true, causing the argument to fail - as such, it is a poor defense for the (actual, not possible) existence of God. My opponent has avoided dealing with how to evaluate the argument's value by simply equating rhetorical worth with the ability to spark a discussion. I reject this method because the scientific claims made by the Cosmological Argument demand a more scientific degree of scrutiny in order to evaluate the argument; ability to provoke thought is not sufficient to use it as "good" argument to support the existence of God. Thank you for reading.