The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument is Sound - 2

Thanks to my opponent for taking up this topic again. 1. The LCA requires violation of natural law The LCA has three components: (1) God necessarily exists and is necessarily capable of performing miracles, (2) the universe must have come into existence through a miracle and not through natural law, and (3) therefore, God created the universe. People who believe in God may also believe that God chooses to act through natural laws in the natural world. One may believe that God is the ultimate reason for sunrise, while believing that the mechanism for accomplishing sunrise is the earth rotating around the sun in accordance with the laws of motion observed by Newton. The explanation for sunrise involves stating Newtons Laws, verifying their validity, and then showing how they work to produce sunrise. It seems to me that if God exists and wanted to create the universe through natural laws, He could have. The LCA argues that is not possible, that the universe must have been created miraculously, outside of any mechanism that could be used for a scientific explanation. Science has not come up with proven scientific explanation, although they are making progress. All I must show in this debate is that a scientific explanation is plausible. That would allow the possibility that God chose to act through natural law, contrary to the miracle that the LCA requires for its proof. 2. A scientific explanation of the universe is plausible All cosmological arguments fail because they mistake beliefs gained by experience with logical necessity. It's vital to the debate to understand this confusion. Pro explicitly calls upon everyday experience as proof that it is impossible for things to simply “pop into and out of existence.” He's quite wrong, but we'll get to that after a simple example of the limits of everyday experience.Suppose you are traveling at some speed in a vehicle, maybe a train. Inside the vehicle you can run forwards a few steps and momentarily reach a total speed of the vehicle speed plus your running speed. We may think that no matter what speed the vehicle is traveling, we can always go faster by adding some velocity. Is it pure logic that tells us that's true, or is it a product of experience that no matter how fast we are moving, we believe we an always go faster? Einstein theorized that it is not possible to always go faster. The speed of light cannot be exceeded in any inertial frame of reference. Einstein has been conclusively proved correct by observation and measurement. Since the conclusion that we can always go faster is wrong, it cannot have been a product of pure logic. We can always run in the train, but the speed does not add as we might suppose. Lack of contrary experience allows us to keep the false belief. In debate, an argument from incredulity is an argument believed true because we have had no contrary evidence. Here, the contradiction appears only under very unusual or difficult-to-observe circumstances.Now consider causes and events. The idea of a "cause" supposes a time sequence wherein some action happens that precedes an observed event, and in which the event would not have occurred without it.. Our everyday experience tells us that everything must have a cause, and we may come to believe that it is a logical necessity that everything that occurs must have a cause. This everyday notion is also false, but again the failure can only be observed under certain circumstances. "... Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. The researchers simulated the frantic activity that goes on inside protons and neutrons. These particles provide almost all the mass of ordinary matter. Each proton (or neutron) is made of three quarks - but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass. So what accounts for the rest of it? Theory says it is created by the force that binds quarks together, called the strong nuclear force. ... The energy of these vacuum fluctuations has to be included in the total mass of the proton and neutron. ... For now, Dürr's calculation shows that QCD describes quark-based particles accurately, and tells us that most of our mass comes from virtual quarks and gluons fizzing away in the quantum vacuum." [1. http://www.newscientist.com...] We know as fact that contrary to Pro's claim, things pop into existence and out of existence all the time. Well, those are things too small to see. What about big things, like a universe? One possibility is that we don't see new universes because they only appear every trillion years or so, which is one theory. Another theory is that universes coexist in different dimensions so we cannot see them. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most eminent scientist in the field: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. … It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." While universes are created spontaneously, it may also be possible for a scientist to create a universe in the laboratory. Alan Guth, originator of the inflation theory in the explanation of the Big Bang, believes it is possible. [2. http://www.nytimes.com...] "The seed, Dr. Guth says, would consist of a spatial region of 'false vacuum' - a region charged with the negative energy essential to driving the inflation of the infant universe. Starting from virtually nothing, the expanding space in such a universe would create for itself all the particles of matter and energy that make up a universe like our own." What happened before the Big Bang created the universe? We think that question makes sense, because out experience is with time moving in our daily lives. But Stephen Hawking writes: " ... James Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn't have any boundaries or edges. I have been round the world, and I didn't fall off." [3.http://www.hawking.org.uk...] Scientists are sure that these theories, though unproved, do not contradict our everyday experience. That defeats the LCA requirement that a miracle must have occurred. 3. God is not a “necessary being” Pro argues that God must exist as a consequence of the definition of perfection. Kant effectively disposed of the ontological argument centuries ago by observing that existence is not a predicate. [4. http://plato.stanford.edu...] “Existence” is not a property of an object itself, but a relationship of the object to the real world. If it is a property of the object, then we can define a unicorn as a horse with a horn that exists and by virtue of the definition we made one exist. We might also define God as being perfect in every way except for existence. Then the definition makes God not exist. Moreover, perfection is a relative property. Would Pro assert that a devil that exists is closer to perfection than a demon that does not exist? If existence is an attribute that contributes to perfection, that any being that has it must be more perfect than one that does not. At best it is not a property relevant to perfection. As I asserted at the outset, defeat of the LCA leaves the God question unanswered. Defeat of the ontological proof also leaves the question open for a different claim of proof or acceptance by faith.