Strong Atheism is a Sound Position

“Soundness”Logical soundness only applies to arguments, given that the resolution is clearly not about logical soundness, and strong atheism is clearly not an argument, but a position (as stated in the resolution), applying the logical soundness definition to it is absurd.So a colloquial definition along the lines of cogency, or “most likely correct” is entailed by the context. Given Con advocates this in the beginning of his round I have absolutely no idea why Con proceeds to attack the logical validity of my arguments, given they are not deductive arguments (nor are they intended to be) except my two explicit deductive arguments for strong atheism. Con can attack the validity of my arguments to attempt to mitigate their role in affirming the resolution, but that is not to say my arguments are non-topical.Strong AtheismPro sets himself a massive strawman by stating that strong atheism has anything to do with certainty whatsoever. I provided an explicit definition in R1:“The belief that there is no god(s)“There is nothing here that states anything about certainty, thus all of Con’s rebuttals regarding certainty of “there existing no God” can be dismissed out of hand. We do not operate on certainty on issues of ontology/claims regarding realism, thus even the interpretation is completely misplaced.Inference to Best ExplanationI stated from the outset that the conclusion is not guaranteed, and like inductive arguments, they are either strong or weak, rather than sound and unsound. What inference to best explanation provides is a methodology for sorting the most likely explanations from the least likely explanations. Any set of data may have more than one explanation, however that is not to say all possible explanations are equally likely from the outset, abductive reasoning does exactly what we need to sift bad explanations from the good explanations.Moreover, abductive reasoning does not commit the affirming the consequent fallacy, a much more accurate depiction is Bayes Theorum (probabilistic abduction),[2] which attempts to determine probabilities of an explanation given a set of data and prior probabilities of each hypothesis. The criteria I listed in the previous round are ubiquitous in the Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical methods, hence if one is to remain intellectually consistent, then without a deductive defeater these arguments do forward a strong positive case against God’s existence.[3]2. Law of ParsimonyCon’s seems to reject the law of parsimony on weight, however he clearly concedes that theism violates the law of parsimony, both severely and necessarily so. I made arguments in my opening that multiplying the complexity of the explanation is unnecessary to explain our observations of the universe. Naturalism has been shown to be both sufficient and efficacious hence extraneous entities are not needed.To defend the Law, I will propose an analogy, imagine a box, to which you do not know of the contents. The atheist is claiming there is a crayon inside the box, wheras the theist is claiming that there is a red crayon in the box. The atheist is necessarily going to have a greater probability of being correct since he making less assumptions. To extend this, an atheist may claim there is no red crayon within the box, and the theist is claiming there is a red crayon within the box. Here we must deal with contradictory entities, since perhaps there is an apple in the box instead consuming the spaciotemporal location, hence it is impossible for a red crayon to exist in there. We can repeat this for any number of hypothetical entities within the box, the more possible entities, the less likely it is that the “red crayon” hypothesis is correct. In the case of theism, we have much greater number of possibilities which do not make the extra assumptions of omnipotence, omniscience, or intelligence, thus all things equal are more likely to be true.Regarding Einstein, Con misunderstands the difference between a scientific “Law” and a scientific “Theory. Einstein presented the theory of relativity, which provides explanatory power, whereas Newton only gave a generalised Law, which provides no explanatory power by definition, thus it’s completely unanalogous.[1] In this debate, we are attempting to determine the explanatory nature, and Newton’s Law, even if it was explanatory, failed since it did not explain the dataset presented both in practice and in principle. We do not have that problem in naturalism.1 & 4.Explanatory & Predictive PowerCon also drops the fact that theism has exactly zero explanatory power, and hence he cannot hope to win this argument. Moreover, Pro conflates “Natural” with “Metaphysical Naturalism” as defined. It is true that new objects of query have entered our realm of knowledge, however these are all known to obey natural laws. New particles have been discovered, yet their behaviour can be modelled extremely precisely with the standard model. Even objects of enquiry that are poorly measured (e.g. dark matter/energy) are at the very least seen to be obeying natural laws, which is metaphysical naturalism as defined.The discovery of objects of entiry that clearly do not obey natural laws would obviously falsify metaphysical naturalism in a heartbeat. Thus, Con’s objection actually hurts his own case, rather than aids it. Moreover, Con abusively conflates “breaking down of laws”, to give a comparison, our newtonion laws “break down” at the subatomic level, however what is actually happening is that our “Newtonion Law” is actually a macroscopic generalised state of affairs that actually obeys Quantum Mechanics. Thus it is not that Newtonion Laws “break down”, except that these laws are not fundamental, and other laws are (which only lends support to the thesis of metaphysical naturalism).[4]3. Proposition is within Background KnowledgeCon also drops this point, that theism is not within our background knowledge. Moreover, Con misunderstands my argument here, that generally things we know already exist are more likely to be explanations of a state of affairs than ones we do not know exist given all things equal. It is of course possible that it is something else (although the likelihood of it being a specific something is another matter), but one is epistemologically justified in accepting a prior known explanation over an unknown one.The reasoning is because we know metaphysical naturalism is a possible explanation (since we obviously know the natural law obeying world exists), however we do not know if theism is a possible explanation. Thus, theism entails an uncertainty factor that naturalism simply does not have. On a probability diagram we have the following consideration:To give a rudimentary mathematical example, when comparing theism and naturalism, if all other things are equal, then both explanations have a 50% chance of being correct (for arguments sake) IF they were possible explanations. We know naturalism is a possible explanation, thus we can multiply the probability of it being a possible explanation (1) against the probability of being the actual explanation if it is possible (0.5), leaning to a 0.5, or 50% overall probability of being correct. With theism however, we do not know it’s probability of being a possible explanation, however we can assign an epistemic possibility, which necessarily is less than 1, which when multiplied against its condition probability, gives a probability of less than 50%, and hence is less likely than metaphysical naturalism.What Con proposes instead however, is equitable to epistemological solipsism, since he implicitly concedes that we cannot make such probabilistic inferences about the world.Absolute truths2.1 Mathematical ArgumentPro hasn’t yet shown how this is relevant to the resolution, so I will wait until he does before addressing it.2.2 Warping of Space-time ArgumentPro’s argument is based on a strawman of metaphysical naturalism as defined in R2:“the notion that everything within the universe is explicable by natural laws”Hence, his objection here is invalid. I am not advocating for naïve materialism.5. Employment of ad hoc assumptionsArgument From atemporal MindsTwo Points:1.Con employs ad hoc reasoning here, which strengthens the abductive argument for naturalism.2.His entire objection is incoherence since spacetime is contingent upon the universe, thus without the universe, you have no spacetime. Without spacetime, then God can only be atemporal during the creation act, and therefore all my arguments logically apply. We end up with a state of affairs where God must be atemporal, lest the universe not be created which also2. refutes God by contradicting her definition.Incoherence of a Caused UniverseCon does not respond to this argument, so I will extend. This argument addresses the universe, not God. If the universe cannot be caused, then God is impossible since one of his attributes is impossible (cause of the universe).SummaryCon concedes swathes of ground and mostly only provides mitigation in the form of misunderstandings of the principles presented, and a strawman of what metaphysical naturalism is.References1. http://en.wikipedia.org...2. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu...3. http://plato.stanford.edu...;4. http://en.wikipedia.org...;