Resolved: The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument is Sound - 4

I will start by addressing my opponent's complaint that I have 'pigeon-holed' him into defending the God of Christian Theology. On the contrary, he pigeon-holed himself into defending such a position. In his opening statement, he defined God through the words of A.W. Pink, in which the said writer quotes books of the Bible to describe God's attributes (Colossians and Job) as well as describing him as 'the Triune God'. Well, as far as I am aware, there is only one God who has ever been described as Triune - the Christian God of the Bible, consisting of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I accepted the debate on these terms, and if my opponent intended only to defend the existence of a personal necessary creator of the universe, and not the specific God of the Bible, then he ought to have defined his terms more clearly to make this point clear in his opening statement. He did not, and so I argue that he must show that if there is a creator of the universe, then that creator has to be the God of the Bible. To take any other stance would be to allow him to change the terms of the debate half way through. I leave it to the reader to judge whether or not this stance I have taken is reasonable. If you do, then this is sufficient reason alone to vote against the motion, since so far my opponent has given us no reason to conclude that the creator is the God of the Bible. The best he can do is appeal to Brandon C. Look, who writes: "First, insofar as the first cause of the entire series must have been able to survey all other possible worlds, it has understanding. Second, insofar as it was able to select one world among the infinity of possible worlds, it has a will. Third, insofar as it was able to bring about this world, it has power. (Leibniz adds here that "power relates to being, wisdom or understanding to truth, and will to good.") Fourth, insofar as the first cause relates to all possible, its understanding, will and power are infinite. And, fifth, insofar as everything is connected together, there is no reason to suppose more than one God. Thus, Leibniz is able to demonstrate the uniqueness of God, his omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence from the twin assumptions of the contingency of the world and the principle of sufficient reason." However, the problem with Look's argument is that he makes a great many unsubstantiated assertions without justifying them. Starting at the beginning, why must the first cause have been able to survey all other possible worlds? All the LCA gives us is a first cause - we have no reason to assume that this cause considered other possible universes or even knew what it was doing at all! So the conclusion that the cause has understanding fails. The conclusion that the cause has will also fails, since it is presented as a direct consequence of the first conclusion, which I have shown to be unfounded. Now, power I am happy to accept by definition; but again, Look gives no reason to conclude that this power is infinite - he simple asserts it as truth without justification. And so we see that the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence do not follow as a logical consequence of the LCA, despite my opponent's claims to the contrary. But what if you think that my stance is unreasonable, and that all my opponent has to do is show that the cause is a 'personal necessary creator' and not specifically the Christian God? Well in that case, my opponent has to, at the very least, show that this creator has a mind and that he intended to create the universe. Without these characteristics, we would hardly call this creator a God. Yet my opponent still has not given us any reason to accept that this cause (if it exists) has these characteristics. How does he know, for instance, that the cause is to the universe what the sun is to the Solar System. Now, it would be fair to say that the Sun is the cause of the Solar System, in that its gravitational pull keeps the Solar System intact, and that its heat and light provide the necessary conditions for the existence of life on earth. But the sun has no mind, it is not alive; it does not intend to do any of this. How does my opponent know that the cause (again, if it exists) is not like the sun, in that it causes the universe to exist, but that it does so unintentionally. Again, he gives us no reason to assume that this cannot be the case. And of course, he continues to give us no substantial reason for concluding that such a cause exists in the first place. He attempts to refute my previous arguments by stating that if the objects that constitute the universe are contingent, then the universe itself must be contingent; and he supports this by the claim that necessary existence implies that the thing itself must be unchanging and eternal. Now, note that while I have conceded that premise 1 is trivially true by definition, I have not conceded that my opponent's formulation of modal logic or the PSR are necessarily valid - for the simple reason that I don't need to. My opponent introduced these concepts to prove that premise 1 is correct. But since 1 is true by definition, I regard these concepts as irrelevant to this debate - unless my opponent can show that they follow from premise 1. After all, this debate is about whether the LCA is valid - not whether modal logic and the PSR are valid. The practical consequence of this is that I do not accept that the terms 'contingent' and 'necessary', as my opponent defined them, are respectively equivalent to 'having an external cause' and 'being caused by the necessity of its own nature', as set out in premise 1. The crucial flaw comes when my opponent states that "necessary existence would require the quality of being unchanging and eternal". By the way he has defined 'necessary', this might be true, but the point is that he has not shown that any object whose explanation is the necessity of its own nature must therefore be necessary, in the way he has defined the term. It is perfectly possible for instance that we may have objects that exist only for a finite period of time through their own nature but not due to any external source - consider so-called 'virtual particles for instance, which, according to Quantum Theory, appear to do just that.[1] So we have no reason for assuming that any object that does not have an external cause must therefore be eternal and unchanging, and crucially this implies that we have no sound reason for concluding (again, to use my opponent;s terminology) that just because the universe contains contingent objects, it must therefore be contingent itself. Finally, my opponent makes a logical error when he claims that "if God created an alternative universe that caused the creation of this one, then by proxy he is responsible for creating this universe." This does not follow logically. In short, if A creates B and B creates C, this does not allow us to conclude that A created C. For example, my parents created me and I have created this argument. But my parents did not create this argument. They had nothing to do with it, know nothing about it and are certainly not responsible for it. Similarly, even if a god intentionally created a universe (but not this one) we have no reason to conclude that he intended, or even knows about, the creation of this one. As I pointed out before, the LCA cannot rule this possibility out, and so this is a powerful reason for rejecting the argument. In short, the flaws that I pointed about before remain. My opponent cannot demonstrate that the universe requires an external cause, and even if he could, he cannot show that this cause must be a personal God, let alone the God of the Bible. The LCA must therefore be resoundingly rejected. [1] = http://www.scientificamerican.com...