Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic

[SteveII]

Yet, the new thing, whether it be an idea, a novel, a symphony or a Mandelbrot is created. It begins to exists. They are not the same thing as the material that is holding the information (Therefore we have examples of things beginning to exits that are not themselves material. So, a material cause is not needed, only an efficient cause is needed. 

What it means for material to "hold information" is an important question.  If there is a clear sense in which the phrase is meaningful, I would grant that it's probably not valid to say that the information is the same thing as the material.   It would be an illogical leap to therefore conclude that the idea, symphony, or whatever is immaterial.  It's really not understood how we make sense of the meaning of things like language, yet it's possible that language and meaning exist as a closed system of material effects in which the meaning of an utterance exists as a process in the brain, and that the effect of finding things meaningful is a consequence of sharing similar brain processes among language speakers.  In that case, the "meaning" of an utterance only exists as a behavior of the system, and has no independent existence beyond that behavior.  The behavior of a system is fully described by efficient causes existing between material components, so to speak of that behavior as something immaterial is simply wrong.  If symphonies and novels and ideas only exist insofar as they are material processes of a system of brains and such, then your conclusion that immaterial things exist is also wrong.

Are you really dancing around if abstract objects exist or not because they are grounded in the mind? Is that your hard determinism/physicalism getting in the way (honest question)? It seem like defining abstracta might have a few methods but generally:

There is a great deal of agreement about how to classify certain paradigm cases. Thus it is universally acknowledged that numbers and the other objects of pure mathematics are abstract (if they exist), whereas rocks and trees and human beings are concrete. Some clear cases of abstracta are classes, propositions, concepts, the letter ‘A’, and Dante’s Inferno. Some clear cases of concreta are stars, protons, electromagnetic fields, the chalk tokens of the letter ‘A’ written on a certain blackboard, and James Joyce’s copy of Dante’s Inferno. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstr...s/#WayExam

I don't recall what the point in bringing up the immateriality of symphonies and such was, but it seems to rest on a non sequitur.  I don't see any reason to necessarily conclude that a symphony is anything more than stuff doing what stuff does.  The tendency to view symphonies and such as non-material is a hangover founded upon our ignorance of the nature of human cognition.

The topic came up that all effects have material causes (in Aristotle's sense of there being four types of causes) so that Premise (1) and (3) were equivocating on the word 'cause'. I pointed out that at least every effect has an efficient cause and used abstract objects as an example. 

The concepts of justice, morality, logic etc, are not themselves material. That's why there is a whole type of object defined for them: abstract objects. 

Abstract and concrete are classifications that denote whether a term describes an object with a physical referent or one with no physical referents. They are most commonly used in philosophy and semantics. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes called concreta (sing. concretum). An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing, i.e., an idea, or abstraction.[1] The term abstract object is said to have been coined by Willard Van Orman Quine.[2] The study of abstract objects is called abstract object theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete

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The universe by definition is a contingent object.

The universe may or may not be contingent.  Regardless of which happens to be the case, its contingency cannot be established "by definition" alone.  If you're asserting the universe is contingent based simply on a definition, then that's a problem.

Fine. I retract the "definition" claim. However, there is no portion of its definition/description that implies a property that would suggest that it necessarily exists. Is that fair to say?