Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?

[bennyboy]

So let me see if I got this straight.  The touted empirical data shows that nothing exists without a cause.

And you infer from this fact that there must therefore be something which must have existed without a cause.  This doesn't seem like a very sound inference to me.

First I did not say "God made everything"  I simply said that according to the logic there must be a single cause without cause and that cause must be proactive (not reactive).  It just happens to be we already have a term for that which is the single proactive cause without cause and that term has been God.  We may use another term if God is to icky.  Perhaps Dark Cause?  Or Darth Genesis?

As you are a declared Catholic, you'll forgive me for flipping ahead a couple pages and assuming that when you talk about a single uncaused cause, you're talking about a Catholic God, and are currently laying the groundwork for such.

But it doesn't really matter.  Your central thesis is that all we know points to a special case which must necessarily violate all we know.  Call it what you want, but a magic wand is still a magic wand.

Now if wish to anthropomorphize the Universe such that it may behave proactively, very well.  I await your evidence of Universal proaction (not reaction) to beget itself?  Bear in mind that in anthropomorphizing the Universe you will be providing an argument to theist who contend God is everything while no particular thing is God.

We need to talk about the relationship between frameworks and the things found in them.  I agree that something must be unique: a framework has properties which the things operating within it do not.  I do not agree that you need to posit any extra entity or additional framework to solve the philosophical problem of regression.  This is because we can just as easily assume that the framework called Universe can have all those mystical, magical properties you insist must be attributed to that extra quantity.  In other words, if you are going to insist on brute fact, then the net should be cast as near as possible.

As I imagine you do not have direct experience with everything you consider to be factual

I didn't say I need direct experience.  I said that you have to provide me with some kind of experience that accords better with the God idea than without it.  I can tell you in no uncertain terms that this hasn't happened.

thus I would state once again that you are imposing a bias threshold of proof.  If you accept the same threshold of proof than the evidence is as you say just outside your window.  You do not observe infinite regressive causal chains and you observe existence outside your window.

I've said that evidence will be any experience which resolves (or at least contributes to a resolution of) a question posed to my world view.  Nothing I see outside my window in a literal sense, or in my experience of the world in a more general sense, accords better with the idea of God than that of not-God.  I don't require scientific proof, or even physical proof, of God.

Your logic is: "Infinity cannot be possible, therefore something infinite made the universe."  You might as well just say, "Existence is a paradox," or even just "This sentence is false."