Deisim makes more sense then Christianity

How disappointing... I will go ahead and present my case anyways. == Negating Deism == The defining characteristic of deism is the belief that God is an impersonal being. This is patently false because God was almost certainly involved in the development of life on Earth,and more importantly, the creation of the human race. According to famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, evolution is a radically contingent process [1]. In other words, any given evolutionary path is dependent on such a large number of random events (e.g. volcanic eruptions, continental drift, ice ages, asteroids, etc), that if someone were to "replay the tape" of Earth's evolutionary history, things would likely have turned out entirely differently. Consider the following: "The formation of the Earth as a planet was a large stochastic process in which the rapid assembly of asteroidal-to-Mars-sized bodies was followed by a more extended period of growth through collisions of these objects, facilitated by the gravitational perturbations associated with Jupiter. The Earth's inventory of water and organic molecules may have come from diverse sources, not more than 10% roughly from comets, the rest from asteroidal precursors to chondritic bodies and possibly objects near Earth's orbit for which no representative class of meteorites exists today in laboratory collections. The final assembly of the Earth included a catastrophic impact with a Mars-sized body, ejecting mantle and crustal material to form the Moon, and also devolatilizing part of the Earth." [2] Every single one of the aforementioned events had to occur in order for Earth to be suitable for the development of life. There are no specific numbers available on the individual probabilities of these events occurring, but it is safe to say that the combined probability of all of them happening "just by chance" is incredibly small. Even if the conditions on Earth were right for life, the probability of crude cells developing from organic compounds is still incredibly small. Sir Fred Hoyle calculated that probability to be about 1 in 10^40 [3]. As the source states, there are some problems with the assumptions involved in coming up with that number, but it is nonetheless safe to say that the actual probability is still extremely small. All in all, the probability that intelligent life would have ever evolved in the context of deism (i.e. through purely naturalistic means without any divine intervention) is infinitesimal; on the other hand, under Christianity, the fact that humans evolved is completely unsurprising -- God would have set things the way they were with the specific intention of bringing about the creation of human beings. Christianity provides an infinitely more likely context for the evolution of the human species than deism does; thus, the rational choice is to reject the deistic conception of an impersonal God in favor of the personal, theistic conception. == Affirming Christianity == Firstly, I would like to clarify that, contrary to Pro's opinion, Christianity does not necessarily include "all the stuff in the bible and places like hell." The Bible should *not* be regarded as the ultimate authority on Christian doctrine. Christianity is defined as revolving primarily around the figure and teachings of Jesus Christ, rather than the Bible. There is simply no reason to believe that the Bible was divinely inspired in any way; it is a collection of stories which were written independently of each other by various people during various eras and passed down throughout the course of Hebrew history. The compilation of all those stories into the Bible was not a project endorsed by Jesus or any other divine authority -- it was carried out centuries after Jesus died by a random priest [4]. At best, the Bible can only be considered as a source of historical information; of course, that does mean that the Gospels can be considered an acceptable source for learning about Jesus's teachings and actions, but that is the maximum extent to which the Bible can really be considered "Christianity's book". In other words, my BoP in this debate does not encompass the Bible. I only need to show that the most essential and universally-accepted tenets of the Christian faith are true. To me, it boils down to three: 1) a personal creator God exists, 2) humans are inherently sinful (original sin), and 3) Jesus was crucified and resurrected. If we accept these three premises to be true, then there is really no reason to doubt the standard Christian narrative as a whole (i.e. Jesus being the Son of God, dying for our sins, opening the path to salvation, etc), as it is the only narrative which accounts for and creates a coherent context for all three premises. It has already been demonstrated that a personal creator God exists, so I'll start with proving the doctrine of original sin to be true. That humans are inherently sinful is obvious. We clearly do violate the commandments of God and the teachings of Jesus: every human regularly engages in numerous acts of impiety, selfishness, promiscuity many other actions explicitly condemned by Christian doctrine. Children do not grow up and learn sinful behaviors -- they have to be disciplined and taught by their parents NOT to engage in those types of behaviors from a very young age; without that discipline, such behaviors seem natural to them, which is why people who were neglected as children often end up engaging in criminal behavior as adults. With all this in mind, denying the doctrine of original sin becomes ridiculous. Moving on to Jesus. The New Testament may have some contradictions between its various accounts of Jesus's life, but there is a majority consensus among historians that the books of the NT are generally reliable sources of historical information; they were all composed within several decades of Jesus's death by people who lived through the events being described, and many other historical documents from Greek and Roman times (which are readily accepted by secular historians as being mostly accurate) actually have less factors lending to their credibility than the NT does [5]. There could, of course, be some parts of it which are exaggerated, but unless given significant reason to believe otherwise, we should accept that the major events which all the NT accounts agree on probably did occur as stated -- such as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Moreover, a miracle like the resurrection was *necessary* for Christianity to survive Jesus's death. Jesus had spent all his life claiming that he was the Messiah -- the divine savior the Jews had been awaiting for centuries. However, Jesus was brutally crucified before he could even begin to fulfill that role; this should have made it blatantly clear that Jesus was NOT divine certainly NOT the Messiah. No follower of Jesus could still reasonably believe that Jesus was anything more than a false prophet. Christianity should have died out, yet Christianity continues to thrive two milennia later. The only reasonable explanation for why Christianity was able to retain its followers is that something happened which caused them to believe that Jesus was indeed divine and still capable of fulfilling the role of the Messiah. The miracle of the resurrection certainly fits this bill -- he appeared to all his followers after death and promised them a second coming in which he would fulfill the prophecy, effectively convincing them to continue having faith. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the resurrection did occur, regardless of the historicity of the NT. ~ [1] http://www.philbio.org... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... [3] http://www.coppit.org... [4] http://www.biblica.com... [5] https://carm.org...