Atheism is more rational than Christianity

Thanks Wyndeson for agreeing to debate me, and if you're like any of the Christians I know, you will be more than willing to engage in an open-minded and fair debate. First, I'd just say that I think the rationality of any belief, or belief system is whether or not it is true, whether it sets out to do what it accomplishes and whether or not is represents our current knowledge, and for that reason, if no other, the single most important aspect of the rationality of Christianity is its central claim - that God exists, and what the world would look like given this proposition, and it is for this reason that I feel it is necessary to start with the elephant in the room, mainly, does the Christian God exist? Hi, thought I would start out with a definition of the Christian God, as I see it: God is all good, all knowing, all powerful, timeless, spaceless, personal and the creator and sustainer of the universe. Obviously, the Christian God has additional characteristics, but these are the ones which I think are most important. First thing to do is to define terms. I will defend atheism as: A single, solitary belief that there are no good arguments for theism, and that there are good arguments against such a proposition, particularly Christian theism. It is not a statement about science, morality, politics, or any other discipline. It is not a worldview. It is not a religion. It is not an ideology and it is not a commitment to any other principle or proposition. Christian theism is simply adherence to the belief of the being defined above, as well as a belief in the resurrection and (to a greater or lesser extent) that the bible is the word of God. With those definitions in mind, why Atheism? The WSA inductive problem of evil (P1) If there were an all-powerful and all-good God, then there would not be any evil in the world unless that evil is logically necessary for an adequately compensating good. (P2) There is lots of evil in the world. (P3) Much of that evil is not logically necessary for any adequately compensating good. (C2) Therefore, there is no God who is all powerful and all good. I define evil as: Anything which causes pain, suffering, disability and death. I suspect that we can all agree that evils exist and that they are frequent in the world. From the Holocaust to the Tsunamis, both moral evil and natural evil puncture our world. Anyone who doubts this need only turn on a T.V or read newspaper, visit a children's ward or suffer personal loss. Thus premise 2 is self-evident. For premise 1, we can return to an analogy. When we go to the dentist with toothache, we do so, as rational agents, to prevent pain. The consequent jags and yanking out of the tooth is (in this scenario at least) the only way to prevent the toothache. Thus, we rationally choose to suffer this, first because there is no other way to relieve the toothache (the pain of jags and pliers and is logically necessary) and the result is a relief of the toothache (the adequately compensating good). Therefore, in order for evil to be justified, it must be logically necessary for an adequately compensating good. If a pain-free pill was available (all other things being equal), then the evils of the pain at the dentist would not be justified. There must therefore be no other way to achieve an end, and the end must in turn be worth it. The first part of premise 1 refers to the character of God. If He distributed evil arbitrarily, with no end-game in mind, then, logically, He cannot be either all-good or all-powerful. Plantinga's free-will retreat is both accepted and actually used explicitly in the argument, making it a probabilistic argument, which means that any such arbitrary evil is evidence against Christian theism, which solidifies premise 1, and with the existence of evil established, all that remains is whether there is any such evil. Premise 3 is justified by what historians call an inference to the best explanation, and will I suspect be subject to the denial of the argument. An all powerful being is able to prevent the evils that occur, and an all good being is obviously willing, so the question becomes, is there always justification for the evils in the world, in the ways described above? The answer, I think, is quite clearly, no. Consider the examples of mass murders, torture, rape and other unimaginable cruelties in Indonesia, under Suharto, in Pinochet's Chile, in Stalin's Russia, Pol-Pot's Cambodia, or in Nazi Germany, and many, many more. What possible reason could there be for this horrendous evil? What compensation can there be for such barbarism? To use an economist's phrase, the short-term costs of such evil are so frighteningly high, so intuitively horrific and so apparently unnecessary that to attempt to justify it would is a tremendously difficult and, I suspect, an insurmountable task. Yet there is more. In conjunction with moral evils, there are natural evils, one of which is described in the following example: "Many babies each year are born with Down's syndrome. Most of these babies, with normal paediatric care, will grow up healthy. A significant number, however, have intestinal obstructions that will kill them if they do not receive an operation. Without the operation, dehydration and infection will cause these babies to wither and die over a period of hours and days. Today this operation is relatively simple, but not long ago these babies could not be saved . . . This baby (one born in the past with this) suffers for days, then dies." (Sinnott Armstrong,2004, P84) Again, what possible reason, what possible compensation could explain this natural evil? But it gets far worst for the Christian, because God is both necessarily able and willing to prevent these evils, among countless others, yet they remain, and there are no obvious reasons why this is so. Lets finish with an analogy: Suppose a politician could have prevented these genocides above, or that a doctor in the past had a remedy to such ailment as expressed by Sinnott-Armstrong, and could do so with no cost whatsoever to themselves or anybody else? What are we to think of such a refusal to act? That their reasoning is above our comprehension, even although we do not no what it is? Or are we conclude that the only possible excuse is that they were unable or ignorant or unconcerned at all with even the most basic precepts of morality? I am open to an answer to solve this problem, but, thus far, the responses have been incredibly insufficient and woefully underwhelming. As for your own case, Christian rationality cannot be merely maintained on selective fitings with Genesis, however liberally one translates them, because there are, it seems to me at least, clear mistakes, not least in the first line of Genesis, that the earth was created, "in the beginning" (even if this is a mistranslation, it creates a problem, as discussed below). Secondly, the acceptance of evolution as a fact, although honest, does not really help one's case, being as it is a case of "retrospective evidentialism", much like when one uses a prediction of Nostradamus AFTER the event. Also, with many made first in all, and evolution being violent, destructive, inefficient, and continually compromising force with no foresight, which creates somewhat of an arms race betweens species, it strikes me as difficult to reconcile this with Christian theism. Furthermore, the fact that the bible itself been seemingly misinterpreted by many, for many years is not exactly indicative of perfect foresight from a perfect being with a divine message. The message is further muddled with question over interpretation, clear contradictions and abhorrent morality displayed within the pages of the Good Book. You say that this is not a debate over the existence of God, but surely if God does not exist, then Christian theism cannot be maintained, thus these arguments must be addr