Does God exist

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I will respond to your ad hominem arguments without fearing the lack of humility that Christians undoubtedly hold while at the same time clearly displaying. Being the recipent of $350,000+ in college scholarships receiving a 4.0 GPA at one of the top high schools in the country, I have learned despite my diagnoses of mental disabilities that I will allow myself the pride of acknowledging my intelligence, if nothing else.I would like to simply point out the all-too-common notion that we were created in god's image, when all logical conclusions will lead to the fact that god was created in our image. Theists are constantly left stumped by questions such as why god must be ascribed a sex, why he is vengeful and endorses murder, genocide, slavery, and rape in the Old Testament. I propose there is a very simple answer to that question: because god was created in man's image (and I use the male pronoun intentionally), and not the other way around. Thousands upon thousands of gods have been created throughout the history of our species, and most of them (with the exception of a few in the Eastern traditon) are anthropomorphized by the same people who will say that god is sexless and impassible. As to why they are created, it is simply because men are scared of uncertainty and doubt. The question of morality without god shows the innate fear of thinking for ourselves and our assumed impossibility of coming up with ethical standards on our own. Creation myths have been made up by almost every civilized society we know of, and Christians would behoove themselves if they read The Enuma Elish and even some of the ancient stories regarding the character of Lilith which provide some sense of the history of texts such as Genesis. (http://faculty.gvsu.edu...) (http://en.wikipedia.org...) You are correct, that we are much more than a bag of flesh and bones. We are the product of millions of years of evolution which have come to acquire consciousness, prescience, and incredible abilities through technology and industry. But in the end, we are nothing more than mammalian primates. Knowledge of a creator is a claim to a knowledge that no primate can claim to have. That being said, I will recognize the millions of theists that acknowledge evolution as true yet claim it as the way that the creator brought our species into being. It must be asked, then, why this process has left us utterly mentally ill, ever single one of us. It was most easily described by Ruby Wax, a comedian who has spent much time learning about her mental illnesses and others'.The paradox of evolution is that the more we evolve, the less able we are to cope with our surroundings, explaining much of why a creator is claimed to be a self-evident and necessary being. I will summarize:(http://www.ted.com...)Evolution did not prepare us for the 21st century, and thus we have clatched on to this hypothesis of eternal life and an eternal moral standard-bearer. You see, when we were beings less evolved than we are now, we would see a predator and naturally fill up with adrenaline. We would kill the predator which made us feel in danger, defuel, and move on. But now, we can't kill the traffic cop that makes us feel in danger, so we still fuel up, but never defuel. We are thus in a constant state of alarm, and we have created deities which provide us some way of coping with this, despite the lack of evidence for such a being. So yes, we are much more than a bag of flesh and bones, we are an incredibly capable species which has suffered the consequences of the imperfect process which has given us these abilities. In terms of the relation between the part and the whole, you are correct yet are applying this in an inappropriate way. In a sense Zhuangzi came up with the argument Hume introduced into the Western framework which said that we cannot extrapolate from the parts to knowledge of the whole. Zhuangzi put it in terms of our undoubtable limited knowledge being inappropriately extrapolated to conclude knowledge of "the whole," while Hume simply made a more general philosophical argument saying that one cannot move from knowledge of the parts to knowledge of the whole. What has allowed us to make this fallacious argument, however, is the fact that we have anthropomorphized this fictitious god, making it easier for us to claim "knowledge" of this deity because he is simply a divine version of ourselves.(http://plato.stanford.edu...)(http://plato.stanford.edu...) Your emphasis on focusing on something is interesting to me. I find you have become immune to recognizing your own monomania (http://en.wikipedia.org...) with this subject. You are in a sense correct, however, that when a human focuses on something it appears true. However, that is not necessarily because it is true, but is more or less explained by the concept of the law of attraction and our specie's incredible ability to lie to itself. (http://www.amazon.com...)It was not until the last 300 years (and it really has only been 300) that we have seen a remarkable explosion in scientific advancement that has revealed theism as a coping mechanism indelibly marked by the "stamp of our lowly origin" as Darwin put it. Simply put, god exists because we exist. My dog does not need god, the racoon eating out of my garbage does not need god, and you must come to recognize that we are more like them than you think. We have only half a chromosome different from our chimpanzee relatives, yet that half a chromosome, while providing incredible abilities such as consciousness, has led us to a place where we latch onto ideas such as eternal life or deities because of our inability to cope with reality (which Freud astutely pointed out as a necessity for our imperfect species). Biologically speaking, it can be said that we continue to latch onto these ideologies because we have been provided adrenal glands that are too large and prefrontal lobes that are too small, leaving us with the inability to rationalize our desires for these deities. For some additional context, I will quote Chris Hedges, a believer himself who asserts statements I personally disagree with but may be helpful to you: "Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know. Those who claim to know what life means play God. These false prophets -- the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells and the James Dobsons -- clutching the cross and the Bible, offer, like Mephistopheles, to lead us back to a mythical paradise and an impossible, unachieveable happiness and security, at once seductive and empowering. They ask us to hand over moral choice and responsibility to them. They will tell us they know what is right and wrong in the eyes of God. They tells us how to act, how to live, and in this process they elevate themselves above us. They remove the anxiety of moral choice, the fundamental anxiety of human existence. This is part of their attraction. They give us the rules by which we live. But once we hand over this anxiety and accept their authority, we become enslaved and they become our idols. And idols, as the Bible never ceases to tell us, destroy us."I hope you can find a way to be mature in your dealings with this debate that you seem to have forgotten in your first round. Thank you.