The Problem of Evil makes it unlikely that God exsits (debate #2)

I like how you dropped my Zeus exists argument at the top of my last post. It was pure gold. I feel like you don't understand my arguments against your "test of faith" defense. I assume that "testing your faith" is not good in and of itself (intrinsically good), but is instead good for something else, making it extrinsically good. My question was, and still is, why doesn't God just get us whatever the test of faith is good for directly instead of this roundabout way? You claim that if he gives us this directly, there is no test, but why is the test important? I can guess from analogy that tests allow someone to separate out the high performers from the low performers to see who passes or fails. The problem with this line of reasoning is that God can make us all pass and improve whatever skills he's testing directly. Your additional argument that we can have the knowledge but not the wisdom that comes from experience is additionally absurd. You're essentially arguing that it is beyond God's powers to create wisdom in me. So, I can do something through experience which an infinitely powerful God cannot do. Wow, I rule. So, I need you to explain to me why this test of faith exists and why God cannot just give us whatever we gain from it directly. Until you have a really good answer to this, I cannot accept your ad hoc attempt at a theodicy. Whether or not Einstein said your quote was clearly not beyond the point. If it was, it wouldn't have been the finishing statement and you wouldn't have included that detail. Don't run away now that it's clear that Einstein didn't say anything of the sort. Or, if he did, he said many things to contradict it. My response to the story is still there. Untouched. I suppose you want to ignore it which is probably a good idea considering that I argued (correctly) that the story gets us nowhere and only reformulates the question. Then, you end your post with an ad hoc argument for the existence of God that is highly irrelevant to the problem of evil. I wonder why you bring it up at all as this debate is about a specific argument against God's existence, not about the ridiculously broad topic of God's existence. My response, however, is simple, but to keep things entertaining, I'll illustrate via analogy. I remember a story of a talk given by a scientist on astronomy. He explained that the Earth orbits the sun, which orbits the supermassive black hole at the center of the universe etc. After the talk, a woman comes up and explains that he's got it all wrong, Hindu beliefs tell her that the Earth rests on the back of a tortoise, not out in space. Now, the scientist was very clever, so he responded "what's the tortoise on?". She just smiled and said "oh, you're very clever indeed, but it's tortoises all the way down!" My point is, this argument is no less circular than yours. If God created cells, what created God? At best, you can respond to this by just fiating that God needs no cause, but why then is it not open to me to say that cellular/universe creation needs no cause? Also, I'm cogniscient of the fact that your argument was specific to the problem of abiogenesis. There is a famous experiment called the Miller-Urey experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org...) where two scientists simulated the early Earth's atmosphere and gave it an electric charge and managed to create many of the compounds that are needed for life, but given the short time, not life itself. Every step along the abiogenesis chain has substantial evidence supporting it. You're argument that we don't know how the first cell came into existence is just wrong. We have substantial evidence and knowledge surrounding the problem. Additionally, there is a larger fallacy at work here which I call the God of the Gaps argument. You seem to want to imply that if science doesn't have an answer, then God did it. This is a huge logical fallacy and is no more probably than if no science then Zeus or if no science then invisible pink unicorns. You need positive proof, not just a gap in knowledge. Look, you've failed to address some of my serious objections and have just plowed forward with random unrelated arguments or just re-explained your own arguments. You may consider directly answering my objections or I will and the voters be forced to conclude that you don't have a response. Unfortunately, if you have a response, it'll be too late for me to respond, but better late than never.