This House believes that Jesus of the Bible is Messiah

My opponent has made a case from special pleading, and I will not accept it as valid. ' the existence of God as well as the validity of the Bible will be presupposed. '. I will not accept that. The fact of the matter is my opponent's argument cannot and will not get off the ground unless both presumptions are adequately proven. I have found three problems with this his claims. You cannot presume that God namely the God of the bible exists, then spend the entire time proving Jesus is the messiah, it's special pleading. I will not accept this. 1. Biblically The Holy Trinity is core to the Christian faith, and my opponent makes no different assumptions towards that being not the case. The Holy Trinity can be disproven if in fact evidence can presented to disprove anyone of them individually, the theist must have adequate evidence supporting all three in order to prove biblical claims accurate, the atheist/sceptic only needs to disprove one of them substantially. 2. Arguments exist to prove the contradictory elements of God, which you have not proved to exist or even made an argument to support his plausibility. 3 You cannot presume Biblical inerrancy, and there is ample evidence to prove that the bible is an unreliable and a very poor 'primary' source. 1. The Evil God hypothesis. I will deal with two parts of the trinity, making philosophical objections to an 'omnipotent all-powerful and ever-loving' God of the bible. My definition is not that controversial and I prefer not to delve into semantics over it. After I have made a brief objection to the first premise you presumed, I will then move onto the unreliability of the bible and it's various problems and then I will address if necessary any remaining points you have made. This is a version of the evidential problem of evil. There is plenty of bad and unjustified evils in the world, namely human evil and natural evil, ex. disease and natural disasters. This unnecessary evil/suffering presents a problem for the theist. Using a very easy to explain example, would be how a pack of wolves or how a pride of lions rip apart usually a still alive animal and devour their prey, while the animal suffers the pain of literally being eaten alive. Some might object saying these are just animals or how else would they kill their prey, but those are not adequate objections to deal with the evidential problem of evil. Looking at humans, we can look at a random disease to get a better grasp of unnecessary death in the world. In the us, in 2010 83,494 people died from Alzheimer's disease, this is not just figures and statistics this is 83,494 people who have died for no adequate reason. For opponent's God to exist, there must be not just a vague explanation to why this occurs, there must be a fully adequate and sufficient answer for why there is so much evil/suffering in the world. Not only that but if no reason can be given apart from 'We don't know Gods will' which is special pleading then the likely hood of an ever-loving all powerful God existing becomes highly improbable. If I postulate now that I now believed in an evil god I could found the premise on there is as much evidential evidence for evil as there is for good. The point of this being is the evil god hypothesis can be disproven and found inadequate then there is no reason to believe the good god hypothesis can have any bearing either. For any cosmological argument or ontological argument you presume my evil god hypothesis is as valid as your good god, namely the god of the bible. The argument stands to disprove the nature of gods character, namely the god of the bible, Kalam's cosmological argument or the ontological argument make no specific claim to the nature of god, even though I find them unconvincing anyway there is no reason to try use them as an objection. The opponent must deal directly with my objection to the nature of his god and specifically the problem of evil for any plausible argument supporting his belief in god. 2. Biblical inerrancy I have briefly highlighted one argument to contradict the nature of the god of the bible, a core concept in biblical terminology, as I have said the trinity must be equally supported or abandoned. If any of the three, The Father, The Son or the Holy Ghost/Spirit is adequately proven to be highly implausible or wrong then we can conclude the other three which rely heavily on each other is unjustified and can be presumed to be incorrect. Now if my opponent feels it necessary to delve into semantics or denominational issues, I will remind him to not go to a fringe theory denomination, which he has not previously stated in his first point. Cessationism and continuationism might differ beliefs but yet confirms the holy spirit existed at one point. The origin of the bible is not only speculative at best but undoubtedly raises tough questions for the theist, including why would God allow copies and lost scriptures to occur and forgeries in the bible? Not to mention the bible the opponents used is in fact a copy of a pre-existing transcript. The original bible has been lost and not only that but its original language translated numerous times over throughout thousands of years leaves a lot of room for error. Lets deal with the copies issue, for the bible to be infallible then we must assume over two thousand years and numerous translations that not a single sentence or paragraph has been wrongly translated or even entire pages removed. During the time of the original bible for a copy to be made, a scribe must sit down and translate word for word everything which is contained. To believe that no errors were kept or meanings changed is wishful thinking, not to mention richer men and women would get translations of the bible not the poorer men and women. The bibles we have today are not primary sources nor are they in anyway reliable or justified in accurately telling a story 2 thousand years ago. Forgeries are also evident. Looking at one point in the bible we see evidence of a forgery, Pauls writings are a particular style, they are short sentences which are quite particular, but in the book of Ephesians it is written in long sentences, and not only that but does not match Pauls own convictions but match the Ephesians views, the context and style do not match any of Pauls previous writings and makes no sense in line with what was written. Some of this can be put down as small details, others are extremely important. There is just no way we can compare original scripture with the existing ones now. Is the bible inaccurate in what Jesus said? I have no dispute on the existence of Jesus but I do have major issues with what the bible claims he said, and the agenda of the apostles to present certain views. For example in comparing the gospels there is one point which stands out. In the gospel of John, Jesus believes himself to be God and calls himself divine Jesus answers, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. These are sayings found only in the gospel of John, yet we never see this mentioned in Luke Mark and Matthew, which are the earlier gospels. There is serious confirmation among biblical scholars that Jesus did not in fact say this. Bart Ehrman points out that in the Gospel of John, the narrator, John the Baptist and Jesus all sounds exactly alike, how do three uniquely different people all speak the same theology? This is because we are hearing one voice. This leads us to conclude the entire gospel of John has been modified and written by one person which is the author and is not Jesus' own words. Even in the resurrection we see a major contradiction between the gospel of mark and the gospel of Luke. "In the Gospel of mark during the last moments of Jesus' death, he remains completely silent, he says nothing as even as he is crucified he remains silent. While both robbers mock him and passersby mocks him. He remains completely silent. This continues till the very end when he finally cries our 'my god my god why have you forsaken me. then he dies on the cross. "In the gospel of Luke, he carries his cross and upon seeing women crying he turns and says 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say'. After he carries his cross, gets crucified and only one robber mocks him the other defends him by and Jesus says ' Today you will be with me in paradise'. This is not a minor flaw, these are major issues relating to the bible which cannot be overlooked by any serious believer or sceptic. These are two completely different stories of Jesus one portraying him as silent and saddened and the other as confident and knowing of what is to become, they do not comply with each other By only a few examples we see that the bible is not infallible and has been modified and distorted by its writers, if we agree that the bible is not 100% correct, how do we confirm it is at all correct? Is there any way to confirm it? I do not feel the bible can be used as a primary source as it proves to be way too unreliable as it is a copy of an unknown amount of previous copies. I feel this is extremely important in proving or disproving Jesus as the son of God. If we even look at the gospel of Luke we find very obvious evidence for an adapted re-telling of the story of Jesus in order to force prophecies. According to Luke, Caesar Augusts issued a decree to have a census of the entire Roman world. By purely historical and even contradictory biblical accounts this is just not true. There is no evidence for this ever occurring. The implication is Luke lied in his Gospel in order to fulfil the prophecies. As a minor point I would like to remind my opponent that over two thousand years of biblical change, constant conferences were called in order to pick and choose carefully what should be allowed into the bible and what should not, this implication means the bible is an assortment of handpicked stories and even in that we find obvious problems and contradictions, a poor example of how an all powerful god did not know this would happen. With this the question remains is the bible a trusted source? No, I have problems with the other biblical claims relating to the evidence for God, and the lack of substantial evidence for the biblical claims. The miracles cannot be proven and the likely hood is that they did not happen, and with many prophecies unfulfilled you cannot use it as a source or confirmation of the bible. With these points I believe I have made major objections to the source you used but also the presumptions you made, with that many of your claims fall short of not having sufficient evidence but also based on premises that are not supported with evidence. You make the statement ' Jesus' life and works bear testimony to the fact that He is the Messiah. His life is in sharp contrast to the false messiahs, and is a positive demonstration of what one would expect Messiah to do.' My issue with this comes from an problem with comparison and origin. If your definition of messiah is based on Jesus, and by that admission you base the others as a comparison then no other 'messiah' can fit into the definition apart from Jesus. You use him as a definition to prove him being the messiah, then compare him to the definition. This is circular arguing, unless you have an objective definition for messiah which pre-exists, which undoubtedly you cannot then this statement is a fallacy. I find your next point quite confusing, you discuss the healing claims of Jesus but really without evidence the biblical claims do not stand to sceptical review and cannot be used as evidence. Also you claim ' No one forgives sin but God ' we cannot confirm that claim either, and to say 'well Jesus would not say it unless it was true is not a good objection to make'. I would say there needs to be substantial historical and scientific evidence to support these claims or else they cannot be used as evidence. Your final point about the transformative power of Christ in people's lives is not evidence and we both know that, I don't want to go into too much detail because it's a poor point to make. Only to mention evidence is objective by nature and his 'power to change' people is not evidence, I can point to the millions of Muslims who claim the this also. Thanks for the debate. Sources : "http://www.bartdehrman.com... "http://www.wolf.org... "http://www.cdc.gov... "http://www.rc.net...