God Exists.

Response to Counter Argument #1Pro restated his belief, but it was not an argument. Movng on. Response to Counter Argument #2Pro said that the criterion of plausibility is not quite applicable to the topic because of the motivation of God is unknown. However, my argument did not relate to the motivation of God. To restate my claim, "The implausibility of the objective existence of God follows from the incompatibility of the proposed nature of God with the nature of the known universe. "Further, Pro claimed that the hypothesis of God is more plausible than the theory of evolution, because, he claimed, the theory of evolution leaves out important questions of "Why? " and "How? ". However, I counter the claim by pointing out that the theory of evolution fully and plausibly answers the question of "How? " through the observed mechanisms of reproduction, genetic mutation, variation, natural selection and speciation and through the strong inference of long periods of geological history. These mechanisms render the question of "Why? " inapplicable, because an intelligent agent is not needed. And, these observed universal mechanisms of evolution strongly constrast with the lack of any plausible mechanism for the creation function of God. The creation function of God seems to more plausibly explained than the function of a magic wand, but I invite Pro to supply a better explanation for the creation function. More puzzlingly, Pro seems to undercut his own point with a contradiction. He states that "the motivation of God is not supposed to be known," but Pro proceeds to claim that the hypothesis of God answers the question of "Why? ". An answer to any question of "Why? " necessarily entails a known motivation. Response to Counter Argument #3In written debates and all other public literary exercises, it is bad manners to plagiarize material from text written by someone else. In this case, Pro plagiarized a paragraph ("But what of the census that Luke 2:1 speaks of. .. ") from an article by Richard P. Bucher titled, "Caesar Augustus, Quirinius, and the Census" (see . http://www.orlutheran.com...). I understand if this action was unintended, but unintential plagiarism still counts as plagiarism. This mistake can be avoided by placing quotation marks or formatting tags about the quote and citing the source. Even with a citation, copying from an external source may facilitate the disadvantage of missing the opponent's point. My point was that it is implausible that "Augustus required all inhabitants of the empire to register for the census in their ancestral towns. " My point was NOT that it is implausible that Augustus had a census. The ancient text of The Deeds of the Divine Augustus tells of censuses by Augustus, but it contains no hint of the highly unusual requirement that all citizens travel to their ancestral home towns (see . http://classics.mit.edu...).If Pro wishes that I use the KJV instead instead of the NRSV, then I agree, as it makes little or no difference to me. Regardless of whether the purpose was a census or taxation (it would have been both), the ploblem of plausibility seems equal for the claim of an empire-wide pilgrimage to ancestral towns. Response to Counter Argument #4Pro claims that God exists because we can see His intelligence through the complexity of creation including the cell, and Pro claims it is illogical that random chance "held enough order" to create such organization. I respond that the biological mechanisms of reproduction, mutation, variation and natural selection (not mere random chance) are sufficient to explain complexity of life. Increases in genetic complexity have been directly observed, for example, in the study, "Regulation of antigen gene expression in Trypanosoma brucei," published in Trends in Parasitology, 2005. The abstract claims: "The high recombination frequency prevailing in the telomere that harbours the active VSG expression site has been exploited by the parasite to both drive antigenic variation and generate VSG-based adaptive proteins" (see . http://www.sciencedirect.com...). These highly plausible evolutionary mechanisms again contrast with the proposition of an ethereal intelligence, as I argued in Round 1. I await Pro's arguments in the format of Presentational Counterview (I don't mind at all).