There is no God

Regarding Occam's Razor, my opponent argues that I misunderstand. That Occam's Razor is not "The simplest answer is probably right", but that: "It states one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything. The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific modelling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one. In any given model, Occam's razor helps us to 'shave off' those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed to explain the phenomenon. By doing that, developing the model will become much easier, and there is less chance of introducing inconsistencies, ambiguities and redundancies... For example, through two data points in a diagram you can always draw a straight line, and induce that all further observations will lie on that line. However, you could also draw an infinite variety of the most complicated curves passing through those same two points, and these curves would fit the empirical data just as well. Only Occam's razor would in this case guide you in choosing the 'straight' relation as best candidate model. A similar reasoning can be made for n data points lying in any kind of distribution." I fail to see how, in the light of my opponents example, the existence of God is not the straight line and the "billions of coincidences leading to the world we live in today" theory is not the curvy, highly improbable line. In fact, without using as many words, that is more or less exactly what I said in my previous argument. As to Science proving those coincidences, it's all based on our less-than-perfect interpretation of data through the prism of our likely incomplete understanding of the laws that govern our universe. My opponent continues, "You fail to recognize that the evidence of no god outweighs the evidence that there is a god". I rebut that this is because of a concept called "faith". God demands faith from us. Proof denies faith. Ergo, God will not prove He exists beyond what He's already done. The evidence seems to support a "no god" point of view, but really the evidence is normally inconclusive and thus a scientist's natural bias against the idea of the supernatural wins the day and colors the lack of evidence as disproof. The rest of my opponent's argument didn't seem to make much sense. At no point in my previous argument did I say anything from which you can justifiably extrapolate "denying the existence of a god means that there is a god is the same logic that means you need to spend money to make money. and then you end up wasting 500k on something but sense you need to spend money to make money you therefore did not spend any. Thus making an invalid point." God doesn't exist because someone said He didn't. God exists regardless. Thus rendering my opponents argument invalid. Everything we percieve and everything we don't percieve was created by God. No one created God. God always was and always will be. Infinite, if you will. Without beginning or end. "My thesis is that people who claim to believe in god do not really do so. They just wish to believe in god. They somehow feel that their lives are meaningless without god, so they choose to close their eyes to evidence against the existence of god", argues my opponent. I argue that belief is voluntary. You can choose to believe or not to believe. Wanting to believe is not possible because as soon as you genuinely want to believe, you believe. Just like you choose to ignore the holes in your "disproof" of God. By the way, Catholic priests are the way they are because humans are social, sexual creatures and chastity is not a natural lifestyle. Living an acetic lifestyle where one's natural impulses are considered sinful will eventually drive you nuts. You didn't WANT to believe there were monsters under your bed, but you did. Then one day you just... Didn't believe anymore. There is no wanting to believe. There is belief and disbelief. By the way, Alfred Loisy was excommunicated for heresy and didn't try to reconcile but rather gave up on his faith (not the Church, but his faith); Darwin's initial observations for the Origin of Species was made under the delirium of what sounds like a severe case of the flu, and besides he was a Unitarian, which is the beginning of a slippery slope into atheism anyway; Dan Barker was heavily involved with atheist intellectuals (which if you are unable to hold you own against them in a debate, as I suspect he wasn't, you quickly begin to question the validity of your views); Ernest Renan abandoned his faith due to grammatical differences in sections of the book of Isaiah, which is a petty reason to give up on something; Antonio Fogazzaro actually was a Christian for his entire period of renown, just separate from the Catholic church. There is nothing wrong with that, I consider myself estranged from the Catholic Church yet I am a Christian. Again, no solid evidence of the non-existence of God has been presented. The resolution is overturned.