The Judeo/Christian god most likely exists

I disagree with Con's BoP reasoning, but no matter. My character count is criminally small for this rebuttal, so I will be brief here and hope to make it up in later rounds. No ProofCon, judging by their demands for "evidence for the material existence of God," sees scientific data as the standard of epistemology. This is illogical. My inability to prove (scientifically or otherwise) that the external world is real doesn't mean it isn't. I can't prove that my favorite color is red, but that doesn't make the claim false. In the case of God, science studies nature, and God is supernatural. You should no more expect to find evidence of the supernatural in nature than you should expect to find lizards in Antarctica.Measuring prayer scientifically is an effort in futility. You can't have a blind study with an omniscient being, there is never a guarantee that a person is not being prayed for by someone, and testing a being with a mind the same way you would test a statistically predictable automatic process is frankly anti-scientific. The Problem of Evil A child requiring life-saving surgery, or even a vaccination shot, will certainly perceive it as evil. Children do not have the capacity to comprehend much beyond "pain = bad." To say that the existence of evil disproves an omnibenevolent God is akin to a child saying that being forced to undergo a painful medical procedure is proof that their parents don't love them.Let's examine a God who only allows the existence of those who will accept him. We would be in a position of being forced to want to choose God, which renders the entire concept of want and choice completely moot. If there is no ability to choose, then everything we do loses all of its potency and purpose, including our relationships with God and each other.As for the Tsetse fly, Genesis 3:17 sees God telling Adam "cursed is ground because of you." Christian theology states that the earth, as well as everything on it, has been corrupted by sin and demonic influence.Jefferey Dahmer, in a 1994 interview, revealed that his lack of belief in God, and thus any moral accountability, was why he saw fit to commit his crimes in the first place. If he truly has accepted Christ, then he has abandoned the worldview that lead to his monstrous behavior. Why should he not be forgiven?Not Unique/DivineIn what ways is the J/C ideology not unique? Con has not provided any examples.Dismissing Deut. 25:11-12 as "profoundly stupid" without demonstration is an argumentum ad lapidem. If wives grabbing men's genitals as a form of conflict resolution was common at the time of Deuteronomy, why shouldn't there be a passage on how to deal with it? Not to mention that this method could very easily lead to infertility for the man siezed, which, in a society where having heirs is of superlative importance, would be one of the worst possible afflictions. Causing it would demand severe punishment.As far as Luke 14:26, Semitic languages (of which Aramaic, Jesus' native tongue, is one) have always had a flair for the dramatic. This, coupled with hyperbole to emphasize the importance of following God even against the wishes of one's family, seems a perfectly acceptable explanation for Jesus' language. I can say that I love my family, and I can also say I love donuts, but this doesn't mean I love donuts to the same extent as my family. In English-speaking culture, we understand this. There's no reason to think that an Aramaic culture was confused by Jesus' words."Firmament" was chosen for the King James bible as translation for the Hebrew word rāqîa‘ meaning "expanse." The confusion is due to the root of the word which implies striking metal with a hammer to make it stretch, thus suggesting solidity, but its other biblical usages show versatility here [1].The belief is that Matthew was recording Joseph's lineage through David's son Solomon, and Luke Mary's through David's son Nathan. Joseph would indeed have been the son of Heli through marriage.Con's article on the Codex Sinaiticus is a travesty of journalism. The author confuses the Epistle of Barnabas for the Gospel of Barnabas (a completely different document that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Sinaiticus), declaring that the former includes the Jews chanting "his blood be upon us," which got it removed from the bible due to supposed anti-Semitism. Even if they hadn't gotten their books confused, they clearly failed to examine this claim before making it: Matthew 27:35 reads "And all the people answered 'His blood be on us and on our children!'". Moreover, the claim that the Sinaiticus has Jesus "angrily" heal a leper in its version of Mark's gospel is incorrect. This account is found in the Codex Bezae, not the Sinaiticus. Very poor research.The Cosmological ArgumentTo correct Con's tautology to reflect what I actually said: what begins to exist must have been created. This does not apply to God.Krauss manages to fulfill the claim of "something from nothing" by redefining "nothing" at his leisure. Space, time, energy, and matter are all things required for Krauss's initial conditions. I can't argue this science as well as I'd like either, but it doesn't take a PhD to recognize a semantic bait-and-switch. Either nothing is nothing, or it is something. It cannot be both.The Moral ArgumentIn 2 Kings, Elisha is approached by a gang of fifty-ish "young men" (KJV's translation as "children" is a poor one) who mock and harass him. The taunt "go on up" likely refers to the "death" of Elijah, Elisha's predecessor, which could easily make the comment a threat to Elisha's life. We also don't know whether anyone was killed, as the bible only says that they were attacked.A petulant child may think his morality superior to yours, but that does not make it so. Thinking your morality superior to God's does not necessarily make it so either.Con's sources do not offer evidence of morality, but kin selection. A number of studies, notably the ones conducted by anthropologist Joan Silk, have indicated that primates will not offer aid to primates they don't know. It makes sense to help one's kin group, but it does not make sense to help another's kin group at the expense of your own, which humans routinely do, and see as morally imperative.Resurrection of JesusI don't have the characters to discuss the rising of the saints in Matthew 27, so I will refer to a source [2].If Jesus claimed to be God and predicted his resurrection by God's power as evidence of God, then yes, I would say that points to God rather a lot.The Jews were a mostly illiterate orally-traditional culture, so few written records is to be expected, and the attack by the Romans in AD 71 could potentially have seen the destruction of any records that did exist.Con fails to address the evidences for Gospel reliability that I previously stated, opting instead to compare them to Tolkien.Hume's error is declaring that no one has ever experienced a miracle “in any age or culture,” despite every age and culture reporting miracles. His argument is essentially “every testimony of a miracle is false, therefore every testimony of a miracle is false.” Forgive me if I am not overcome with awe at this pronouncement.As for Richard Carrier, the author of Con's final source, I am familliar with his arguments, and I am not the only one to find them underwhelming at best, to say nothing of his juvenile conduct towards his critics. Once again, I do not have the characters to discuss this fully, so I refer to a source [3].According to Hitchens' Razor, Con's comment about the unreliability of the Gospels can be dismissed, and as far as Occam's, my worldview requires exactly one entity, as opposed to Con's. I doubt that they will accept this as evidence, however.Sources:[1] http://www.asa3.org...[2] http://triablogue.blogspot.ca...[3] http://www.rightreason.org...