It is better to believe in the God of the Bible than to be an Atheist

Pro claims that Christianity cannot simply be the result of "chance," because it is very old. I'm not sure what this argument is supposed to show - at any rate, it is very weak. I'm not claiming that Christianity is the result of chance, I'm claiming that it is the result of cultural evolution, like any number of other religious beliefs. Parents indoctrinate their children into the beliefs that they accept, and these change over time. [1] One issue on which the Bible contradicts itself is the death of Judas. Did he hang himself or fall down and have his guts burst out? It depends which verse you choose to focus on. Apologists have come up with various stretched excuses for this but none of them really hold water from an impartial point of view. [2] Therefore, the Bible contains contradictions just like the Quran does. But even if the Bible contains no contradictions, this is really irrelevant. There is no evidence for the Christian God, so all I have to do is come up with some version of God that would send Pro to hell if it existed. The Islamic God clearly fits this description. Pro has tried to argue that the Islamic God would not send him to hell, but this is directly contrary to the verses I quoted before: "Those who deny the Book (the Quran) and that with which We sent Our messengers [are] going to know, when the shackles are around their necks and the chains; they will be dragged in boiling water; then in the Fire they will be filled (with flame)." (Quran 40:70-72) "Whoso seeketh as religion other than the Surrender (to Allah) it will not be accepted from him, and he will be a loser in the Hereafter." (3:85) I don't think there can really be any doubt that the Islamic God would send Christians to hell, given these verses. If the Quran says anything, it says that non-Muslims go to hell. Pro says I cannot use Islam to support my case, because I am comparing a God and accountability to another version of God and accountability. It should be obvious by now that Pro is just missing the point of my argument when he says this - I don't know why, since my argument is very clear and simple. He is offering Pascal's wager as a reason to be a Christian, when someone from another religion could make the same wager to him and he would have to abandon Christianity by his own reasoning. The logical conclusion to draw from that is that Pascal's wager isn't a reliable way of deciding what religion to believe in. Pro commits the same mistake with respect to my anti-God example, so I'll just repeat that the example is logically coherent and evidentially on par with the Christian God. That is all I need to establish for the analogy to work. The Christian God will send me to hell if he exists, but anti-God will send Pro to hell if he exists. The two outcomes cancel out, leaving us with no reason to choose one rather than the other. Here's the argument formally: 1. Two outcomes with opposite utilities (e.g., +1 and -1) and an equal probability of occurring cancel out. 2. The Christian God and anti-God have opposite utilities. 3. The Christian God and anti-God have an equal probability of existing. 4. Therefore, the two possibilities cancel out. Premise 1 follows from the axioms of rational choice theory, specifically the definition of expected utility. Premise 2 holds because the Christian God will send you to hell if he exists and you make one choice, whereas anti-God will send you to hell if he exists and you make the other choice. Conversely, each will send you to heaven if they exist and you choose correctly. Finally, premise 3 is true because there is no evidence for either. Pro says that there is evidence that Jesus Christ lived. Well, maybe, but that's hardly evidence for Christianity. There's obviously a huge leap between believing that Jesus was a real person and believing that all of Christianity is true. I think this is a very weak argument. A miracle will always be less likely than a natural explanation because it is a violation of a law of nature. The laws of nature are generalizations that all of our experience supports - almost by definition, there is nothing that we have more evidence for than the laws of nature. This means that a miracle would have to be overwhelmingly well supported in order to overcome the evidence for the law of nature that it contradicts. However, no miracle report actually meets that high standard of evidence, including the miracles in the Bible. They always happen in the distant past, where we cannot check them, and they tend to happen in primitive and credulous times and places. Therefore, the rational conclusion is that the miracles in the Bible did not happen. I'm not sure what Pro's point is with the jail analogy. I haven't argued that sending someone to hell is unjust (although I do think that), I've merely argued that Pascal's wager is not a good reason to become a Christian. Pro did not provide evidence for the existence of God, and he has the burden of proof in a debate, so negative atheism would be justified at this point. He also did not really provide a rebuttal to the problem of evil, so positive atheism would be justified. This contradicts Pro's claim that the evidence does not lead to atheism. (On atheism, evil exists because the universe does not care about us and has no problem causing us pain and suffering, or even death.) [1] https://plato.stanford.edu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org...