Does God exist? The proposition is that there is a Christian God who is omnipotent and all-loving.

Clearly the onus is on the person arguing the affirmative - God's existence - to present the evidence. However, I will present one argument against God's existence, then rebut several typical arguments for the existence of God. Argument against God: Atheism has the best explanation for God's hidden nature. The evidence for God is slim, the evidence for Christianity is slimmer still. Even if you claim, as I'm sure you do, that there is strong evidence for God then my question is this: Why is it not stronger? The fact that the majority of the world is not a Christian is evidence against Christianity. God could have made it more evident that he exists and that Christianity is also correct. For example, he could have included some fantastic scientific discovery - evolution, cure for plague, cure for cancer etc. What about if Jesus, instead of only sticking around for 40 days after resurrecting had stuck around for longer, perhaps 100 years, 1000 years still hear now. Then there would be little doubt as to his existence. This probably strikes you as a stupid argument, if everybody knew God existed then there would be no room for faith. Yet, faith used in this context - believing in something without knowing it to be true and against reason - is, by definition unreasonable, so to use it is a reason is wrong. So, God's hidden nature is compatible with atheism and not theism. To summarise: Premise 1: God would not want people to suffer. Premise 2: Atheists (or anyone who does not share your beliefs about God ie people of a different religion) will suffer through hell, or lack of reaching some higher state of happiness. Premise 3: God could have made everybody believe in Him by presenting proof of His own existence, on a par with the evidence for, say, gravity. Premise 4: Not everybody does believe in a God Now onto the second stage of my opening statement. I will rebut the cosmological, or first cause argument. The argument is this: Everything has a cause, what is the cause of the universe, it must be God. First of all, this is a classic 'God of the Gaps' argument - we don't know what caused the universe, or even if it has a cause. After all, the tautology of causation could not apply to the universe as a whole, it could be infinite. Secondly, the classic response to the argument is 'What caused God', a theist replies by either saying, 'This is an unanswerable question', in which case why not just cut out the unneccessary link, and use the philosophical tool 'Occamm's Razor' to get rid of the unneccessary assumptions. Or, they will respond, 'God does not require a cause; He is infinite', again, why not just leave it as the universe does not require a cause, one must not add any unneccessary complications and assumptions to a problem. Another popular argument for God's existence is the anthropic argument. It goes, the whole universe seems benign, we, on earth, are incredibly lucky to be here, the improbability of there being a planet with the correct conditions to foster life, especially life with consciousness', God must, therefore, have created it. However, the logic is once again spurious, it commits the 'lottery fallacy', (putting the cosmological argument aside), the universe had to turn out one way or another, so the mere fact that it happened to turn out this way, producing such extroadinary life, is no more surprising than winning a massive lottery - someone had to. Let alone evidence for a God, how much more improbable must God be to create this universe than the improbability of the universe creating life. Also, as the great philospher David Hume showed in his wonderful work 'Enquiry into public understanding', we must always believe the extroadinary over the miraculous. And that concludes my opening statement.