The Existence of God is unlikely

I simply do not have the space to say everything I would like, so I will begin with two observations: first, my opponent has repeatedly made assertions that things like free will favor the existence of God. As the saying goes, what can be asserted without argument can be dismissed without argument. Further, plenty of atheists have written about everything he has mentioned and (in my opinion) adequately shown how such things are no trouble for naturalism. [1] I'll reference some literature in the comments section, I invite curious readers to look into my references and decide for themselves. When discussing the necessity of God Con seems to be flirting with or alluding to the Ontological argument. I don't have space to discuss the flaws with that argument, so I recommend readers simply google it to see the problems with it. A major theme in this debate has been skeptical theism-the idea that we limited beings cannot say anything about what unlimited god might do. I suppose the classical theist God would be 100% rational. Humans would be less rational, but obviously we are more rational than not. I suppose we are between 60-99% rational (one must presuppose being more-rational-than-not, as being less than that is self-defeating because if you couldn't know if you were rational enough to know that you were irrational). An 80% rational human might not always predict what a 100% rational God would do, but it would not follow that he could never predict the actions of a perfectly rational being or even that his predictions would mostly be wrong. Indeed, if the Genesis story is right and we are ‘made in God's image' we ought to be in a great position to understand God and his reasons for action (even if imperfectly) because we share so much in common with him. For this reason it is perverse to believe that so many creatures allegedly made in God's image are wrong about their intuition that God would create a universe for the purpose of life, an intuition shared by both atheists and most theists (as we all know from the fine-tuning cosmological arguments and such, which all implicitly assume God wants to create life). An allegedly good being like God would want to create thinking, feeling life because living things that can appreciate life are a great good. In fact, it is the greatest good I know of in the universe. "Pro. .offered a revised version of his previous argument (Which I take to be a concession). " I was not revising my argument, I was clarifying it, as should become clear in the next paragraph. "He argues that God's mind is complex in regards to the 'steps that it took to process, store, create, and link together information. ' But as I have shown previously demonstrated, God's mental self is irreducibly simple. There is only one ‘part' which engages in the one activity of thinking -- the 'I. '" I am reminded of a quote from Keith Ward: "It is quite coherent. .to suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally complex. "[2] The point that I have been driving at througout this whole debate is that thinking beings go through certain specific and complex procedures in order to be able to think and design (which requires piecing together information in meaningful ways), store information, etc. Those procedures may be thought of as 'parts' or 'mental organs' even though they are not physical parts or physical organs. Now, different sentient beings may have different 'mental organs' or their 'mental organs' may function with varying efficiencies. The totality of 'possible minds'(that is, all minds that are logically possbile) consists of different combinations of 'mental organs' and different efficiencies of these organs. Very few of the number of possible minds would even resemble God, and I have already given arguments showing that this leads us to suspect God has a low a priori probability of existing. I hope the argument is now clearer. "I am not presupposing God's existence. Instead, I am arguing on the condition that if God were to exist, then he would likely have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil. .. " But you have no basis for saying God "likely" would have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil. You've simply argued that God is beyond what humans can completely understand, and therefore it is *possible* that God may have some reason for allowing evil that we don't know of. What you forget is that it is also possible that God might have reasons for NEVER allowing any evil to occur which YOU cannot fathom. We have two possibilities here: Under the first possibility I mentioned God is only consistent with evil (which would not, by any means, prove he existed), under the other possibility God is inconsistent with evil and cannot exist. Naturalism is compatible with both possibilities (it does not matter if God is merely consistent with evil) while Theism is not. So as a theist you must propose the unevidenced hypothesis that there is some reason God would allow evil. Having to propose an auxiliary hypothesis like this lowers the probability of theism because it loses some of its epistemic simplicity (running afoul of Occam's razor). "Why not suppose that the cause of the universe with simultaneous with the first moment of time, such that the first act marked the beginning of time? " More importantly, WHY SHOULD I suppose your scenario is true. William Lane Craig has said a number of times that a successful piece of natural theology must be more plausible than its doubt. You've given me no reason to suppose that your conjecture here is more plausible than the other options, so your argument has not succeeded in compelling me towards theism. Further, your example of simultaneous causation (an eternal bowling ball causing a depression on an eternal pillow) proves the opposite of what you intend, since an eternal pillow might simply have a depression in it without the bowling ball, so it would not need a ‘cause'. "Computers function as they do because they have been constructed by human being endowed with rational insight. A computer, in other words, is merely an extension of the rationality of its designers and users; it is no more an independent source of rational thought than a television set is an independent source of news and entertainment. " (Hasker) No, computers function as they do because of the arrangement and specifications of their physical parts. One may ask if it is likely such an arrangement is likely to come together without a designer, but the Naturalist would point to a well-known process capable of producing things that look designed: evolution by natural selection. There is only one argument that alleges to show that Natural Selection couldn't produce reliable cognitive faculties, but philosophers have adequately shown elsewhere that this argument is flawed and that natural selection would be expected to produce reliable brains,[3] but since you did not explicitly state that argument I will not take the time to refute it. Conclusion: Winston Churchill once said, "There is nothing more exhilarating to be shot at without result. " Boy do I know what he means! Con has had the opportunity to destroy my case but he has only made it stronger by showing that he is willing to make arbitrary assumptions to keep the God hypothesis from being falsified by the data. Indeed, his attempt to make God unknowable are poor attempts to keep the God hypothesis from being falsified-by making it unfalsifiable. The idea that a rational God would create a physical universe that depended on his immediate intervention to become life supporting rather than simply making it the way he wanted it to be to begin with is not what we would expect from a rational agent. God's doing-so would be like me using gallons of water to grow grapes and make wine, only to use chemical processes to extract the water from the wine just so I could have a glass of water.