It takes more faith to be an Atheist than a Christian

Pro's burden of proof consists of proving that atheism itself requires more faith than Christianity, while I will argue against this motion and show that Christianity requires more faith than atheism, but after I offer my rebuttal to Pro's arguments. REBUTTALPro asks, "Yet isn't it true that the same people who don't believe in God, already believe in something which nobody can see? "Rebuttal: Pro here commits a loaded question fallacy that implies that atheists don't believe in God because they can't see Him. Truth of the matter, atheists lack belief in God because they argue that there is no empirical evidence or good arguments for His existence. Pro argues, "From a very young age we are conditioned as children to believe in a story made-up about 150 years ago by a man who was qualified in theology. Of course the man is Charles Darwin and he introduced the theory Evolution. "Rebuttal: You don't have to be an atheist to accept the theory of evolution, so I don't see how this is something against atheism. It seems to me that Pro is committing a fallacy of equivocation between the word "atheist" and the word "evolutionist. " Furthermore, the theory of evolution is one of the most supported scientific theories in biology. I don't see how that particular theory is a bedtime story, to be honest. Pro claims, "It is asserted that human ancestors evolved from apes and became primitive grunting hunter-gatherers. And are the bone fragments of 'Lucy' the evidence for such a "human prehistory"? Where are the transitional fossils and the missing link, they should have been found by now, right? If you look into it, you may find that all the best candidates for the missing link are dubious bone fragments. "Rebuttal: According to the Smithsonian National Institution for Natural History, "From skeletons to teeth, early human fossils have been found of more than 6,000 individuals. With the rapid pace of new discoveries every year, this impressive sample means that even though some early human species are only represented by one or a few fossils, others are represented by thousands of fossils[1]. " This sounds like a massive collection of fossils with complete and detailed fossils, not "dubious bone fragments. "Pro argues, "In any case, unless time travel becomes possible, we can only make observations and measurements here and now in the present, and from such observations we can extrapolate or theorise about what happened in the past. But there is no way to confirm it, as we cannot do an experiment on the past. Hence we can say that we all have faith-based belief about history. "Rebuttal: Pro seems to miss an elemental point in epistemology which is called "studying the traces. " If a murder occurs, it is not true that we cannot confirm it if we are not there. If Pro is talking about certainty, well, of course, we never have full certainty, but neither do we have full certainty if we observed the event as we could be hallucinating, for example. While it is true that we never have full certainty, that does not at all imply that accusing a murderer with conclusive evidence is equivalent to having a dogmatic, superstitious belief with no empirical evidence whatsoever. It seems apparent that certainty and reasonableness vary in degrees between what is supported by good evidence and what remains unsupported. Pro claims, "Sir Richard Dawkins has not been able to give a clear example of a mutation that led to an increase of information in the genome, and nor has an example been forthcoming from any scientist. Some convoluted explanations have been forthcoming, yet surely these are hardly proof. "Rebuttal: I take it that Pro is not familiar with academic researches and experiments that show the exact opposite of what Pro claims. According to (Zhang et al. 2002), RNASE1B mutated from RNASE1 having an increase in genetic material[2]. According to (Brown et al. 1998), parts of yeast, after 450 generations, mutated further with an increase in genetic material[3]. According to (Adami et al. 2000) and (Schneider 2000), the process of mutation and selection is generally observed to increase information and complexity [4,5]. Pro argues, "And from history, we do have eyewitness accounts about Jesus of Nazareth, which corroborate his resurrection from death. "Rebuttal: Eyewitness accounts are supporting evidence when we're dealing with normal claims, not with spectacular claims such as rising from the dead. To draw further on this, suppose my friend told you that he saw me smoking yesterday. This is a normal claim so you might accept his testimony. Now suppose he continued and said that a man nearby shot me ten times in the head, and after a few minutes of being dead, I rose up and smiled and asked him to do it again. Would you really accept an eye-witness testimony at this point? In conclusion, spectacular claims need more than eyewitness testimonies. There are also thousands of stories carried down by hundreds of so-called "eyewitnesses" in other religions like Sikhism, where you have a Guru that is sliced in half and yet able to recite poetry from his two sliced halves. Nevertheless, such eyewitness testimonies do not suffice in establishing those events as historic or even well-supported. Pro remarks, "And these same eyewitness accounts also provide his family history, which can be traced with earlier records back to King David, and ultimately back to the first man Adam, created by God. So at which point in the 77 generations from Adam to Jesus does the record fail? "Rebuttal: The genealogy of Jesus is different in each gospel, explicitly contradictory and clearly incomplete, which makes it plausible that the genealogies were based on made-up names and the names of historic figures used in a desperate attempt to link Jesus to King David (to fulfill the Jewish literal convention to Messianic prophecies) and back to Adam(who we doubt even existed). According to many Biblical scholars, such genealogies are blatant fabrications[6]. MY CASEI'm an agnostic atheist and I don't find myself with many unsupported assumptions such as those spectacular claims and assumptions in the Christian faith. I have some faith in the empirical method, but that's about it. I lack belief in angels, demons, gods, prophecies, resurrections, godly interventions, miracles, ultimate purposes and judgment days. Instead of believing in spectacular claims with little or no evidence, I suspend my judgment and remain undecided although I'm practically an atheist. How again is that being faithful? CITATIONS[1] humanorigins. si. edu/evidence/human-fossils/species[2] Zhang, J. , Y. -P. Zhang and H. F. Rosenberg, 2002. Adaptive evolution of a duplicated pancreatic ribonuclease gene in a leaf-eating monkey. Nature Genetics 30: 411-415. See also: Univ. of Michigan, 2002, How gene duplication helps in adapting to changing environments. [3] Brown, C. J. , K. M. Todd and R. F. Rosenzweig, 1998. Multiple duplications of yeast hexose transport genes in response to selection in a glucose-limited environment. Molecular Biology and Evolution 15(8): 931-942. [4] Adami, C. , C. Ofria and T. C. Collier, 2000. Evolution of biological complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(9): 4463-4468. [5] Schneider, T. D. , 2000. Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Research 28(14): 2794-2799. . http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov...[6] R. T. France, The Gospel According to Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary (Eerdmans, 1985) page 71.