There is proof for the existence of God

I ask the indulgence of the audience for the novelty of my opening argument. It would have been far more interesting to begin so rather than come in with one of the standard arguments for God without knowing what my opponent accepted as valid, and us both waste space debating on that which has been debated myriad times. Now, let us proceed to the argumentation proper. P1. The only historical evidence for the existence of a person is ultimately either primary witnesses (they who saw the person), or secondary witnesses (they who heard of him, or saw his effects).P2. My opponent believes in Genghis Khan et. al. because of the adequacy of the evidence.C. My opponent accepts witnesses as proof of a person`s existence.P1. The previous conclusion. P2. There are far more witnesses of God than there are for Genghis Khan.(P2 elaboration): Indeed, no primary source account for the existence in persona of Genghis Khan exists as far as my research has found, and if there were, there would be very, very few. The descriptions and depictions of him are contradictory. Rashid Al-Din, who never met him, asserted that he had red hair and green eyes. An artist in Taipei drew his most famous portrait as a typical Mongol. The Chinese drew Temujin as a chinese emperor, the Arabs as a turban-wearing bearded sultan, the French drew him as if he were an Ottoman, with turkish features. Now, on the other hand, that a God who is anthropomorphic, and when the rest of his physiognomy is described, generally with white hair and beard, exists is independently verified amongst several cultures. Viracocha, in Peru, Quetzalcoatl in the Aztec belief. Particularly interesting is that Peruvian indigenous people do not grow heavy beards, which is how Viracocha is portrayed. Then there are the many personal witnesses for God and His description, beginning with Daniel and continuing to John. Few people have seen God, many more have spoken with Him and His dicta as, for example, recorded in the Bible are consistent across that entire work even if the circumstances in it described are perhaps not. More on this in future premises. P3. It is not necessary to believe everything written about God for belief in Him.(P3 Elaboration) My choice of Pythagoras, seeing your belief in him, was deliberate. Indeed, there are many fantastic, many strange things written about God in many cultures and many religions, myriad being contradictory; Pythagoras as well. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu...)This work also highlights how scant the evidence for the existence of Pythagoras actually is. "The authenticated facts in the history of Pythagoras are so few, and the sources from which the greater part of our information respecting him is derived are of so late a date, and so untrustworthy, that it is impossible to lay down more than an outline of his personal history with any approximation to certainty. The total absence of written memorials proceeding from Pythagoras himself, and the paucity of the notices of him by contemporaries, coupled with the secrecy which was thrown around the constitution and actions of the Pythagorean brotherhood, held out strong temptations for invention to supply the place of facts, and the stories which thus originated were eagerly caught up by the Neo-Platonic writers who furnish most of the details respecting Pythagoras, and with whom it was a recognised canon, that nothing should be accounted incredible which related to the gods or what was divine. (Iambl. Adhort. ad Philos. p. 324, ed. Kiessling.) In this way a multitude of the most absurd fictions took their rise -- such as that Apollo was his father; that his person gleamed with a supernatural brightness; that he exhibited a golden thigh; that Abaris came flying to him on a golden arrow; that he was seen in different places at one and the same time. (Comp. Hdt. 4.94, &c.) With the exception of some scanty notices by Xenophanes, Heracleitus, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we are mainly dependent on Diogenes Laertius, Porphyrius, and Iamblichus for the materials out of which to form a biography of Pythagoras. ""In any case, it is known that Pythagoras traveled to Egypt about 535 bce to further his study, was captured during an invasion in 525 bce by Cambyses II of Persia and taken to Babylon, and may possibly have visited India before returning to the Mediterranean. Pythagoras soon settled in Croton (now Crotone, Italy) and set up a school, or in modern terms a monastery (see Pythagoreanism), where all members took strict vows of secrecy, and all new mathematical results for several centuries were attributed to his name. Thus, not only is the first proof of the theorem not known, there is also some doubt that Pythagoras himself actually proved the theorem that bears his name." (Britannica)There is far less evidence that Pythagoras was the first person to discover the Pythagorean theorem than that, to draw a religious analogy, Jesus resurrected. Jesus had several first hand accounts of his resurrection. Do they conclusively prove that He resurrected? Perhaps not, but it`s more than Pythagoras` discovery of his eponymous theorem has. C2. One who believes in such historical figures is epistemologically inconsistent if he does not accept the rudimentary fact that an immortal anthropomorphic being, possessor of some measure of supernatural powers, who has been seen by many people with varying distance in both time and space one from another in some fairly consistent ways, indeed exists. Allow me to anticipate your counter arguments. Counter-Claim #1: The truth of God would contradict science! P1. We don`t know how God`s powers work, nor what they even are (see: P3 of C2). P2. Even if it did, that wouldn`t be ipso facto evidence of its falsity. (elaboration) My relating to the Royal Society in the 18th century of how I spoke to a man in China, I still being in America, by means of a handheld box would surely draw scorn and scientific critique, especially if I could not explain how a phone worked. C3: God does not contradict science, and even if he did, it would not defeat necessarily evidence for HimCounter-Claim #2: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! P1. I can arbitrarily decide that anything is extraordinary, and it gets even less dependable when I start making comparisons. (elaboration)I could think it is more extraordinary that the genius of a single man was able to unite a nation of steppe nomads, devise a strategy to conquer nearly an entire continent of hundreds of millions, with an army of at most 200,000 soldiers, all without ever being seen by any writer to corroborate his existence, than that man went to the moon. Ergo, I could demand evidence at least as compelling as that of the moon landing (or at least the minimum standard to prove a moon landing). I have never seen his feat duplicated in all of history. I could find odd he was buried in secrecy. I therefore conclude that Genghis Khan was simply a legend perpetuated by the Borjin clan that composed the high officials of the Mongol Empire, and that the "historical Temujin" was likely far less impressive. There is a lot of evidence to say he really was who they say he was, but it is a very extraordinary claim, so I am allowed to demand even more. If my opponent does not find this particular example convincing, any number of feats by historical figures I can decide are extraordinary because they were never repeated and strike me as very improbable, and write off much of what we accept as true in history on this basis. C4: Counter-claim #2 proves too much. By not establishing objective evidentiary criteria for the reality of a historical figure, much of history would be thrown out, including several of the persons you claim existed. Final thoughts:If a man stabbed his friend he was known to be very close and amicable with, wiped the knife and otherwise carefully left no scientific evidence, yet was witnessed stabbing him, receiving blood spatter on his shirt, and wiping the knife by three people who did not know one another, and was seen entering the scene of the crime with a clean shirt and leaving it with a bloodstained shirt by five more, he would be convicted.If Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and ten other New Atheists were that jury, they would convict him. They would not say of that bloodstained shirt "Just because we can`t explain how it got bloodstained, doesn`t the witnesses were correct that he stabbed him.". They would not say "Well, the conclusion that he stabbed him is unfalsifiable, so we can`t send a man to life imprisonment.". neither would they say "Science does not prove this crime", and so acquit him. But only because the existence of God would mean a change in their own lifestyles, rather another`s, then they raise such a stink about "extraordinary claims" and such. Worse still, in the criminal realm "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is the standard of evidence, meaning they need more certainty than "more likely to be true than not", which is all belief in God requires. They would send a man prison or to death on less evidence than they demand to accept the reality of a distant, invisible person. This was, by the way, how awarded cold case analyst and former atheist J. Warner Wallace converted to Christianity. He used those same techniques he would use to establish the veracity of crime witness statements, on the Gospels in the Bible, and found that they met those standards. We all have the right to use the consequential heuristic. Pythagoras` existence or non-existence means very little to me in my life, so I have less reason to dispute his reality than if his reality meant I needed to stop eating beans (Pythagorean belief) else be punished. That`s acceptable. But don`t pretend people who are not biased against God`s reality are somehow less because they share not in one`s bias.