Biblical God exists.

I'm going to begin by responding to my opponents counter-arguments from the previous round, before I go on to advance a couple of arguments of my own.RE: Faithfulness of DisciplesPro had originally argued that the willingness of the disciples to die for their beliefs constitutes evidence that their beliefs were in fact true. As I have pointed out, this is a fallacious argument since it is possible that someone is willing to die for their belief and for their belief to nevertheless be false. Pro mentions that this indicates a "logical margin of potential error"- a rather curious way of characterizing an argument which is simply not valid; if the conclusion (that the beliefs of the disciples were true) does not follow from the premise (that they were willing to die for their belief), then one could grant the premises and still deny the conclusion- thus it cannot be a successful argument. That someone believes something and is willing to suffer torture and death for their belief does not create a presumption that the belief is in fact true, it only suggests that this person did indeed believe it, and must have done so with a great deal of conviction. There is, however, a rather large gap between conviction and truth- they are not the same. RE: Explosion of ChristianityIn the previous round I mentioned several crucial historical factors that led to the proliferation of Christianity; Pro has objected to one of these factors in particular, but importantly, did not respond to my claim that historical circumstance provide an adequate explanation for the popularity of Christianity in general. But even on this point, Pro is mistaken; while it is true that in the first few centuries Christians suffered persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire, it is also true that Christianity became adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine around 312 AD*. Being adopted by what was at the time the most powerful and influential empire in the entire world was certainly a fateful and crucial step in the rise of Christianity. But we also should mention the discovery of the New World and European colonialism; Christianity was brought to the New World and the colonies by Christian Europeans, and the native populations were (often forcibly) converted to Christianity. So we have here a perfectly adequate explanation for the "explosion" of Christianity; thus, the argument that Christianity must be true due to its popularity is also non-sequitur.Reliability of the GospelsI'd just like to briefly point out that several of the claims Pro has made are highly dubious; he claims that the Gospels agree with each other "95 percent of the time" and that the points of divergence are mere "minor spelling variations and sentence structure"- a claim which is simply not true. The inconsistencies between the Gospel reports are widely documented, and concern matters of fact more often than not, not simply grammatical differences.** Pro also cites Sir Ramsay as claiming that Luke's credibility is beyond reproach- a claim that is rejected by most Biblical scholars; not only do many scholars consider Luke to be not historically credible, there is a widespread consensus that the author of Luke is unknown, and is not Luke the Evangalist, as tradition would have it; many scholar believe that whoever did write Luke could not have been any associate of Paul.*** Indeed, it is the opinion of quite a few prominent contemporary Biblical scholars that none of the Gospels were written by the disciples whose name they bear and that none are credible historical sources of information****.Standard of Evidence and the Absence Necessary EvidenceIt should be relatively clear that different types of claims require different amounts of evidence; if my brother tells me he went for a walk yesterday his testimony alone should suffice as evidence because this is not implausible; whereas if he claims he flew to the moon, I should require a good deal more evidence. Similarly with the Bible; we are considering reports of a man (Christ) doing things which are, so far as we know, not physically possible- rising from the dead, walking on water, and so on. In order to consider these prima facie highly implausible claims to be true we should require more evidence than we would, if, for instance, it was claimed that Christ visited his aunt and brought her some flowers. Different claims require different evidence, and the more implausible a claim seems the more evidence is required to substantiate it.Now, there's a familiar phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"; the idea is that just because we have no evidence for something doesn't mean that that thing doesn't exist or didn't happen- e.g. at one point in time humans had no evidence for the existence of atoms; this absence of evidence was due to our lack of technology, not because atoms didn't exist. On the other hand, there are cases where an absence of evidence is evidence of absence; when the evidence that is absent is necessary evidence. Necessary evidence is evidence which could not fail to exist if the claim in question were true; if I claim that I drove to Disneyland yesterday, the additional miles on my odometer are necessary evidence- if I did drive to Disneyland, there must necessarily be a good deal more miles on my odometer now than there was previously. If there is not, it is not possible that I drove to Disneyland (at least in my car, anyways). So we must ask what the necessary evidence for a particular thing happening or being true would be, and see if we do indeed find that evidence. Now, with respect to the truth of the Bible (the existence of the Christian God, the divinity of Jesus Christ and the factuality of the Gospel reports claiming Christ performed miracles) there would seem to be some necessary evidence which turns out is absent- thus suggesting that the Bible is not true on these crucial points. Some things which we would expect to see if the Bible were true-A Moral World Order: Given that the Bible describes God as being good, merciful and just, and as being the divine creator and intervener, we would expect a moral world order to exist unfortunately what we find is the exact opposite- the evil and greedy often flourish, the innocent and the good suffer, and the universe as a whole seems indifferent to it all.Fulfilled Prophecies: If there is a God who knows everything then we should expect some of the many prophecies in the Bible to come true- however, to the extent th we can even make sense about what exactly such prophecies predict, they don't look to be accurate. And, of course, we must mention one of the largest errors of all; Christ's failed prediction that the world would end during the lifetime of his disciples (Luke 9:27). And yet, we're still here.Miracles: We have never observed a miracle in a laboratory, or caught one on tape, or had one performed in front of a large crowd of impartial witnesses. All reports we have of miracles are anecdotal, and problematic. Moreover, if the miracles that are purported to have occurred did indeed occur, we should expect more documentation. It is highly curious to suppose that Christ actually rose from the dead, and was observed by many people- all of whom failed to ever record what they saw; we would expect the opposite, i.e. an abundance of eyewitness reports of this event which, even to people in first century Judea, would have had to have struck people as unprecedented and extraordinary. Alas, we do not, we only have the Gospels. *http://www.bbc.co.uk... **http://www.infidels.org... ***Theissen, Gerd and Merz. 1998, Ch. 2 and Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2010 “Biblical Literature” and Fizmyer. 1981-1985, and as many others as care to pick **** This is what Ehrman argues in Forged and Jesus, Interrupted, and elsewhere.