Does God exist

As my opponent has not provided the parameters of our debate, I will attempt to do so here." 1.) "God" shall refer to the Christian god as described in the Bible and popular theology. As the debate refers specifically to "God", rather than "A god", I feel I am justified in this assumption." 2.) The standard of proof shall be one of persuasiveness, rather than conclusive evidence, given the nature of the discussion. 3.) Pro shall hold the burden of proof. And 4.) This round and Pro's next shall be for opening arguments and, for Pro, rebuttals. The next two shall be rebuttals and conclusions. I shall leave my last round blank to keep us even. Arguments 1. The problem of evil. Quite simply, an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity would not allow the sort of atrocities to occur that do, in fact, occur. One of the principal defences to this argument is the one of free will. Id est, God granted us free will, he cannot therefore be considered responsible for what we do with it. There are several problems with this, foremost among them being that an omnibenevolent God holding no qualms with limiting our "freedom" in other ways (for example, we cannot manipulate matter with our thoughts, nor fly without the aid of machines), would, conceptually, not have had any problem with making us fundamentally incapable of evil. 2. Free will is incompatible with omniscience. If god knows all that has happened and will ever happen, He knows what you will choose to do and how it will work out before you ever make the choice. Thus, causality is violated and it would be inaccurate to claim you ever had a "choice" to begin with. Since all events are therefore predestined, there is no free will. Thus, either (a), God is not omniscient, one of His essential characteristics, or (b), we do not have free will. If A, the god as defined does not exist. If B, as we have no free will, any punishment for "sins" we commit would be completely arbitrary. Arbitrary punishment is inconsistent with omnibenevolence. Therefore, if B, He is not omnibenevolent and therefore the God as defined doesn't exist." 3. A short refutation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The KCA suffers from several logical flaws. For ease of reference, I shall reproduce Wikipedia's post of it: Classical argument P1 Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence; P2 The universe has a beginning of its existence; Therefore: C1 The universe has a cause of its existence. Premise one is unwarranted. While most things that do come into existence do so by way of some cause or other, any evidence we present to that effect is necessarily inductive in nature. Inductive reasoning draws generalities from specific examples. Because of this, however, we cannot create an axiomatic generality (say, all birds are black) without access to the whole set of things to be generalized (birds). One single case to the contrary (say, a seagull) defeats the axiomatic statement. Thus, we need only find a single example that contradicts the statement in order to defeat it. It has been observed in quantum mechanics that particles can pop in and out of existence at random(1). These particles obey no thus-far observable cause. While it cannot be ruled out that there is a cause we have not yet observed, it casts doubt on the axiomatic nature of premise 1. Premise 2 is also unsupported. While the current iteration of the universe "began" in the big bang, whether the matter that composed it was created only then, or existed infinitely far in the past in other forms cannot be stated with any certainty. Conclusion 1, even if the premises are somehow found to be axiomatically true, the conclusion does not necessarily point to the existence of God. Rather, His position could be filled by any intelligent creator not exhibiting the other attributes assigned to God, or a naturally occurring phenomenon that does have an eternal existence. I look forward to my opponent's arguments and rebuttals. i