The Christian god exists

Thank you, Jerry! Definitions: After reading my opponents responses, it seems clear that we have a misunderstanding of “personal god”. Personal god - A personal god is a deity who can be related to as a person instead of as an impersonal force, such as the Absolute, "the All", or the "Ground of Being". https://en.wikipedia.org... The Axiological Argument: It is not mandatory that a lawgiver have personal contact with the governed or to be known by name. It might be that this hypothetical lawgiver, due to omniscience, perceived the necessity for moral values and built them into consciousness through any number of ways without directly interacting with humanity. To claim, that a moral law giver must be a personal god simply doesn’t follow from the premises. To be clear, I am not advocating subjective values. It is possible I was not clear on that, so hopefully this will help us avoid strawmen. Pro suggests that emergent morality (due to evolutionary processes) would be instinctual, but that is an oversimplification. Morality can be reliant on instinct – specifically empathy, but it is not itself instinct. It is our continual evaluation of which actions are best for the welfare (what is best for continuing survival) of the relevant community (family, friends, species, other species) and our responsibility to it. Pro points out an objective morality (not based on the Christian god) might be wrong. This is actually a strong argument for my point of view. Some of the moral values laid out in the Bible are now considered barbaric and immoral such as owning another human (Exodus 21:2-6), forcing a rape victim to marry their attacker (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), or stoning a disobedient/stubborn son (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). Empathetic objectivity provides a much better explanation for this change in moral perception rather than a shifting transcendental source. In regard to animals, prosocial experiments with chimpanzees support the proto-morality I mentioned last round. These experiments involved two chimps separated by a wire mesh with only one chimp having access to tokens of different colors. One color rewards only the token bearer, and the other rewards both chimps. Given the choice between rewarding only themselves or rewarding themselves and another chimp, more times than not, they chose unselfish behavior. When another chimp was not present, more times than not, they chose only to reward only themselves. http://www.livescience.com... The Teleological Argument: Pro seems to acknowledge the god posited in this argument is not a personal god. However, he bears the burden of showing the Christian god exists -which is said to be personal. This argument is irrelevant to his burden. Jerry suggests I don’t quite understand the odds, and I admit my analogy was not as “inconceivable” as the odds conjectured in his argument. However, the point stands: calculating odds on the assumption of design is meaningless - much like calculating the odds of getting a specific identification number. The probability of this universe supporting life 1 /1, after all we already know this universe supports life. Ultimately, complexity is not how we determine design. Design is determined by comparison to nature. We have no other nature to compare this alleged 'designed' nature to, and as such, claiming unnatural nature as proof of a creator is spurious. The Cosmological Argument: Much like the last two arguments, Jerry contends the Cosmological argument posits a personal god. This is simply not true. The Cosmological argument does not argue specifically for a god, in as much as it argues for a cause which might be a god. To go beyond that and suggest that not only is this cause a god, but it is a personal god is not supported by the premises. Pro picked at my virtual particle objection to his first premise saying ‘virtual particles don’t come from nothing’. This is a completely irrelevant rebuttal to my objection. His premise was “everything that begins to exist has a cause”, not “everything that begins to exist from nothing has a cause”. My objection stands. In addressing my objection to his second premise (why not multiple gods or a force of nature as the cause?), Pro chose one being over multiple beings by applying Ockham’s razor. I find this to be reasonable. However, he had no response for how the cause must be a being over a force of nature. My objection stands. The Existence of Jesus: Let us recap what Pro and I agree on, and where his argument for Jesus (god) stands. 1. We agree a man named Jesus likely existed in the first century. 2. Pro contends this same man was god, but… 3. Sources and support: Due to our agreement (see #1) some of his sources are no longer necessary. His remaining sources www.reasonablefaith.org (RF) and the Bible are still problematic due to bias and circularity. RF is an online apologetic ministry of William Lane Craig (WLC). WLC has confirmed that if given evidence that Jesus never came out of the tomb he would still believe in the resurrection in response to a question asked by Mark Smith. Additionally, he plainly stated in his book Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, “The fact is that we can know the truth whether we have rational arguments or not.” [1] Clearly, WLC’s priority is not to evidence and reason, but to his belief. While all humans may be biased, WLC embraces his bias at the cost of objectivity. As a final point regarding this source, Pro is submitting his source as his argument. However, this is not a debate between Pro’s sources and I – it is a debate between Pro and I. Pro offers no resurrection related arguments of his own and continues to leave his case unsupported. I pointed out in the last round relying on the NT as evidence for the claims of the NT is circular. Pro claims that the NT represents independent eye-witness sources suggesting that it might be able to be internally corroborated. However, this argument is flawed. The story of the resurrection is mentioned in the synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. Let us start with the synoptic Gospels: they are not thought to be eye-witness accounts nor are they independent from each other. Mark (the earliest gospel) was not a Jew as evidenced by his unfamiliarity with Jewish customs. This leads us to conclude it is unlikely the author of Mark was one of Jesus' disciples as they were Jews. Luke specifically states he has gathered together his story from other people (Luke 1:1-4) – suggesting he himself is not an eye-witness. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke rely heavily on Mark as a source. (Matthew copied 92% and Luke copied 54%). If Matthew and Luke were eye-witnesses, they would not have needed to rely on an account from someone else. Moreover, considering the shared information between these three, we cannot consider them completely independent sources. If they are not completely independent accounts, then they cannot corroborate each other. They represent one source. Secondly, The Gospel of John is thought to have been written around 85AD. Assuming the disciples of Jesus were about his age (~30yo), an eye-witness would need to be older than 80 years of age to write this gospel. Not to mention, nowhere in John does the author identify himself specifically as “John the disciple”. Assuming John was written by an eyewitness (a debatable assumption), that leaves the question, how much corroboration can an anonymous second hand source (the Synoptic gospels) provide to it? I submit little or no corroboration can be had from such a source. For this reason, the story of the resurrection needs 1st century extra-Biblical sources for corroboration to avoid submitting the claim as evidence of the claim.Summary:His first three arguments do not argue for the the god of the Bible. As I told him in the comments: Even if he were able to prove a god from these three arguments, we would not know which god he had proved. It looks as though he has focused on the resurrection of Jesus to prove his divinity, but he has provided little or no argumentation of his own and there are still issues with his sources.It looks like Pro will have the last word in this debate. I ask that he limits all his arguments to the next round since I will not be able to respond to his round 4 conclusion. Let's turn this back over to Pro. [1] https://books.google.com...