Debate: The God Debate: Does he exist?
Side: yes

If that is the case, then why does Christianity require faith?Everything requires faith. If you come across a bridge that you've never traveled on before, you need to have faith that it is going to support you. You can examine the aspects of the bridge and make a conclusion, but you still need faith. Christianity requires faith because if you accept God to be true, you accept that he has given man the free will to choose. In order to have free will to choose you cannot have incontrovertible evidence of God's existence otherwise your free-will to choose is now taken away from you.The historical components of the bible are juxtaposed to the mythical, allegorical, and metaphorical components. Can any of the supernatural elements be corroborated? No. The parts of the Bible that can be corroborated are not being disputed here.You can accept that the writer of Luke was so diligent that he correctly makes note of the direction of the wind in specific places and the depth of the water in others but then say anything he wrote regarding the super-natural is false. I would argue that because these writers were so meticulous in there recording of facts that the Bible should receive the benefit of the doubt in this regard.And do these happen to be anecdotal confirmations?Feel free to do your own research. There's a lot of archaeological confirmation of many of the people and places.I'm sure you don't.Hence the inability to provide one? I'm an open-minded person and generally respond well to examples.What is offered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.I do like Christopher Hitchens, although he often seems so angry! A very clever guy.Never hear of Aristotle then have you? Should we conclude that Aristotle's teachings are the result of divine inspiration?I've heard of Aristotle. I hope you're not claiming that his writings are more influential than the sayings of Jesus?The original study was double blind, but even assuming that the results are completely bunk, it isn't a stretch in the least to say that the things people have faith in varies from one culture to another culture.That's the beauty of science, you should be able to recreate such an experiment, however if you read the link I attached it definitely was not a double blind study. At least the accounts that got to the media anyways.The fine-tuning argument, is nothing more than a God of the Gaps argument.How is that God of the Gaps? It is making the reasonable assumption that in order for ALL of these constants, some of which if they were of by one part in 10^120 would mean we would not exist. I would call these multi-verse theories "Naturalism of the Gaps" because it seems anything will be proposed before scientists accept that there is only one universe and it was created by the big bang, which has theological implications.At the very least, the rise of life from inorganic material is entirely possible, and many aspects of this are demonstrable.I think you're over-estimating the amount of evidence here. If that were true they'd be able to do it right now, right?Urey and Miller showed that Organic Material can rise from inorganic materialIn an atmosphere that was no where near what the Earth would have been like. At that point you still need to have the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up and create a protein molecule. And that would still be a long way from being a living cell!Scripps researchers showed that self-replicating organic Material can rise from ordinary organic material.As I mentioned above, creating organic material is not creating life. There is still no evidence that LIFE can spring from non-life. Ignorance of current scientific literature is not an argument. This has already been explained.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968000499014838 Arrogantly posting science articles from 2000 which have been basically refuted is no better. "As researchers continue to examine the RNA-World concept closely, more problems emerge. How did RNA initially arise? RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under really plausible ones."- John Horgan, science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology"This discussion… has, in a sense, focused on a straw man: the myth of a self-replicating RNA molecule that arose de novo from a soup of random polynucleotides. Not only is such a notion unrealistic in light of our current understanding of prebiotic chemistry, but it would strain the credulity of even an optimist's view of RNA's catalytic potential."- G. F. Joyce, L. E. Orgel Professor, Departments of Molecular Biology and Chemistry @ Scripps