> >Archeology. Science. History...
>
> Are all tainted by their authors, are all constructs of our desire to find patterns, correspondences and systems of cause and effect.

It's easy to say this in a philosophical debate. It proves my point. But when you come down to real life, where things actually matter, it doesn't hold up.

You win the lottery. You get two billion dollars before taxes because the little air-blown numbered balls fell in the right way. Do you rejoice? What would you rejoice about? All you did, when you get right down to it, is found a pattern (a particular number) in the midst of chaos (tiny numbered ball tornadoes). The numbers themselves are subject to human interpretation, and money is too, for that matter. What is money, other than a means to create more order in the chaos around your personal living space -- or someone else's? This whole situation is not only tainted by human intervention -- it's a human *invention*.

Science. The burner on your brand new electric stove is set way up high, and the burner is glowing red. Your scientific analysis of the situation tells you it's probably hot, and if you touched it, you'd burn your fingers off. You suspect this because of the scientific knowledge that bright glowing red things are generally hot, that past scientific experiments (with a black burner as your "control" and accidentally touching a red one your "test case") have confirmed the hypothesis. But science is tainted, right? So go ahead and touch that burner!

History. Was the Declaration of Independence written in 1776? How can you be sure? You weren't there. Dozens of separate eyewitness accounts have confirmed this, but those accounts are tainted by the humanity of their authors. Its writing had ramifications even more significant, but hey, how do we even know the Revolutionary War happened? Because we're not a part of England anymore? But who says we ever were? Let's face it. There's no *proof* that any of that ever happened. Our human desire to resolve and find order amongst observed facts simply conjured up that whole Revolutionary War thing to appease our sanity, right? We can see that the Declaration of Independence appears to be an "old" document, we can see that it appears to have been written by people, we can see that we are the same race as the British and speak mostly the same language. Archeological evidence (also tainted) suggests we have not been here much more than a few hundred years, while thousand year old castles still exist in England. Certainly if we were to be gullible enough to believe the Revolutionary War story, it would add order and sense to a lot of different observable phenomena. But can you prove it ever happened?

In a *purely* philosophical debate, such as you are attempting to have about the existence of God, it would be foolish to accept that the American Revolution happened without continual question. Your very own philosophical argument might just as well suggest that the American Revolution never happened as that God doesn't exist. If you can truly discount history, science, and archeology with a simple word, you can invent any reality you want and legitimize it. That, in fact, is why I think philosophers like to philosophize so much. It isn't motivated so much out of a desire to think sensibly but rather a desire to legitimize any train of thought one cares to.

But when you get right down to it, whether you're debating the existence of a war or the winning of a lottery ticket, it doesn't hold up. It either happened or it didn't. It exists or it doesn't. It does not make logical sense or practical sense to debate *why* things are the way they are when the question of *what* things are is still up in the air.

I submit that there is more than enough historical, scientific, and archeological evidence to make the existence of the Christian God -- the personable Being who was manifest on the Earth in the form of His Son Jesus Christ -- every bit as probable as the happening of, say, the American Revolution. (I think that's why many atheists resort to philosophical arguments -- because those fields can be discounted.) And the reason I mention the Bible, rather than another religious book, is because the Bible has the unique ability to legitimize itself on its own. Impossible, you say? You'd be surprised in how many rational ways it can do that. For one, there are prophecies in the Old Testament (that number in the thousands) that are fulfilled in the New Testament. (Historical and archeological evidence corroborates the order in which the books were written.) For another, there are scientific insights in the Bible that were not common knowledge at the time of their writing but have since proven correct. For a third, the Bible exhibits an internal consistency that would be mortally impossible to achieve under the conditions it was written -- over a period of hundreds of years, by dozens of human authors in varying cultures and economic classes, and so forth. As I implied earlier, I will elaborate on each of these points and more at a future date. But for the time being, suffice it to say that while I admit that you can't prove the existence of God by the "unreasonable" scientific standards of today (good line, Issachar), there *is*, however, more than enough evidence to make it beyond probable that the Christian God does, indeed, exist.