A response to W L Craig's "Five Reasons why God Exists". I wrote this a while ago, but have only just got round to posting it here.

The link is to the article in question.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/13/christmas-gift-for-atheists-five-reasons-why-god-exists.html

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.

Essentially, this boils down to “I don’t know how the universe came to be, therefore God” – or rather “therefore my specific interpretation of God”. Argument from ignorance. Fallacious.

2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.

This amounts to same argument; “I don’t know why the conditions of the universe are such that life (humanity) can exist, therefore God.” Fallacious.

3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.

Again, an argument from ignorance. “I don’t know why morals exist or how they came to exist, therefore God.” Fallacious. Besides which, even the most cursory reading of the Christian Bible shows that God is very far from a moral being such as human societies have defined morality.

4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. 

There ARE no “historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection”; there is nothing but second or third-hand hearsay evidence. Craig assumes that the Biblical accounts of Jesus are factual; that is begging the question. Fallacious.

5.  God can be personally known and experienced. 

Argument from revelation/anecdote. Fallacious. People suffering all manner of delusions, from paranoid certainty that the government is watching them to belief that they were abducted by aliens, know and experience these things as being true. That does not mean that they are. Just because Christians sincerely believe that they have “personally known and experienced” God does not make that objectively true.

Even if we take all of Craig’s arguments above at face value, they STILL do not constitute convincing evidence for the existence of the Christian God; only that one or more deities exist. That is the problem with all theist apologetics; they can be used to argue for the existence of any God or pantheon at all.

Essentially, either no God exists or they all do.