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That is so right Lalabelle. Religion isn't about logic, not really anyways. It's more about faith and believing. You might be able to debate some aspects of a religion but whether God exists is a difficult subject. I know, for myself, I can't really explain the reason I believe in God, I just do. In a debate you usually need to provide proof and reasoning for your standpoint but with something as intangible as faith for reasoning its very hard to do.

I may be wrong here, however the freedom of philosophy is that you do not need to hold up to the rigours of scientific or mathematical proofs.

Philosophy is open to arguments based on feeling and emotion and other intangibles - within philosophy you can make arguments based on perceptions.

For example you can argue philosophically that the word is but a hallucination of yours and none of it really exists. This is pointless scientifically as it cannot be tested or falisified - however it can be a very interesting debate, can you make it stand up to scrutiny as an argument? What impact would this have on the world if it really was true? Would things continue when your mind if not there, or does your mind fill in the blanks and create everything on the moment?

I won't continue that line as it is a new topic, however to bring it back here - how would you argue for a deistic gods existence? You could make assumptions or examine implications about how this would effect the universe and then test these as a non-rigorous proof of your chosen gods existence. This is within the bounds of philosophy and quite workable.

Another example: Let us assume the universe is created by a perfect god, we can imply from this that a perfect god could only act in perfect ways because any imperfection they make would reflect on them as imperfect. This means that the universe itself must be perfect. Now if we can show that the univere isn't perfect we can disprove this perfect god.

So in conclusion I think the 'does god exist' debate is quite viable and you can make assumptions and arguments - it will make for more of a discussion and more interest if you are willing to make assumptions, willing to accept other peoples assumptions for the sake of discussion and also if you are willing to accept that your asumptions or arguments may be 'proved' wrong.

It seems to me that if a God DID exist it would sort of be created alongside the universe, birthed together, player and plaything. But that's just random guessing. It doesn't seem to me that everything NEEDS a cause... if I asked you the cause of nature being so pointlessly confusing, why it's not just a very clear and simple "wake up, work, die" existance, what's the answer? Some things just are, I guess.

To question is human...to know is unnatural...

I don't know and I don't think man kind ever will either.

I'll debate... of course god doesn't exist. One has to be very silly to believe in such pipe-dreams.

A simple saying : Its better to believe in god and find out there isn't , then not believe and find out there is . There's always going to be something higher and as well lower in the evolution chain then us.