Both sides would grant that if the Old Testament is true then God exists. But it would be an appeal to ignorance by the theist to simply assert that it is true unless the atheist can prove otherwise. That is, one may not say, "I am presupposing that the OT is true until you prove otherwise." And the atheist would be committing the fallacy of denying the antecedent if he or she argued that because the OT is false, it follows that God doesn't exist. Why? Because there may be other reasons besides revelation for affirming God's existence: consider, for example, as the reasons that made Plato to affirm the existence of a kind of supreme being, which he called the Good, and the reasons that made Aristotle affirm the existence of a highest being, which he called Thought. These and other reasons may be marshaled as parts of a longer argument that demonstrates that the same Supreme Being is provident (which is what both theist and atheist mean the word 'God' nowadays). These reasons may be available to us even if we are ignorant or doubtful about the truth of the OT and NT. And for an atheist to focus on the question of scripture's veracity in the face of reasons for God that are independent any revelation is to offer a red herring.
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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