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• Deuteronomy 6:4 "The Lord our God is one Lord."

  vs.

• Genesis 1:26 "And God said, Let us make man in our image."
• Genesis 3:22 "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil."
• I John 5:7 "And there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."

- http://www.ffrf.org/books/lfif/?t=contra

So how many are there?

< STRONG There is one God composed of three persons united in substance and power, hence the trinity. (Biblical)

According to Scripture, the Trinity is the one true, living, and eternal God, who is composed of three united persons of one substance and power, without separate existence...the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Deuteronomy 6:4, Matthew 28:19, John 5:19, John 14:16, 2 Corinthians 13:14, James 2:19, [Isaiah 48:16,] and 1 John 5:7)...

The one true God presented in Scripture is not three Gods, but one. God is one in essence, but three in persons, the three persons forming a single unity. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father (Psalm 2:7, John 1:14-18, 1 John 4:9), and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son (John 15:26, Galatians 4:6).

At various places in the Old Testament, God is referred to as a unity ("I") but at the same time a plurality ("us") — e.g., Genesis 3:22, 11:7; Isaiah 6:8. Among the Hebrew names for God in the Old Testament, the plural name Elohim is used over 2,000 times. It is Elohim — the triune God — who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them (Genesis 1:1-2:22), who gave the Ten Commandments to Moses (Exodus 20), who says, "I am God, there is no one else" (Isaiah 46:9, and who is denied by the professed atheist (Psalm 14:1, 53:1). God is identified as the Father in passages such as Deuteronomy 32:6, Isaiah 63:16, and Malachi 2:10.

God is identified as the Son in Psalm 2. God is identified as the Spirit in many passages including Genesis 1:2, 1 Samuel 10:10, 1 Samuel 19:20-23, 2 Samuel 23:2, Job 33:4, Psalm 51:11, Micah 2:7, and Zechariah 7:12.

-http://www.teachingtheword.org/apps/articles/web/articleid/59439/columnid/5434/default.asp

>> OK Invoking the Trinity solves nothing.

Such an idea is more contradictory than the problem it attempts to solve. I.e:

"These three divine persons are supposed to be distinct from one another: the Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit...According to this doctrine, Christ must be his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both. The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten. Christ is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son. The Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father and Son, but he is of the same age as the other two." It doesn't make sense.

- http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/meynell.html#10

< STRONG When it says Jesus was begotten by the Father it does not refer to the Virgin Birth. Begotten means to produce after kind, not to make.

One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God 'begotten, not created'; and it adds `begotten by his Father before all worlds'. Will you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin?...We are thinking about something that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. `Before all worlds' Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?...To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set : say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one...What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

< STRONG The Trinity may appear contradictory, but it's not.

You know that in space you can move in three ways - to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two; you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube - a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares... In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings - just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. 

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Further illustrations:

1. Water can exist in three states: ice, liquid, and steam. At each phase we know it's still water. The same is true with God. God exists as The Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit. These are different "states" but they're all still God.

2. All materials are made of atoms, and each atom has electrons. These electrons orbit the center, or nucleus, of an atom, but when multiple atoms are together (i.e. a molecule), the electrons travel around all the atoms in what is called an "electron cloud." Electrons in a molecule’s electron cloud are constantly in motion, sometimes resulting in various structures for a single molecule, called "resonance structures." However...there was a catch: a molecule is every resonance structure at once, and not any single one of them alone at a given point in time. To me, this seemed to be something in the natural world that was similar to the Trinity. A molecule was actually multiple molecules at once, though not found as any one of them alone. Although I did not solve the mystery of the Trinity, I at least realized that there are analogous phenomena. - http://www.acts17.net/articles/nabeelstestimony.htm