God Stuff It looks like we re getting bogged down in details just like I feared we would I think none of the arguements we are using haven t already been catalouged over at talk origins I m not retreating in fact I had some responses ready but they got wiped out in a combination of edit confict and a malfunctioning kvm switch I m suggesting we put this section on the backburner and try something different I ll try to rewrite my responses when I have time We ve looked at the underlying assumptions of science Why don t we do the same for the creationists Sounds great Theistic realism is a primer i ve been working on Why do you believe in God Yet another edit conflict I m probably going to be editing this page between about 1 PM to 5 PM Central time Could you avoid editing this page during those hours I d like some elbow room to compose and review my replies I know it s your talk page but You stated earlier that you don t believe that the existance of God can be proven Do you wish to qualify this statement If not why do you believe in something you can t prove Why are you giving special preference to a book You yourself say that the Bible is not infallible Yet you maintain that it is very accurate Let s take a look at that The earliest books in the bible were probably written sometime after the Exodus Any events related in the bible before that date are based on oral histories The Book of Genesis is no more than a compliation of oral histories that were current at the time Genesis was written Furthermore we know that a literal interpertation of Genesis is wrong at least in some cases To give only the most glaring example according to a literal interpertation of Genesis we shouldn t even have a fossil record 10 000 years wasn t that the date that one guy worked up is barely long enough for fossils to form We have samples of non fossilized remains older than that Yet even after sections of the Genesis account have been falisified you still try to maintain a theory that s as close to the Genesis account as evidence will allow Some would say closer than Why For events that happened about the same time as the Bible was written the Bible is reasonably accurate It is biased As you say the purpose of the Bible is not to convince Its purpose is to serve as a record of God s involvement with Man for the instruction and enlightenment of future generations of believers It is pro God biased Bias aside which is after all inherent in any human produced writing the Bible is still not as precise as it would be if modern historians were writing it Without precision accuracy is an accident The Gospel writers didn t cite sources We have no idea what part of the Gospels were observed first hand by the writers which were directly taken from primary sources and which were based on urban legends That gives the Gospels a certain credibility gap I don t think there is any doubt that the Gospels are true in general but what details are right and which ones are wrong Compare this to current scientific theory The current theory gains its credibility from the backing of the consensus of the college of scientists This is a body of highly intelligent people experts in the field with access to all the data the human race has compiled over the last few thousand years including the Bible Intelligence and knowledge might not be the same as wisdom but there is plenty of that to be found also More importantly these people are highly individualistic cantankerous and downright cranky These people invented the flame war They are willing to fight bloody intellectual war over any detail no matter how obscure Getting them to agree on anything is a minor miracle in itself But out of all the thousands or millions of life scientists it it hard to find a single one who believes that the theory of evolution is not in general correct There is a lot of discussion on the details but in general the college has moved on to other issues If scientists have a fault it s that they hate being made into fools This gives them a conservative bent but probably less of one than the average human Even so that resistance to change tends to create a preserve of old ideas which can burst back onto the scene in a mutated form That is why Darwinianism didn t completely die under the onslaught of Orthogenetics Instead a new form which combined with the theory of genetics was developed and eventually became the dominant theory This conservative bent may cause s