Is God a Scientist?

I'd like to respond to some of your thoughts.I'm an atheist, so to me the most reasonable conclusion is that God doesn't exist, and therefore I'm resistant to attempts to try to "meld" the scientific conclusion of evolution with God stuff.But there's really no reason you can't do it, if you find that fruitful. Since basically anything can be made up about God and held to be true - he's a Cosmic Scientist, he intervenes in human affairs in undetectable ways, etc - the only avenue you open yourself to criticism is your understanding of the facts of evolution. So far you don't seem to have any huge misunderstandings, but I invite you to ask questions about the science if you want to know more.Nobody can really tell you you're wrong about what you think God is like, except for the complete lack of evidence that God even exists. But I'd like to respond to a few of your thoughts, if I may: I guess I would point out that there are deep qualitative differences between the world's religions. Jews do believe something different than Christians, Buddhists do believe something different than Hindus and Muslims, etc. So I think that the idea that God somehow told them all the same message is a somewhat dubious idea unless you have a very clear idea of what that "universal" message is in the first place. I mean, those religions don't even agree on how many gods even exist. I think you do the ancient peoples a disservice. While they were certainly ignorant of the great scientific discoveries we all take for granted now, that ignorance wasn't the result of diminished mental capacity - just a coincidence of time.Certainly ancient peoples had very sophisticated understandings of things that were complex like science; for instance the Old Testament describes a system of laws, punishment, and justice that is very complicated and sophisticated. Medieval theologians described an entire ecology of angelic and demonic beings, a vast hierarchy of heaven and hell every bit as complicated as, perhaps, modern physics.So I simply don't think it's the case that ancient people were too dumb to know about microorganisms, for instance. They didn't know about them because they hadn't been discovered yet. Had they been revealed by divine knowledge, a system of God-taught science classes, who's to say that they wouldn't have caught on? They were certainly able to deal with a lot of other complex things.I think the Bible, like all religious texts, simply reveals the best efforts of humans to deal with the world around them and the big questions of life - all on their own. I don't think it was a divine effort to communicate scientific information to poor benighted savages who were too backwards to understand it - because I think they would have understood it. They certainly understood plenty else. Why would God have DNA? Moreover - dinosaurs lived in a vastly different environment than we inhabit today.

While there's certainly plenty of religious conflict, I think you've missed the main conflict - religion vs. reality. There is much that the world's religions hold to be so that just isn't. Probably the same way the early Christian message was received - viewed as heresy by many, but viewed as truthful by others.Christianity survived. The early Christians certainly weren't telling people what they wanted to hear, or pulling punches to avoid persecution.So I still find it pretty specious to suggest that they had to "cover up" what they knew (or what God knew) about genetics and evolution - the reason that the Bible doesn't describe evolution and genetics is because those things were unknown at the time, because men had not discovered them yet. As a former Catholic, I'd like to point out your error here. "Immaculate conception" refers to Mary's conception by her parents, not her gestation of Jesus. (That's the "virgin birth".) Modern fertility research doesn't provide for "immaculate conception"; Mary was conceived the usual way, according to the dogma, but the Holy Spirit intervened so that Original Sin was not passed onto her, rendering her a sinless vessel for the eventual birth of Jesus.Modern fertility treatments probably don't provide for virgin birth, either, actually. If a couple appeared at a fertility clinic before they'd even attempted intercourse they'd be laughed out of the office. Not universally. Hindu and Buddhist theology hold that the world and universe are essentially eternal, and existence is a vast unending cycle of karmic rebirth. And, of course, it's impossible to find any universal concordance on any moral issue among the world's religions. Any conceivable moral question has been answered both ways by religion.The most obvious characteristic of religion, one that becomes obvious when the world's religions are juxtaposed, is that there's no unifying principle. There's little similarity to the stories. Since it's all make-believe, different religions make up different stuff to believe. What makes you think God is beyond our intelligence? Is it possible that the only reason you don't understand what God is, is that you're starting from faulty premises about God? Namely, that he's an actual, existing being?Understanding cannot proceed from faulty premises. Have you ever considered that that might be your problem all along? Not that God is beyond human understanding, he's just currently beyond yours? What "genetic laws" are you referring to? There has been no such flood of the Earth. Had there been life on Earth would have been completely extinct. There isn't even enough water on the Earth to flood the Earth. This isn't a flood thread, but you should know - it's well-known that the flood is a myth, not something that actually happened to the world.

The evidence is that there is no evidence; absence of evidence is evidence of absence. (What else would be?)

No.It's a position of incredulity; because it's most reasonable to be incredulous of claims that have no credibility.It's not an argument from incredulity, because the argument is not "I don't believe it; therefore it's not true," the argument is "there's no evidence, therefore I don't believe it." The incredulity here is a conclusion, not a premise. You do know the difference between conclusions and premises, right?Having incredulity, being incredulous about incredulous claims, is nothing like actually making an argument from incredulity. And it's very telling that you can't seem to see the difference, but I guess it's the sort of mental gymnastics that lead to the agnostic position of special evidentiary rules for a God they don't even believe in (just in case, I guess.)

Based on what evidence do they conclude an unknowable God? That the claim has to be taken on faith is sufficient to refute it for reasonable people. It's always reasonable to reject conclusions that are developed without any recourse to evidence. That which is made up is almost never true.Just like a book made up out of random words is not likely to describe the accurate anatomy of the human body, conclusions based on making things up are so astronomically unlikely to be right that we can reasonably reject such endeavors wholesale.Surely no reasonable person can dispute that making things up is not a path to truths.