My point is still to focus on the idea of truth and if faith is a good way to know what is true. Less the difference between a goose and an elk hunter and more an elk hunter sitting on a different knob and looking at the same idea with a new perspective.
Your answer, the one I asked you to review from a different perspective, is kind of nonsense from the perspective of an outsider such as myself.
It can only work if you are already a believer.
OK, I have a little more time now to answer the question posed by you, so I will take a stab and see if I can't answer some stuff for you.
Take away faith and use only truth. There are really only two truths we can go by in any discussion about God. Here they are: you are on the earth, and you are not God. As an atheist I think you can agree to those two truths.
Lets break those apart. You are here (on Earth). How did you get here. Simple truth is from your parents. But that can continue all the way back to the beginning of things, ultimately back to the "big bang theory"...all things had a beginning, and the theory is all matter in the universe started a singularity that snapped and is constantly expanding and that is how we are all here. Now to get here, there had to be multiple versions of life forms, RNA turned into DNA and all kinds of very complex mutations with complex proteins all driven by DNA changes (think changes that beget changes). The biochemistry and biological changes that had to happen to get you where you are today are so vastly complex and ,despite the best of science and our understanding, we still have no real idea how it all happened from beginning of life to the end organs and differentiation we have today.
OK second, you are not God. I think that is a pretty self explanatory truth. If any of us were God, I think it would also be self explanatory as well. I think it is safe to say none of us have seen God in the flesh.
So where does that get us? You are here, and you are not God. Back to the beginning.
In the end, we all have a belief system. You, a self described atheist have a belief system that says at some moment all the matter of the universe was "somewhere" and it magically exploded and that is why we are here today. If you have a different theory on this, please let me know, I am making an assumption on the theory of why you are here. based upon many conversations with atheists and scientists about this very topic. The leaps of belief (we can call it "faith" if you want or keep it at belief, but the semantics are exactly the same) you take to get where you are today are enormous. What collected all the matter of the universe all in the same space? What caused the snap and sudden expansion? How did the primordial soup create life? How did life go from unicellular to multicellular to differentiated organs, etc, etc, etc, etc.....the list of stretches beyond our current understanding are very large and despite knowing exactly how life exists, we still can not create life in a perfect modelled system with all the parts. There are so many aspects of your life that require so many leaps of faith, just to explain how you got here today, that to say "lets stick to truth" is an impossibility.
But on the other side, we have a historical record of a man, Jesus of nazareth, who claimed to be the Son of God incarnate. The prophets from thousands of years before Him gave writings (the old testament) which not only predicted His coming, how He would be born, but also how He would serve, how He would die, and then we have historical record of His resurrection and the first hand accounts of His living on earth after He was resurrected and seeing Him ascend to heaven. This is not faith, in as much as any historical record is a faith driven belief, this is historical record, well preserved and well documented over the two millennia since His death.
As part of that structure, the writings that were passed down in the Old Testament give a record of how the Earth was formed, who did the work, and more importantly the WHY. The whole Bible is about the why, with a little how, but mostly the why. Yes this structure requires some leaps of faith, the biggest one being that there is a God who cares about us individually and desires what's best for each of us. But the leaps of faith all tie into a singular WHY that is coherent, and all leads to the finality of Jesus and His purpose and mission on earth...to bring salvation of a fallen world and its people back to a loving all powerful God.
I won't get into the other religions of the world as they are not pertinent to the struggle between truth and faith. But the reality of it remains, in order to believe in the two truths each of us possess, there are stretches of faith in all directions. If we want to be really truthful, the stretches of faith are A LOT longer in your direction than in mine, but you can not realistically say that you don't hold on to some sort of faith structure even if you call it "science". I put science in parentheses there simply because the origination of the universe stuff is not real science, it is all theory with no real way to test, and most of it is the "best educated guess, since we are here, we got here somehow". I believe science can be done really well, but it can also be abused and cause a lot of doubt for people who struggle with truth. I am a physician, as such I have a science education and understand the scientific process a lot more than most. I also feel science will eventually be able to create life in a lab one day, but that will not exclude the possibility of God, since God gave the blueprint on how to create life. Kind of like the joke where scientists finally create life out of dirt, and God comes back saying, "make your own dirt and then come talk". Science and Chrisitanity do not have to be mutually exclusive. They actually fit together quite nicely and science gives the HOW and Christianity gives us the WHY behind the HOW.
I am sure there are parts of this that are not well written, so please feel free to ask questions or drive nails into my post. I am very willing to discuss.
