Well written Paper Laura, and great posts everyone. A lot of different viewpoints written out by some articulate and perceptive people. It's funny how everyone's views differ slightly no matter how closely they resemble each other. In the last few hundred years religious people and their respective denominations of churches have become a bit more level headed and open minded; talk like this used to get people burned as heretics. We exist now in a time of science, where people know the world is "round" not because it's common opinion touted by the well-educated, but because there's multi-million dollar satellites in earth's orbit capable of taking HD photos of individual blades of grass. As such Religion has had to grow up and change in the face of emerging theories.

In my honest opinion, having either a strictly religious or a purely scientistic view of reality is a basically flawed position. There are unanswered and extremely important questions on both sides of the fence, and anyone who claims to have an truly informed opinion on the empirical veracity of either one is ignoring some pretty major inconsistencies. Both come down to a simple choice: can you relinquish your mind's need to substantiate facts with hard evidence, or do you believe only in what is finite, measurably and fills some volume in what's referred to as time-space. Put more simply, can you have faith or do you need proof?

In my experience religious people take much more on faith. Many are quite content to let things rest by stating (perhaps wisely) that God has a plan and that He is primarily and immeasurably Good and Just. Anything else is wasted thought, why question what you hold through faith to be true? Conversely, people basing their "faith" on science neglect the questions which science has not found(and I believe cannot find) the answers to: for example, what is rational thought and self-awareness, what is morality and why are we affected (or plagued) by it, or on a bigger scale, where did all matter in the universe originate. Of course thought and emotion are measurable phenomena and it's true that our brains carry out these instructions. But where does the feeling originate? It's true that everything we've found in the universe shares the same composite materials, but where did it all COME from?

A Christian might say that it was all created by God. But what is God? Is it a being? Does it reside somewhere in the depths of space? Or is there some alternate reality that exists alongside our own, one in which time doesn't exist and the governing laws of the universe don't apply? And if so, what is the meaning of our reality, of our very existence? Add to this the search for life in the rest of the universe. Am I to believe that in a universe that's quite possibly infinite there is nothing else but floating rocks? No life exists anywhere else? And if it does, why doesn't the Bible make any mention of it? And then there's the historical angle. If the world was created with human beings already fully "evolved", then were they alive during the time of the dinosaurs? Why do we dig up fossils of giant reptilian beasts from the Cretaceous Period but no humans? And more to the point why, if carnivorous instincts weren't originally built into the animals in the Garden of Eden (as evidenced in the Bible a few times) did a Tyrannosaurus have jaw musculature perfectly suited for ripping flesh from bone, and why were its teeth naturally serrated to more efficiently cut through meat?

An atheistic scientist on the other hand would have to concede, I imagine, that the universe (by which I mean all the matter in the universe) has always been and will always be. To cope with the immediate feeling of helplessness and infinitesimal worth in the scheme of fourteen billion years of continued existence he/she would adopt perhaps and existentialist outlook, or an agnostic/realist one. To cope with the inconsistencies of the evolutionary theory and the meager evidence of the big bang theory (of which I am a believer) he/she would have to make allowances in the area that science is as yet imperfect and the answers to these questions are logically answerable in some way or another. And in the face of the essential meaninglessness of life as a whole, it becomes the responsibility of each person to craft a meaning for their own place in the world.

I believe that the entire root of existence is the perception of time, and that the universe by humanity's very existence is subject to its laws. The "Garden of Eden" was a verbal rendering of the state of the earth, before self-realization was introduced and with it time and guilt, which is a byproduct of retrospect. Before original sin, there was no sin in my own estimation. The fruit eaten by "Eve" and then "Adam" was an "apple" picked from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. "We" (I don't think I was there) rebelled against God by giving ourselves the ability to differentiate between right and wrong, thereby creating Good and Evil. And this is my biggest gripe with religion at the moment; that if we had no concept of right and wrong before the fall, how are we guilty of original sin? My other main gripe is that the God that I read about in the Old Testament doesn't seem like an all-knowing benevolent and loving savior, but more like an overzealous, overbearing, tyrannical and brutal egocentrist.

The answers to the overriding questions of existence are as plentiful as they are subjective, and holding to one and ignoring all others is the very definition of narrow-minded. If it turns out that my unwillingness to subscribe fully to a world view that I don't completely understand condemns me in God's eyes, then I guess I'm just a fool to the core. But in my opinion no view can ever be fully understood by a single person, and as Mr. Mcauliff quoted Darwin to have said, "...the whole subject of God is beyond the scope of man's intellect." It's my view that no matter if someone believes basically in Science or in Religion as the sole explanation of creation, many things will have to be taken on faith. Science is no closer to discovering the meaning of existence than the Bible is to painting a suitably concise picture of human history and the advancement and evolution of its various cultures. No physical evidence exists to prove Heaven or Hell exist in the same way that no irrefutable evidence exists to prove man evolved from microbacteria in the still-forming earth's new-formed oceans. At some level, everything must be taken on faith.

Sorry for the long-winded post, it's 4am and I'm wide awake... cheers.