This topic has moved on a bit since I was last able to comment. Apologies if what I say is no longer relevant.

Responding to Thorne's comments about Moses, it's quite remarkable that his first reaction is to call a non-existent person a lunatic rather than a fiction. Clearly, he feels that is a stronger line of attack against believers. I do agree with his contention that religion has no place in science classes, however. Religion should be taught in religious education classes - which should be compulsory - as it is here (or was when I went to school).

As for Pharoah's magicians' "tricks", they would have been skillful legerdemain, but they would not have been miracles. Moses's snake really was the rod transformed; the water did become blood, not simply polluted. Science could explain the trickery, not the marvels performed by Moses.

You doubt his word as a lying, mentally disturbed non-entity. But you have no faith. The faithful have no trouble in believing it and see no reason why they shouldn't.


You ask (concerning people with no opinion about the existence of gods), "What of the person who says, "I have not seen any evidence that it is so, so I do not believe it is so."

That man also does not believe in unproved scientific postulations, and certainly does not prefer one unfounded opinion against another, no matter how plausible other people think one of those opinions is and how preposterous the other

I enjoyed you explanation of how Newton's laws have been replaced to some extent by the Relativity Theories. And these in turn are under critical scrutiny now . You make the point that religions do nothing to test their faiths and beliefs. Yet there have been countless of conversions - both individual and en masse People believed in other gods before they began to worship Jehovah. Christianity started out among Jews who felt that their old religion has been superseded by the new one, and millions of pagans of different hues embraced it too. Mithraism is said by some to have been a "rehearsal" for Christianity. Islam also grew up from Judaism, Christianity and sundry pagan beliefs. Religions evolved and changed to reflect changing beliefs. Human sacrifice, for example, no longer occurs, because volcanoes no longer hold gods who need to be bought off. The Mormons represent a more recent evolution; Scientology another.

Some of those changes may be the result of irrelevant belief systems, but you have already admitted, science gets things wrong too. Where one religious belief does not work, a better one is sought.

And finally,

But still, it's all based on a foundation of nothing!
... and so is the current scientific understanding of creation: at the moment of the Big Bang, a supremely massive singularity came into existence from nowhere by bursting into equally massive amounts of matter and anti-matter (and, presumably, energy and an equivalent amount of anti-energy). For some unexplained reason (perhaps a magician's conjuring trick - there would have had to be a magician and an anti-magician, of course) lots of the anti-matter disappeared so that, after it had all been annihilated again by collisions with matter, there was still enough matter and energy left behind to form the universe.

What clearer foundation of nothing can there be?

So far as anyone can tell, atheism is no more correct than theism, and this will remain the case until god is revealed or a "natural" explanation for everything and beyond is found. It is churlish to scorn the opinions of others which do not chime with one's own. That is not to say both points of view should not be discussed, advocated and encouraged. Quite the opposite, in fact, but the naturalists must understand that there can be no natural proof of the supernatural, while believers must modify their beliefs to accord with natural reality.