I respect your attempt to merge the best of both worlds, but I would suggest that religion does not uncover truths to ultimate causality--it creates them. Unfortunately, there is no ultimate causality to our existence. It is a happy accident based on the occurence of events that had very low probabilities of occurence, but a veritable eternity of trials for realization. We must understand that we, as humans, are a particularly fortunate species of animal imbued with a unique talent of narrative construction. This talent has provided us with a "consciousness," as well as the ability to create stories of our creation (please see Daniel Dennett's discussion of the Center of Narrative Gravity). We have been fortunate to populate this planet for, let's ballpark here, 300,000 years. This is 0.0075% of the chronological history of this planet, and 0.002% of the chronology of the universe. If you only consider the history of this current civilization, let's say, 6000 years, these numbers fall to 0.00015% of the history of the Earth and 0.000042% of the history of the universe. That, friend, is humbling.
For hundreds of years, intellectuals have searched for answers to empirical questions. What is the shape of the earth? Which revolves around which, the Sun or the Earth? How did our world come to pass? In the past, those unable to answer the question would resort to created reasons, like God, or magic, yet never once has that strategy worked faithfully. Why should our inability to answer this question at this time be answered in the same fashion? We do not resort to this type of fanciful thinking in any other instance in our lives, especially as scientists. When we see something that defies all logic of our existence, like a clever Copperfieldian illusion, we don't say "That, my friends, is magic!" We appropriately and skeptically say, "I don't know how he did it, but there has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation." Scientific progress has slowly and methodically debunked each magical theory, with religion sheepishly acquiescing. Are we truly to continue to believe, as Catholic Doctrine insists, in the actual transmogrification of the Communion Wafer into the physical cells, organelles, and DNA of Jesus Christ?
There are some popular science books about the creation of the world and I would urge anyone interested to read them. One is "Fabric of the Cosmos," by Brian Greene, and the second is "Warped Passages," by Lisa Randall. They are fantastic and eloquently summarize current theory in the creation of the universe. One particularly interesting idea is the proposal that black holes are essentially the reproductive entities of the cosmos. Because of the incredible gravitational fields, matter (and, hence, tremendous amounts of energy) is compressed to the size of a fraction of a fraction of fraction of a the period that ends this sentence, providing the energy necessary to Bang in a Big way. In fact, in the earliest fractions of seconds defining the beginning of our universe, all the matter in all the cosmos (read: every atom that makes up you, me, the Earth, the sun, and every other planet, star, and comet in the universe [please note: this matter is, itself only a fraction of all the matter in the universe, the rest of it is so-called dark matter which Conservation of Mass predicts must exist!]) was compressed to this fraction of period, as well. In less than 10^-19 seconds, the universe had expanded exponentially.
, as I'm exasperated by the absurdity of your refusal to acknowledge or attempt to counter the arguments put forth in the thread. All you do is ASSERT, issue an AD HOMINEM ATTACK, followup by CLAIMING SPECIAL INSIGHT NOT AVAILABLE TO OTHERS, then THREATEN TO DEPART THE THREAD. Maybe you're new to teh internets, but most of us have dealt with this kind of "debate" many, many times before.
