Originally Posted by SecretMethod70

Shanifaye, please don't take offense to this, because I am genuinely curious, but I don't gather that you're one to believe that god or the devil are "testing" or "tricking" us with science. You also don't strike me as one to attribute some vast atheist conspiracy to the scientific community as a whole (that would be one gigantic, well-structured conspiracy!). If this is true, and you don't believe those things, why do you believe 1) that a flood killed the dinosaurs, 2) that the earth is not millions of years old, and 3) that humans, essentially, have not evolved? (I realize you say you believe species evolve, but if homo sapiens has always been homo sapiens, there hasn't been much change in our evolution at all.)

Are religious leaders somehow more equipped to understand rocks, bones, and other things than scientists who dedicate their lives to the study of very specific things are?

How do you explain the fact that, with the exception of a very small handful of people in the scientific community (who almost always have questionable conflicts of interest between their science and their evangelism), the overwhelming majority of scientists accept and are relatively certain of things such as the age of the earth and the evolution of humans?

Are hundreds of thousands of scientists all wrong? All unable to properly conduct experiments? All less interested in the truth than they are interested in promoting disbelief in a literal interpretation of the bible?

What about the majority of world religions who also see and accept the scientific findings and incorporate such findings into their belief structure, such as the Catholic Church which is fundamentally opposed to Intelligent Design and, for all intents and purposes, accepts evolution as fact (granted, fact set into place by god), and has cautiously done so since Darwin published his Origin of Species?

How is it that when experiments have repeatedly shown, with more and more accuracy, and an increasing accuracy which almost always moves even further away from the literal-biblical approach, that these many thousands of experiments, and hundreds of thousands of scientists doing research, are all wrong?

How is it that religious leaders, most of whom have simply gotten their information from reading a single book and choosing to believe it literally, are more equipped at discerning scientific truth than the scientific community which is hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people strong?

Finally, to touch on something that was said in the other thread, if theologians are not more equipped at science than scientists (which I would hope you'd agree to - which would you prefer to deliver your baby, a priest or a doctor?), and you are admittedly not a scientist, why would you not defer on scientific matters to the incredibly overwhelming opinion of people who actually are scientists?

I don't mean any offense by these questions - I'm honestly curious as to the answers. I just see no way to reject the overwhelming scientific evidence without resorting to explanations such as, "god's testing us," "the devil is tricking us," or "all those hundreds of thousands of scientists hate religion and are on a crusade against it." So, I'm really curious to hear what your reasoning is, especially if it doesn't fall into one of the three aforementioned categories.