The Bible is not history. It's a poorly plagiarized collection of myths stolen from other cultures. Ross probably doesn't believe in a lot of stuff that you hold to (he believes Noah's flood to be a local event not a global one).

Eternal life sounds awfully boring. I'd rather be useful with the time that I have.

Thanks for playing.

     IS there a mod who could straighten out that blotch of a post into the format I actually tried to write it in.

 You veterns all know I've done this before, apologies all around for doing it again.   Otherwise send it off to Air head Vanessa as is.

   edit&nbsp Thanks to who ever pulled off the miricle in the above post.

Science is inherently testable.  If it ain't testable, it ain't science.  Theism is untestable and, therefore, it must be accepted on faith alone.

Evolution doesn't disprove God's existence -- it merely makes God unnecessary as an explanation for the existence of humans and the amazing variety of life on this planet.

Darwin's theories have been tested and retested over and over.  His theories have been modified where necessary where the results of those tests made such revisions necessary.  Evolutionary theory has grown beyond Darwin as a consequence of 150 years of research and testing of Darwin's theories and the theories spawned by his work. 

In the long run, I trust science.  Why?  I trust it because I understand the safeguards built into the scientific process.  For example, every scientific study submitted for publication is examined by other scientists who examine it closely for problems.  If they miss something, their reputations will suffer for it, which gives them an incentive to be careful.  After it is published, it is studied by other scientists who would love to be able to prove that the original study was flawed.  Finding someone else's errors and finding that which is closer to the truth is one way for an up and coming scientist to make a name for him or herself, which provides incentive for them to not let shoddy work get past them.

Scientific methods of investigation have sophisticated means of catching errors and dishonesty.  Sure, errors are made and some scientists are dishonest but they get found out and exposed.  The same is quite obviously not true of theologians.

That's a really, really bad analogy. 

First, I don't reject belief in the existence of God because of evolution and I doubt that there are many who do.  I reject belief in the existence of God primarily because of a complete lack of testable evidence supporting the claim that God exists.

Second, as I already explained, the nature of scientific investigation means that scientific theories and discoveries are subjected to intense scrutiny, criticism and, where necessary, revision or even rejection.  The records of all these studies are available to anyone who is serious about examining them.

Third, the recorded "history" of Jesus is rather shaky.  Many biblical literalists claim that the gospels are eye-witness accounts.  There are at least two problems with this. 

The first is that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable.   The human memory is "plastic", meaning that it changes due to suggestions, expectations, desires, etc.  The gospels were written decades or more after the events that they supposedly depict.  It is simply unreasonable to expect that anyone's recollection of events would be accurate and fair after so long an interval. 

The second is that the gospels simply do not qualify as eye witness accounts.  For one thing, we don't know who wrote them; the names attached to the gospels are there because of tradition, not because there are good reasons to think that someone named Mark actually wrote the book of Mark.  Annonymous testimony is not acceptable as evidence in any rational forum.  In the case of scientific papers, we know who wrote them and we know who is to be held accountable for them.

Even if that is true, it tells us exactly nothing about the reliability of that "history". 

Incorrect.  That is according to the gospels, not according to history.  Most biblical scholars understand that the gospels were not written with the intention of recording history but, rather, for the purpose of refuting what the authors considered to be heresy and promoting what the authors considered to be correct doctrine.

Sorry, but your fantasy about what the Bible actually is does not correspond well with reality.

My denial of the existence of God is based primarily on the complete lack of testable evidence support the existence of God and secondarily on logical issues such as the many ways in which the Bible contradicts itself and contradicts reality and reason.

LOL!  Oh, my.  You are quite deluded.  Either that or you've swallowed whole what some preacher spewed at you without bothering to think about it for yourself.  Quite sad, really.  And funny, too, of course.

I'm quite familiar with the work of Hugh Ross.  He has indeed done some legitimate science.  However, I can strongly refute his primary argument for God very, very simply.  Basically, he presents a version of the argument from design.  Essentially, he claims that the odds of conditions in the universe and on the Earth being suitable for life are so small that God must necessarily have intervened to make it happen. 

Such claims suffer from a fatal flaw: to calculate the odds against something happening, you have to know how many possibilities there are.  Unfortunately, for Ross, there is no way to know how many possible configurations there are for the universe and its physical laws.  Maybe the possibilities are nearly endless or maybe it was only possible for it to turn out the way it did -- there's no way to know. 

That alone is enough to sink Ross.  He'll never admit it, of course.  He is committed firstly to faith and only second to reason and evidence.

Sorry, but I understand that emotional experiences are chemical in nature and, having evolved in an environment very different from the one in which modern humans live, are often misleading and should be examined rationally.

You mean the emotional.  Evangelism would be absolutely nowhere without emotional manipulation.  It's quite shameful, really.

Correction: that is where you experience the fantasy that your Sky Daddy not only exists but actually notices and cares about you.  Grow up; God is just pretend.

May you develope decent reasoning skills.

Ack.  I made a typo.  There should be no 'e' at the end of develop.