••

It's not a case of "not lining up". It is a case of various scriptures completely contradicting what science has discovered.

Take the Bible, since it contains the stories most familiar to us here in the West. At almost every turn, the tales told in the Old and New Testaments contradict science -- and no "just" physics, but also geology, biology, astronomy, mathematics... the whole raft of accumulated knowledge.

Accumulation is the key, of course. When the Bible was written, humanity did not know as much about the universe as we do now. In order to explain the "unexplainable", people simply made stuff up. Which is fine, if it helps people be less afraid of the world and nature -- but, unfortunately, there is a basic flaw in human nature which compels people to try to force their stories on others. Religions wrap themselves in a mythology of love and comfort, when in reality most are about power and control.

As I have said many times, the principle point upon which science and religion can never be "reconciled" lies in the fact that science is all about questions, and religion is all about answers. When science is proven wrong, it becomes a cue to ask deeper questions, to reanalyze the data, to dig and search and ponder. When religion is proven wrong, as often as not it becomes a cue to start killing people.

++++

This is why I have atheistic friends who look at me and consider me to be a near-moron because I'm willing to actually consider the possibility of a "higher power," while at the same time the more fundamentalistic of my religious-minded friends tend to look at me as some depraved, heretical, sicko "non-believer" who just might decide to copulate with their pets without warning.

••

You need different friends.

You also need to accept the "considering the possibility of a higher power" is not an intellectual exercise. It is, in fact, the opposite of an intellectual exercise. As I have said before, when the question is "who or what created the universe?" and the "answer" is "God", it's not an answer at all, merely a refusal to ask the next question. "Who or what created God?"

When I have been asked a similar question, I have tended to turn it back on the one asking. Rather than how I would respond when confronted by God, I ask how the believers will respond when they discover they picked the wrong god. How will they answer to Zeus, or Odin, or Krishna?

Blaise Pascal illustrated the narrow view of Christian believers when he said, almost 400 years ago, that it was safer "betting" that God existed, since if one was wrong one lost nothing, but if there was a God and one denied him, one lost everything. No thought there that there might be gods other than the one promoted by the Bible.

It is amusing to me that pride/hubris is considered a mortal sin in the Christian church, yet the church itself is founded on the ultimate hubris: the assumption that it, and it alone has all the right answers.

I pretty much agree with you here, JB -- which is why I seldom use the Bible (or Koran, Torah, etc.) as the "religious" basis that must be aligned with science in order for it to all "make sense." 

As I said, the Bible (and all others) are undeniably the work of MAN.  Yeah, maybe some higher power "guided" the writing of those tomes, but for me that's just another aspect of "putting God in a box" and minimizing any higher power by further attempting to anthropomorphize that which is both NOT human and also unfathomable to our small intellects.

This is why, for me, Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching contains more "religious truths" than what I can typically find in the Bible . . . which is why my closest and most enlightened liberal Episcopal friends lovingly refer to me as the resident Episcopal/Taoist/heretic.  Nothing like spiritual wisdom in the form of the word of (a) man NOT masquerading as "religion" and the "word of God."

:-)

I have to say it REALLY does make me chuckle when both the atheists and the fundamentalist use almost the EXACT same arguments, and cite the EXACT same sources (as you referred to the Bible here) to put forth arguments for why the OTHER side of the coin CAN'T be right. 

It also amuses me to find avowed atheists who are WAY more knowledgeable than scripture and religion than those religious fundamentalist types who CLAIM to be Christians, etc.  Kind of makes me wonder who really IS seeking God, and who feels a greater need for the comfort that knowledge of a higher power would bring.

;-)

"I don't want to miss out on heaven due to a technicality."

What cowardly, appeasing little mind-slaves believers tend to be.