We'll try this again...Even atheists must concede that...?

of course we don't have the answers, that's not conceding anything, i'm not sure who you think is saying that... the point of not believing in god is not believing you know, for me it's accepting ignorance rather then having faith in something just because it's a definitive 'answer'.

as a scientist i can say that there's heaps we don't know. i think the reality is probably beyond human comprehension, kind of like the colour of ultra violet. but not knowing doesn't equate to god, be it the christian type, unicorns or spaghetti monsters.

for millennia we didn't know about gravity, and then there was arguments about the actual mechanisms involved, but apples weren't suspended in air pending the outcome. once an electric light would have been herald as a miracle, and people use to think the brain was for temperature regulation.

we haven't reached the hight of what we will discover and end the end humans don't have to know everything, they never will, i don't think existence was 'created' to be conquered either physically or mentally by us. at least we can know we need to ask the question and even if we will never find the whole answer, searching in and of itself can be informative and rewarding

edit: scientists don't find "solutions", they make theories, sometimes those theory can be utilised to solve a problem. gravity is a theory (it's sometimes called a 'law', which is basically a theory we're really confident in). the whole point of it is that science never says we know something for sure, because we can't know everything.

- theories are put forward to explain observations (an apple fall to earth because of gravity)

- predictions are made based on the theory (if i drop and apple it will fall)

- predictions are tested (i drop an apple)

- if the theory is disproved (the apple floats!) it's discarded.

- if the theory isn't disproved (the apple falls) it's maintained

the theory doesn't become a fact, we can't perform every test or make every observation (we can't drop every apple), we can be very confident, but all we know for sure is that apples in the past have fallen when we drop them.

if god were the theory to explain everything we would never get anywhere, god is not testable because the 'theory' of god cannot be disproved, therefore failure is disprove it cannot be considered 'evidence', that where the whole burden of proof issues comes in, which is the point of the flying spaghetti monster analogy. if my theory were the flying spaghetti monster is pushing the apple to earth with his noodly appendages, how could i ever disprove that?

i don't 'concede' god is a possibility, because i've always acknowledged it. but i haven't seen this "plethora of circumstantial evidence for God, many witness accounts, etc" and in then end circumstantial evidence is circumstantial because it can't be tested. so yes, god is an option, so is the spaghetti monster, but i'm not going to 'believe' in them, and i'm not going to stop looking for answers which can stand up to scientific scrutiny, if one of those answers were actual evidence for god i would look at it.

if we just accepted that everything was because of god we would get nowhere. medicine, technology, physics, biology, etc all exist because people decided that 'god did it' wasn't good enough. one of those people i admire was a man called mendel who was a priest and the worlds first geneticist, before anyone knew about dna, genes or evolution! i'm sure he had faith in god, but i didn't stop him looking for other explanations for why he's pea plants looked different.

maybe some of the questions we just can't answer are unanswerable because god really did do it, maybe we just haven't got to the point where we could know, maybe we aren't capable of understanding the answer, but if were to stop looking, say it's god just because that works, then belief would be impose by ignorance and there would be no faith

I agree. Even Atheists accept stuff by faith. We cannot understand where God came from because we think in time. God is not bound by time. He is infinite. He is eternal. And our simple human mind cannot fathom that. But just because we can't prove or we don't understand doesn't make the Bible false. Nothing in the Bible has been proven false. History and Science continues to prove the Bible true. And many of those who go out trying to disprove the Bible, come back believing the Bible and that there is a God.

"you don't have to believe in the God that I and many Christians have come to know personally."

First, I state that you present a fallacy. The God that you claim yourself and other Christians know personally is but a projected mental image, a concept perpetuated by faith, or rather blind faith. You then state: "But there must be something beyond our understanding, do you agree at least to that?" Well how can something you claim to be beyond our understanding be known by you and other Christians? Therefore, you are bound in a concept within your mind which projects its own subjective world and idea of God. Call it an ephemeral dreamworld.

Do not believe for one second that I am an atheist because I am not. There is something immutable in which the manifest consciousness transpires, but it cannot be labeled. All worldly knowledge arises from a foundational, prerequisite knowledge. This essence is all-inclusive, non-personal and prior to the arising of thought and concepts pertaining to God. This nameless, formless knowledge permeating all things animate and inanimate cannot be conditioned by words. The mind cannot grasp "That" which contains it. In order to understand the highest knowledge or for lack of a better term "God Consciousness", the transitory mind must be transcended and higher consciousness must be held. The perception of duality must be transcended and when one relizes the state of "jivanmukta" they are liberated while living. Beings who exist in the highest state are very rare indeed and I am inclined to state that few if any Christians alive today are of this quality. There are many good faithful Christians, but faith is just faith and I will go out on a limb and state that few Christians are free from the grips of duality, thus they are not in "God consciousness". They worship a God from the level of the mind, a mere relative fantasy of a personal relationship with "That" that illuminates consciousness and is Absolute and non-personal in nature. From it all sentient beings experience the concrete sense of being here now.

I suggest you drop your kindergarten concepts about knowing God personally and see it for what it really is: "faith." Faith is nice, warm and fuzzy, but faith must be transcended by "jnana" (knowledge) and until then you will live in a state of delusion mired in limited concepts. Because you are ("I am") the world appeared. First the vital breath was there and then the world. No you=no world. Go deep into the sense "I am" prior to words and self-limiting concepts generated by the ego. Ask; Who am I? I imply that you are not what you take yourself to be and that you are unborn and have no religious affiliation. From you the Absolute the mind arises and with it it's dualistic concepts including the notion of religion and God.

Mmm, not really. As long as humans are around science will continue to make sense of things. Science is still VERY young, humans have only been around for 150000 years, and the world is 4.54 billion years old. There is a hell of a lot we don't know yet but that doesn't mean we will never know. I certainly see no need to attribute anything in this world to anything supernatural. Everything that is accountable in this world so far can be explained by natural laws.

edit:

Actually you are wrong, god would not be 'natural' it would be supernatural. It would mean natural laws were defunct and gods existence would completely destroy the established course of things, including all the natural laws which govern our universe. A universe WITH a god would be very different to one without.

Scott, you're still arguing the "God of the Gaps".

I do not concede that our origin is beyond our ability to prove. We just haven't done it yet. There was a time when a number of things were beyond our ability to prove. Did that mean it was unprovable? Of course not. We continued searching and eventually came to answers.

I "believe" that eventually human kind will be able to know everything as long as we don't go extinct or something. We have the ability and we've proven that over and over again.

I don't think your way of saying, we can't know something, so it must be God is good at all? If we all took that school of thought....as you do, then we'd never discover anything ever again! Can't you see that?

Why should any concession be involved? Most atheists have no problem answering that they don't know. We have made leaps and bounds in the last two centuries in scientific progress. If we continue at this pace, I have no doubt that we will soon have some more solid evidence of abiogenesis and a better understanding of it. As Dawkins says Science may not know but they're working on it.

Antony Flew used to be one of the famend atheists of the 20 th century. Many rode his coat tails. I'm amazed on the small quantity who declare to have heard of him, however I'm now not amazed in any respect that the revision of historical past is on our heels. When the empirical proof you call for is earlier than your eyes you are going to discover the dying of the religion you're required to have, and there might be no approach to arrive what has been located.

No,can't agree on that. I don't see any reason why it should be called "beyond our understanding". Just because we don't understand it now doesn't mean we never will.

Besides,the whole concept of "beyond our understanding" sounds to me like"I don't feel like finding an answer".

Maybe, but not necessarily.

If there is something beyond our universe and/or something before the universe started, it wouldn't have to be something we couldn't understand. If there is such a thing beyond the space and time that we can perceive (and there's no reason to assume that there is), I'd rather get an idea of what that "something" is before I assume that it must be beyond human mental capacity.

Yes, we don't understand exactly how life started. We don't completely know what dark matter is. There is indeed things that scientists have yet to discover. But it appears that you are supplementing these unknowns with something supernatural. That has a 100% failure rate in history.