Every time science explains one of your challenges you guys dredge up something else and insist that if science doesn't already have an explanation for it, or can't instantly produce one, divine design must be right.
That may be the case with some Christians. Others, however, are delighted when science finds explanations -- that's what science is for. And that things can be explained does not frighten our faith, for we find that God made his universe quite discoverable and explorable. It is compatible with our worldview. What we do find, however, is that no scientist (Christian included) is free from bias or political agenda. You may feel frustrated a scientist who is motivated to use science to prove God. That's fair. It is equally annoying when another scientist allows her political or ideological persuasion to influence her "science."
For example, the freedom of inquiry is an honorable pillar that under-girds scientific progress. But we see a political movement that says, "if you believe in 6-day creation, you are not a reputable biologist... for what reason? because the definition of a reputable biologist is one who does not believe in 6-day creation." And so there is a mainstream politically-correct agenda, and there is social misbehavior comparable to grade 8 children fighting for popularity. And if science is anthropomorphized, he hangs his head in shame, because his students have lost sight of why he exists and are instead acting like babies while mixing in tidbits of good science.
The arguments you've advanced so far amount to the argument from design and the god of the gaps argument, with a few logical fallacies like begging the question thrown in. None of them go anywhere useful, they explain nothing while claiming to explain everything, and cutting off attempts at finding better ones. If biology had accepted the divine design explanation for the flagellar motor, nobody would have bothered looking for the real one. If you want to understand biology and evolution, or anything really about the natural world around you, religion's not the place to look.
Is it necessarily the correct strategy for a man or woman to navigate life by starting with science and using it as a springboard to answer all the big questions and from this launch his/her entire worldview and lifestyle?
I have not here, necessarily, been attempting to prove the existence of God from scientific arguments, though I do find reasonable and intuitive discussion there.
Science, in the first place, never pretended to answer the big questions, as if it were philosophy. There are people a lot smarter than me (and smarter than Richard Dawkins) who have grappled with the questions of "why are we here" and "how ought we to live," and they didn't assume that looking at rhinoceros poop under a microscope would lead them to the answers. But the likes of Dawkins have raised up a generation that somehow believes that the starting point to all the big questions and answers is science.
In practice, people form their worldviews mostly based on what their parents taught them, their social interactions with siblings and other human beings, and much thought inside their God-given faculties that (though lacking precision) in many ways transcend science, and then these people bring their worldviews into the arena of science, and they attempt to explain and navigate the worldview questions using science, as if that's where they had actually started, when we know otherwise.
Hitchens had a brother, right? Two guys growing up in the same environment, both atheists at one point. One became a Christian. I'm not going to dream of saying that scientific reasoning caused him to convert to Christianity. It's way bigger than that. Along these same lines, I'm not going to even pretend to convert you to Biblical Christianity using scientific arguments.
I'm going to declare what I believe to be true, as you do, and as do all in this forum -- this is our democracy. If anything ever persuades you to Biblical Christianity, it will be the will of the sovereign God -- the same one who blinded Saul of Tarsus and who unshackled the Christ from the tomb -- that sovereign God has determined it from some point that transcends this dirt, this time, this universe, and this conversation.
Yes, it does, and that makes it a logically indefensible position, but it's not the position of most atheists I've encountered. There's a subtle but important distinction between firmly believing that there is no god and simply not believing that there is one.
So, they shouldn't call themselves "atheists," but rather "agnostics."
Some would say that there is no absolute truth. Others would disagree on what that truth is, though they would confess that it does exist quite without any of our help.
