AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Religion obviously provides an important sense of meaning to a lot of people's lives. Not everyone needs to be religious or spiritual, but it has definitely made a huge impact on history on the societal scale and served as the motivation for a lot of great (and not-so-great) deeds.

It's a natural thing for people to search for a higher meaning in the world or in their lives. Why else would we see some form of religion develop in basically every society, independently from one another? It must serve some important purpose or else we wouldn't see it at all.

Indeed this. Copernicus was fascinated by astronomy because he felt that if he could understand the heavens with math and physics, he'd crack a pattern that would essentially show him the blueprint of God's Creation of the universe, as a God created universe would necessarily be perfectly in balance according to his thinking.

He spent years working on it, helping flesh out and expand on concepts that came before him and produced ideas that would later lead to other discoveries by other famous scientists. He, of course, never found the blueprint, and actually felt greatly discouraged during his life, because his findings didn't make sense with his hypotheses. The universe wasn't a perfect system, it was actually quite wonky, and it shook him up a bit.

In any case though, he followed this train of thought initially because he felt he needed to understand God on a scientific level, and because of him, western society got a little closer to figuring things out quicker than we otherwise might have.

What about when science conflicts the Bible, i.e. that dinosaurs did exist (while some Christians would disagree) or that the Earth is billions of years old and not only a few thousand?

They learn to accept it as a metaphor or bad translation.

I have actually read an article where a scientist broke down the seven days into particular time spans.

Do you have a link to that? I've always figured that someone had to have had tried that but I haven't had any luck.

I can't remember correctly, but in the bible wasn't "light" made first, then the earth and the sun at a later time? How would that make sense?

The light could be explained as the Big Bang.

In my RE class the teacher told us about how some modern Christians interpret the 7 days as actually several thousand years over which the universe was formed, and how they believe that they Big Bang was caused by God and so forth. But then if you're willing to accept the scientific evidence that God didn't make the world in a flash then why is God included in the theory in the first place?

because there's still the concept of God creating the matter to begin with and then setting everything in motion. That's why you hear of the rather snotty argument "in the beginning there was nothing, which then blew up".

Religion, particularly the idea of "God", has always been around because it can provide a sort of comfort. Things don't just happen. It's much easier to accept things, especially bad things, when you can attribute it to something, like an omnipotent being pulling the strings. That would explain where our idea for it came from. The reason it's still around is the exact same reason a lot of "obscure" scientific theories still exist (multiple universes for example), because there's not much evidence against it. While that doesn't serve as 100% proof for his existence, what it does mean is we can't just dismiss it off the table (since a lack of evidence also doesn't equate to a lack of existence). From what I've heard from the more recent churches I've attended, for the most part, we seem to be moving away from the classical "bearded old man in the sky" model and more towards the entire Universe, as a whole, being a sentient, living thing.

It isn't even that far fetched an idea either. After all...we're sentient, living beings, and we're more than "a part of this Universe". The next question this proposes, though, is more on the lines of whether or not the Universe is it's own separate living entity (comparable to us being the bacteria that live within our own bodies) and whether or not it has sentience enough to know we exist, separate of itself.

I don't think I read that on the net, just some random magazine or something.

I did however meet a mathematician who came to believe in a greater power as he learned more about maths and science. He felt that everything worked too well, that answers were too abundant for there not to have been some being that was making sure it all worked.
The bible may contradict hard factual science, but science doesn't necessarily contradict the existence of a god.

There's also a guy who went insane while trying to explore the nature of the universe through mathematics, but Im not sure if he was already crazy before or not

I like to think shit just happens, and we're along for the ride. Its exciting and awesome.

This came about due to the dumbed down version of western Christianity that was about during a time when no one except nobles and actual residents of the church could read scriptures to place the more abstract concept of an omnipresent being. If you're just being told the stories as a little kid, you're going to need some sort of illustration, and so that was what they went with. It was further cemented when a few renaissance artists went and actually did something that the church was supposed to be opposed to, and made up an image for God.

There are stacks of rules in Judaism (which is what a great many of the Christian values are founded on) that say that you are not to make an image or an idol to God, even if you are trying to sincerely worship the God of Abraham. This was for two reasons: 1) the Israelites had a really bad habit of letting half of their number fall into pagan worship. 2) they believed that God was too great to even try fitting him into a single image, because they already saw him as an omnipresent force of the universe. They thought it would be insulting to try and represent him with a human-made image. Hell, they never even said God's proper name out loud because they felt they weren't worthy to use it.

So basically, God never started out as "bearded old man in the sky". That was kind of a phase that the religion went through when everyone was on Sunday School-level comprehension of the faith's history.

Oh nononononl that's not what I mean. I'm talking about the fact that "God" is often specified, and confined to very specific criteria that are often farfetched in nature, which is what I was talking about. By "bearded man in the sky" I meant more "one of the Gods as portrayed by a specific religion.

Like there's the God who created the world in 7 days 3000 years ago and once wiped out the human race, leaving a small family to repopulate. Or the God who allowed a small bit of oil to burn 7x longer than it should have. Or the God who sent golden tablets down for a white settler to read and disperse. (And then the God who did whatever Scientology says happened...)

What I'm saying more is that those particular Gods are easy to single out and disprove with something as simple as "Well these here fossil records are millions of years old..." I get symbolism, but it seems people like to look at the symbolism as a criteria for existence rather than the idea the symbol represents.