There's an old arugment called the "Cosmological Argument". (I guess it's actually many related arguments.) Roughly: Something had to cause all this stuff; that's God. There are two kinds of objections to this argument. One is that there's just no good argument that something had to cause all this stuff. In this context: How does one know that anything caused the Big Bang? Why can't it just have been uncaused? It's important not to answer: Well, everything has to have a cause. If so, then presumably God has to have a cause, too. The other objection is that, even if there were, the "God" whose existence the argument would prove need not be much like the God of religion. And, indeed, in this case, too, that is pretty clear. Hume pushes both forms of argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , if I remember correctly.

There are a lot of questions here, but not many of them are philosophical in content. Nonetheless, I'll have a shot. Plainly there are many people throughout the world who subscribe to faiths other than Christianity, including faiths, such as Judaism, that are older than it. As to the question about the Bible, I'm not sure what "questionable origins" it has. Last I checked, a great deal was known about who wrote its various parts, when, where, and under what circumstances. The fact that Isaiah, for example, was written by three (maybe more) different people at different times makes it no less interesting to me. In fact, it helps me understand it better. Perhaps a certain sort of fundamentalist would reject this kind of historical research or find it threatening. But not all Christians (or Jews, or Muslims, or...) are fundamentalists. Indeed, in Christianity, anyway, fundamentalism is a recent invention, and fundamentalists a distinct minority, despite the success they've had convincing so many...

Surely there could be evidence for this kind of claim. Maybe we'd find when we went to Mars that there were some super-smart aliens working on the creation of life, and then we'd find when we returned evidence to back up their story that they'd done the same thing here. But, at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any prospect of such evidence. But, as the judge in Pennsylvania clearly recognized, Intelligent Design isn't really a scientific hypothesis. It's a religious doctrine. That, to my mind, isn't a bad thing. What's unfortunate is that so many people on both sides of this debate seem to think science and religion are fundamentally opposed.

I'm not sure there's much "logic" there, frankly. First, the relevant doctrine is that of transubstantiation , not transfiguration. The latter term refers to the events described in e.g. Luke 9, when Jesus appears "transfigured" in the presence of Elijah and Moses. Second, I'm not entirely sure why it is so obvious to you, or to your friend, that the consecration does not transform the elements into the body and blood of Christ. The fact that they do not look much like flesh and blood has nothing to do with it. (The Wikipedia article on the topic is excellent, by the way.) That said, transubstantiation is controversial within Christianity. It is, as was said, a pillar of the Catholic faith, but it is not widely accepted outside Catholicism. I see no reason to suppose that all "dogmatic doctrine[s] canonized by the [Catholic] church" must stand or fall together. One might reason thus: If one of them turns out to be wrong, that diminishes whatever general reason one had to suppose that official...

This depends a great deal upon how one reads the Bible. Frankly, I think there are many people whose views on this kind of question are inconsistent, even incoherent, just as you suggest. Take, for example, Pat Robertson, who recently suggested that God had caused Ariel Sharon to have a stroke because he had withdrawn from Gaza, or Ray Nagin, who suggested that God had sent hurricanes to the Gulf Coast because God was upset about how the US treats the poor. One might find these suggestions pathetic for all kinds of reasons. (The latter suggestion is particularly bizarre, seeing how it waslargely the poor who were trapped in New Orleans, the wealthy havingmanaged to get out.) But, indeed, I find it difficult to see how anyone who was prepared to take them seriously could also regard God "as a supreme being of love and compassion". It rather makes God out to be a vengeful despot. If, then, by "believe in the authenticity of the Bible", you mean "regard every word of it as literal truth", then there is...

As Alex said, one can presumably imagine there being lots of empirical evidence for God's existence. But if so, then I'm not sure why faith would be needed there any more than it is needed in ordinary scientific inquiry. But that doesn't mean faith wouldn't be required: The mere belief that there is a God hardly exhausts the content of faith. Liberal protestants and ultra-orthodox Jews agree that God exists, but there's not obviously a whole lot else about which they agree. Obviously, there are other religious doctrines, such as the status of Jesus, on which there is similar disagreement, but what is more interesting, to my mind, are the far deeper disagreements about what God wants for humanity and creation. Indeed, I'm aware I might be in the minority here, but to my mind, the question whether God exists is really a pretty boring one. This point is really just one made long ago by Hume. Even if you can prove that God exists, via any of the standard sorts of arguments philosophers consider, you'll...

If I can add a little, I guess I find myself puzzled about why anyone would think there was a conflict between belief in God and evolutionary theory. Some Christians, Jews, and Muslims (and, perhaps, adherents of other faiths about which I know less) do find there to be a conflict, but that is because they read their scriptures in a very literal way and take it as a matter of revealed truth that the universe and its inhabitants were created in a particular way. Then, indeed, there is a conflict, and the issue becomes how one should read scripture. This sort of very literal approach is, in Judaism and Christianity, actually a fairly recent phenomenon, and it does not fit at all with how the authors of the relevant texts understood their own writing. There are, for example, two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, which have quite different histories, and they contradict one another at several points. That fact does not seem to have troubled the compliers of the book, and there is no reason...

A few comments. First, the Bible nowhere says that oneshouldn't work on Sunday. It says that one shouldn't work on theSabbath, and the relevant prohibition is contained in the Law given toMoses, which means that it referred originally to the Jewish Sabbath,Saturday. Second,as Peter Fosl said, the view that the Bible isliterally true, through and through, is largely a recent invention andwould not be accepted by most people who call themselves Christians.But I'll agree with this much: Those who run around quoting Leviticus'sprohibitions against homosexuality while eating pork have a lot ofexplaining to do. Indeed, those who ban gays from their churches whileadmitting those who are divorced have some explaining to do, too.(Jesusis not recorded ever to have mentioned homosexuality, but Matthewrecords him as having prohibited divorce, except on grounds ofinfidelity, on two separate occasions.) Those who "proof text" tend tobe rather selective, as indeed they need to be, since the storiescontained in...

As has often been pointed out here, there is no proof for many statements at all, except those in logic and mathematics, and even then the basic premises from which the proof proceeds can , in principle, be questioned. So the fact that there is no proof of either of the statements you mention seems no more relevant than that there is no proof of either "The Bush administration manipulated intelligence about Iraq" or "The Bush administration did not manipulate intelligence about Iraq". In particular, it doesn't imply that one can't justifiably have an opinion about the matter.

My main thoughts would be these: Trying to find somesimple, single sentence explanation for something as complex andancient as religious faith is not very sensible. Beforeattempting to answer the question what role religion plays in people'slives, it would probably be a good idea to do some actual empiricalresearch. In this case, I think one would find that there are very,very few religious people, perhaps none, who would accept that the"meaning of life" can be boiled down to: We were created to live. Many people actually have done such research, and much has been written about the matter. There are many viewpoints, and there are no easy answers. But let me end with a question: Why do so many people seem to find it necessary to dismiss faith as a product of something trivial? What is it about faith that is so threatening?