O.K. enough personal attacks. Let's stick to the issue at hand.

I find the idea bewildering that this or that discovery in Science proves or disproves the existence of God. I've studied theology for over 6 years (liberal Catholic university) and nowhere in my studies did a single professor draw an opposition between the Bible or the creation stories of Genesis and what science has so far learnt. Those stories were written by writers who wanted to express their faith in how the world came to be. They used the common knowledge available to them at that time. Many creation stories of different religions or civilizations written at the same time as the Genesis stories use much of the same imagery and concepts. If the same creation stories were to be written today, they would simply incorperate the knowledge available to us today about the visible world (emperical truth) and affirm their faith by saying that somehow, all this came to be through the will of a creator or "God". (Of course, I am aware that my theological view is tainted by my catholic/chrisitan faith/studies but from my limited knowledge of other religions, I don't think it's all that incompatible with the basic judeo-christian view.)

To say that religion is crap or unintelligent because the way the Bible relates creation has proven to be false (universe created in a few days, etc.) is to have, in my view anyway, a rather narrow concept of the Bible and christian faith. What is crap (or not true) is actually the "science" if we can call it that or more precisely the common cosmological knowledge, which prevailed at the time the Bible was written (Genesis anyway around 700BC).

As a liberal catholic believer I have no difficulty distinguishing between the empirical data contained in the Bible which is simply not true (because it is based on 3000 year old science), and the theological truth that simply states that somehow, this universe came to be because God wanted it. That is why I stated that I see no opposition between science and religion or, more precisely, faith and spirituality.

For the record, I'm about as far from a "creationist" as you can get. Although my master's degree is in theology, I have studied math and science at the university level and still read up on scientific subjects as much as possible.

Marc P.