Those are your questions because science pushed religion back 13.7 billions years. It used to be that gods caused thunder. That was bad logic. Saying gods caused the universe is exactly the same bad logic.
We’ve all said that. A few times
But science says that we can’t push religion any further because there are limits to human exploration and knowledge.
So what do we make of that?
Well, some look for answers in religion and others are content with “I don’t know” or others philosophize.
Noble paths all of them.
Indeed, and “I don’t know” is the safest but also the least productive of the answers.
The other two may offer a path to knowledge and enlightenment, but both can have a dark side as well.
The dark side of theocracy is the enforcement of compulsory behavior on penalty of death. The dark side of science is providing the means of enforcement.
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Science doesn’t care about religion. Science is a method, and a leap of faith doesn’t fit that method. Science can’t make anything of a claim about the supernatural.
Well science is about studying the physical world.
Religion is all about what’s happening within your mind and heart. This Faith, it’s totally within your mind, and it’s your’s, just as your relationship with your god is uniquely yours, and everyone else has their own unique vision of “God” -
How do you make sense of that?
If god were some unified all, it would make itself known,
but it don’t because in the real day to day, our god’s can’t escape our minds and join our real world. Anymore than my faith will ever be fathomable to you. It’s personal, it’s our own, in our heads. In our physical world, it’s always our actions that connect with reality, good or bad.
Science seeks to objectively learn about our physical world, but we should still recognize all our understanding is embedded within and constrained by our mindscape.
Religion is all about the human mindscape itself, with its wonderful struggles, fears, spiritual undercurrents, needs and stories we create to give our live’s meaning and make it worth living, or at least bearable.
What’s the point?
Religions, Science, political beliefs, heaven, hell, even God they are all products of the human mindscape, generations of imaginings built upon previous generations of imaginings, all the way down.
{That’s not to say they are the same thing, they are not!
Though I think they’re both equally valid human endeavors,
but fundamentally qualitatively different.
Religion deals with the inside of our minds, hearts and souls,
Science does its best to objectively understand the physical world beyond all that.}
That does not mean you can make up unprovable stories and heroes.
Do angels and demons exist? Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster exist?
But more importantly; how many of the old Gods still exist? All of them? A few of them? None of them?
Answer me this single question; why do the old historical Gods no longer exist?
After all, you are an atheist as far as Zeus is concerned, no?
Why?
The strength of a religion comes from its believers.
The myths of the Greek-Roman religion have meanings and refer to fundamental beliefs, with deep symbolism. this symbolism was lost in time. The elites lost faith.
The christian myth came and in terms of marketing has big advantages.
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It tells that every one is equal in front of god, and that’s appeals to the poors, the slaves and so.
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it promise the resurrection of the bodies, in the glory of youth !
To give a last idea, Esculape/Aesculapius was a very difficult god to kill for church, as believers really thought that by praying to him, they could be healed.
Archaeologists have found thousands of exvotos, ordered by people to thank the god for healing.
Of course, illnesses were caused by demons until Van Leeuwenhoek actually saw bacteria. If you cannot see it, it’s a god or a demon, until you can see it and then the demon has a face.
Question: why would God bother with humans , when humans are 90% bacterial and only 10% human?
Seems hardly worth his time.
Ouch that hurts. We’ve been over this a few times. Presenting it like that is an excellent example of what happens when we don’t appreciate the fundamental divide between our thoughts and the actual factual physical reality we are embedded within.
Oh and I think you forgot to mention what units you are using with this 90%/10% claim of yours. Don’t you think that’s important. Is 90% of your brain bacterial in nature? How about your heart, liver, how much of that is bacterial in nature?
{Sorry, don’t mean to be a jerk, but I do want to hold your feet to the fire on this one, because it’s such a clear example of the sort of unjustified distortion people engage in, that turns facts into fanciful story telling, I’m so often complaining about.}
Oh and what lesson or moral does the ‘we are 90% bacterial’ provide?
Well, if we want to talk genes, humans are only 1 % human and 99 % bacterial.
Ratio of microbial to human cells and genes in human body.
A little reminder that it is not God but bacteria that keep us alive.
A factoid I threw in for entertainment…!
I don’t think that’s correct about religion.
Religion is not about the mind, it’s about the supernatural. Stuff that we can’t explain reasonably. Stuff that scientists don’t want to investigate because it’s not a good career path.
Here’s another reasoning.
If I go back in time, with today’s technology in year 500 BC, and healed some of the sick with vaccines we have today, that would be described as something “supernatural” back then.
Same analogy can be used for today.
But because we can’t explain it, we have to categorize it somewhere. We have to call it supernatural. We can’t ignore it!
So it’s not in our minds as you suggest.
So religion is as event based as anything real that you see and touch but we can’t explain it. As Lausten put it, science has pushed religion back 13 billion years but now that’s the limit and that’s forever our limit.
Does that make sense?
Well this is why we don’t need to go to extremes as I mentioned. After you filter out spaghetti monsters you are left with genuine supernatural cases. So at that point, faith begins.
It also has a bit to do with positions.
If you believe in spaghetti monster , then you’re not an atheist.
To answer your question about old gods: the old gods don’t seem to exist because their foundation was not strong. Their foundation was as strong as the spaghetti monster.
Ahhh, so we employed scientific criteria to debunk the mythology of the old gods but are now using the biblical account to establish a firm foundation to support belief in the new and better God ? That approach doesn’t persuade me.
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Understandable and totally respectable.
The implications of either one of us would be huge if these existential questions are proven true.
Let me open another topic where we can continue our morning coffee philosophical discussions 
Why don’t we split the difference.
Do away with a Divine Creator Agency and Intelligent Design, but keep Jesus as an Intellectually Inspired individual who taught some very uselful moral lessons , much like Buddha did.
Buddhe did not claim to be spawned from a god. He specifically referred to himself as merely a teacher, even as he was from royal blood.
Speak of Jesus as an inspired human teacher without the hocus pocus mythology, and you have my support.
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I’ll have to think about really hard about this offer. It may take years.
Here’s the new topic: The consequences of a thought proven to be 100% true
And where do you think the “supernatural” exists, can you answer that?
That’s like slander almost. Why do you forget science is based on removing the human ego. It is explicitly dedicated to the physical world we can observe, measure and to do so consistently and repeatably.
There is no way to observe or measure “supernatural” stuff, it is dedicated to the natural world!
Yeah but that’s ignorance at work there. Hmmmm, you know CERN fascinated me, when it was first suggested I thought it was pure crazy, something that complex, having to coordinate millions of components to millisecond timing, etc. It still seems totally unbelievable,… supernatural even. Yet, there it is, simple humans are running it and getting results that the community of experts accept and can work with. Heck they can even have something break and fix it and it’s back to humming like a sowing machine. And I gotta take there word for it, they have the reports and the evidence, all I have is my incredulity.
My personal incredulity based on my lack of understanding of the details, doesn’t make the CERN magical, cause it’s all in my lil head, and I can appreciate as much.
Yeah, but me calling it supernatural, doesn’t make it supernatural, just that I don’t understand it.
Like what?
Oh so god is a changing something, like everything else.
At this point ‘god’ just becomes a label to toss around.
What make this ‘god’ concept so special for you?
Entertainment is all that’s worth. (no link to original website, that’s not like you)
Playing with statistic is such fun, toss in some “logic” and a case can be made for anything.
Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome.
Imagine how superior a monster that creature Paris is to humans, 50x the genes of humans. I prostrate myself to its superiority. 
In the realm that we cannot directly see. If we use modern terms … it’d be like trying to explain a sphere to two-dimensional people. It will be impossible. They just see a circle / line which gets smaller and larger appearing in their world.
Similarly in our world, we may not be able to conceive higher dimensions . Dimensions where someone like a creator might exist. Dimensions which exist outside of our universe and interact with it.
Okay so if dedication to the physical world equals to “good ego” then what would be Hitler’s dedication?
Are you a bit biased with this “ego” concept?
This is not a good analogy of the supernatural because it’s known from our perspective at this time.
Ok this is a fair assessment and I also agree with it. It’s unknown.
Like many unexplained cases. Top of my list is Jesus but you don’t believe in historical Jesus so why should I believe you if you say “I’m in pain” if you think personal testimonies have zero credibility?
God isn’t changing. We are.
Calling Zeus a God or Spaghetti Monster a god has a weak foundation when compared with what we observe.
And calling it supernatural doesn’t make you more knowledgeable.
on the contrary , It keeps you ignorant.