Joe, you make good points that, I think, illuminate how and why religion has power even if some of its claims don't stand up to the skepticism of science. I'm not religious & I didn't grow up in a religious family. When I was a teenager/college age I was a proud atheist. But my mindset/beliefs changed when I started studying philosophy and when I made some close friends who are deeply religious. What I found was that, while I have a deep desire to be virtuous, philosophy did a poor job of outlining a code of conduct to follow -- even as it struggled to define virtue. My religious friends, however, had strict definitions of morality. Ever since then, I've used some of Christianity's basic morals as a litmus test to evaluate my own conduct. My belief in God hasn't changed, but I have earned a deep respect for people who are religious and use it as a means to pursue virtue. I'm not sure science or any other non-religious institution can effectively outline a comprehensive path to virtue.

WM, I know, I reasoned that out long ago. The Big Bang could be the Word that was in the beginning. But there's this gem in Genesis 1:26: 'And God said, Let us make man in OUR image, after OUR likeness' What's this 'our' stuff? Who's there with God? Is he just speaking like pompous royalty? Which gets back to what was here before the Big Bang or the Word? Are there a myriad of Gods, passing this blue-green ball back and forth? Are they doing this by passing matter through black holes and creating white holes? What did God do in the black void? Maybe he was a criminal banished to that void, and a little matter leaked through? I guess the bottom line is not to attempt to reconcile the two ideas, but to keep thinking up new ideas. We thought when we discovered atoms that we'd gotten as small as it gets. Now we know about electrons and protons and neutrons, the last two being hadrons (quantum combinations) made up of quarks. BTW, there are six types of quarks... Why are we so quick, no matter what side we're on to say that we know definitively that that's the answer?