Ha, wow, every time I go away for a couple of months it always seems that I come back to the forum to find this same old topic alive and well. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, I wish there was more discussion of complex topics like this one in the mainstream. But it's still funny. You always have two (fairly) well-defined camps going at it (the ones who are verbal about it anyway). I mean really, it just boils down to another duality. You either believe in something or you don't, for whatever set of reasons. Even people who declare neutrality probably lean in one direction or the other if they're honest with themselves.

There's a brick wall here, though. Uncertainty. Before you can even begin to debate the existence of God or how the world came to be you have to look at the idea of knowledge and if it's even possible for us to actually KNOW anything with any degree of certainty. How can you make a truth claim if you don't have any kind of an epistemological foundation? Well....you can't. It's called a "leap of faith" (coined by Kirekegaard I think) and you can't touch it. It's based in intuition, or a gut feeling, and it defies logic altogether. Even if you profess the absence of a god, its still a leap of faith to come to that conclusion.

Most everything we think we believe is based on what was taught to us by - get this - other human beings who have as little of a clue of what's going on as we do. That's the black hole. There's really no ground to stand on at all. We know nothing for certain. And these are just words I'm spewing here, but I'm pretty sure you'll stop breathing inadvertently for a few seconds when that idea REALLY hits you.