Christians, what is your VERY BEST arguments for the existence of God?

[Purple Rabbit]

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What these discussions time after time show is that christianity claims definite answers with unsound reasoning and competes for it with science. If NOMA applies then why should christianity bother with the origin of the physical universe at all? Right, cause NOMA isn't accepted by christianity either. Christianity claims that the border between the supernatural and the natural world is somehow magically tresspassed. Accordingly, and most conveniently for christians, it is trespassed right at the borders of scientific understanding right now: in our brains and as the cause of the big bang.

Science, not religious dogma, showed us that the earth is not flat.
Science, not religious claims, showed us that the earth is not in the center of the world and that with the heliocentric model, the orbits of the planets could be predicted very accurately.
Science, not religious magic, has shown that our sun is nothing but a star in a vast ocean of stars.
Science, not holy scripture, has shown that the 'bang' of the big bang can still be heard as 3K cosmical background radiation.
Science, not religious prayer, has shown that time and space are intertwined and that there is more to causation and detemination than a simple 'god did it'.
Science, not religious fortune cookies, has shown that the big bang took place 13.7 billions years ago.
Science, not religious healing sessions, has brought us deep insights in the working of the human body, medical treatment and some understanding of the human brain and mind.

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I didn't know science and religion were so diametricaly opposed.

Around 330 BC, Aristotle provided observational evidence for the spherical Earth. The Jerusalem Talmud says that Alexander of Macedon was lifted by birds to the point that he saw the curvature of the earth. This story is mentioned as well by the Tosafos commentary on the Babylonian Talmud. This is used to explain why a statue of a person holding a sphere in his hand is assumed to be an idol. The sphere being held in its hand symbolizing the idol's purported dominion over the world whose shape is a sphere. (ref) I don't see how Early Christianty did anything but help procreate the correct scientific opinion in this instance. Please extrapolate your point. Thank you.

In fact they were never more opposed than today.

In the old days before science emerged as a separate method there was no strong divide between philosophy, science and religion. The word science had not been invented yet. The closest thing to it were the activities of the greek philosophers, though the empirical approach to it, which is so typical for the scientific method, was regarded as inferior to thought about nature. This thought-based view on nature led to all sorts of predispositions and concepts, some rooted in aesthetic ideas. The circle for instance was regarded to have superior form. These thoughts about superior form were supported by the emergence of mathematics, predominantly geometry, which is an entirely thought-based discipline and was greatly developed by the greek philosophers.

Please observe that Aristotle provided no observational evidence himself, he merely used anecdotal evidence to arrive at a conclusion. It was a great achievement of Erasthosthenes, roughly a century after Aristotle, and one of the first recorded cases of application of empirical methodology of that magnitude we know of, to measure the circumference of the earth with astonishing accuracy.

Aristotle surely was a great philosopher however and it would be unfair to judge him on the basis of what we know today. Aristotle set a standard for the western world and it was widely regarded as such at the time. Because of that, in the early centuries of christianity the cosmological basis that Aristotle had provided, a geocentrical one, was merged with christian dogma knowingly and willingly by the church. So in those days christian dogma was in perfect accordance with what was seen as the best knowledge around. Because of this self-chosen bond between christian dogma and Aristotelian cosmology later it would become very difficult indeed for the church to acknowledge that their Aristotelian geocentrical view proved to be wrong. In essence the church had not anticipated the tentative nature of human knowledge. And that's what time after time keeps surfacing as a huge problem for religion in relation to science. The basic difference between religious and scientific truth finding is that the scientific method incorporates the dynamics of new evidence to arrive at tentative knowledge while the religious truth finding relies on interpretation and re-interpretation of dogma alone to arrive at absolute claims. Anyone can see that this means trouble and that the divide will keep on growing.

The divide has astronomical proportions right now, yet vast groups of christian believers ignore the fact that the church did claim knowledge of the physical world in the past and still claims knowledge of the physical world in every niche that is left. There's vastly more reliable evidence available now than 2000 years ago. In those days the vast majority was illiterate, now the availability of knowledge is greater than ever before. And the gaping hole between science and biblical account is so appalling that the only way around this is building hide outs in metaphorical bible interpretation. But really, if the religious and scientific aspiration about truth would really be on totally different aspects of existence, then why claim first cause as an explanation for the big bang?