Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.

[Sword of Christ]

Yet other Christians might not agree.

When it comes to what we know about factually you either know the fact or you're wrong. This isn't a faith/belief thing such as the existence or non-existence of God.

It's as reasonable to say that God planted dinosaur bones and fiddled with radioactive decay rates just to fool us, as it is to say that there is a god at all.

Well no God created the universe, there is the natural order of the universe and Gods relationship with us. Science studies the natural order of the universe and goes on the evidence we can see. So the actual science is or should exactly the same and not influenced by personal belief.

When you start talking about a being that is entirely independent of the rules of life and matter and energy as we know them

He created the rules of life and matter and energy as we know them. What do you think did? But that's not a scientific issue that's a belief issue concerning something neither of us can know about. It just happens that God is the better context even though it's a faith based belief.

, anything- no matter how improbable- goes.

No there's there is just dividing line between what we know to be fact such fossils on one hand and what we can deduce to be true through reason and faith such as God hand his relationship with his creatures on the other. It's technically possible like an belief that atheists could right of course, it's just not very likely that's all.

But we certainly can use science to look at claims made by religious texts about the nature of the Earth itself, or its history.

We certainly can sure. But good luck trying to prove or disprove the resurrection of Christ. Short of building a time machine it's your word against those who believe.

The problem is that once you start interpreting the holy text more metaphorically, how can you determine if ANYTHING in it is literally true? Where does that slippery slope level out?

You could say there are different grades of truth not all of it has to be represented in literal historical event. The resurrection of Christ is the one major event to believe literally happened the rest you can be open minded about. I'm sure he had some kind paranormal healing ability perhaps some precognition and so on. We can't be sure exactly what he was or wasn't able to do or how much of the gospels is literally historical true but was certainly a real man there's no real doubt over that. His real name would have been Yeshua btw full name possibly Yeshua Ben Yosef and he may have looked something a bit like this.

But again, where is the hard line where you stop dancing with something real- like a horse, and start dancing with unicorns? My point is that there are so many gradations of belief among Christians that nearly everybody's theology is different from everyone else's.

C.S Lewis describes Christianity as one building with a hallway in the centre and in the building there many different rooms. You go into whichever room you like.

Everybody can find a way to torture religious tenets into a fit with their own understanding of the world or moral viewpoint. Literalists are on firmer theological ground, since they don't cherry-pick their god's word.

You don't have to cherry pick Christs words they speak for themselves. The Old Testament is difficult to say exactly what went on some of it will be history, some of it will be dream visions and parables and so on. What matters is that it establishes the worship of the true God and creator of the universe and it does away with the worship of idols. And of course it talks about the coming of the Messiah/Jesus into human history, that's some crucial detail there.

Happily, I agree. But how do you know that god isn't testing your faith with all the evidence for evolution?

Evolution is actually quite compatible with God because what it does is explain why you have all these unpleasant things like predators and parasites in the natural world, why would a loving God make those things? What happened is that God didn't create every species individually but the natural processes of the universe that allowed the formation of life to take hold and shape. So that works out pretty neatly. Darwin even says something to this effect in his Origin of Species book.

It sounds like something he would do. And since he can do anything, and often tests faith, why couldn't he be doing it to you?

Evolution is compatible with God anyway there isn't a problem with it.

You may be in as much trouble as I am with him if he exists and if the literalists are right.

But we know they aren't right? Not if they think the Earth is 6000 years old it demonstrably isn't.

I am open to the possibility that faith can be reasonable- I just haven't seen much of it. What is considered reasonable is open to interpretation, obviously.

It won't seem reasonable at all if you're presupposing materialism to begin with.