A Former Atheist

[Thumpalumpacus]

That whooshing sound is what's left of your credibility going straight down the shitter.

See, you just have to ask the right questions, and suddenly - clarity.

Indeed. I don't think it will be doing him any favors here, though.

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The question then would be:

Why do you put more weight in one book than in all the scientific knowledge accumulated by the brightest minds in the last 2000 years? 

Let me see. How to answer that. First of all, the origins of science and education didn't get their start in the secular world, but rather in the religious.

Nonsense. Science started when the first guy discovered tool-making.

Secondly, I can name respected scientists in many fields who not only not believe in evolution, but also teach the Bible in their spare time. So there may be some disagreement with current science and the Bible regarding the flood and evolution but there isn't as much disagreement as you might suspect. Remember, science can't test the supernatural so they have no authority to state a position on it, really.

A flood is not supernatural.  A flood leaves evidence.  And whether a scientist has religious faith is irrelevant to the truth of religion.  That is fallacious argumentation from authority, and should be disregarded.

Growing up in public schools in the 1970's and 1980's as an unbeliever my science teachers were atheist and most of what they told me, now obsolete science peppered with what I now know was Biblical ignorance was touted as unchangeable fact. Knowledge grows, evolves, changes. Facts don't. Tomorrow's science will no doubt negate the science of today.

Unfortunately for your point, the Bible is both bereft of facts and superceded in knowledge.

Hundreds of years ago the current science thought that night and day were caused by vapors, from the sky in the day and from the ground at night while the Bible had said thousands of years ago that night and day were due to the luminaries. The hydrologic cycle from the Bible and hygienic laws from the Bible predated science, the latter during Moses' time were only realized in the last 150 years. Until then a physician would go from the morgue to the birthing table without so much as washing their hands. The spherical shape of the earth was explained by the Bible hundreds of years before science concluded it.

The very fact that science is self-correcting makes it more credible than the idea that a tribe of illiterate, unknowledgeable goatherders two thousand years ago landed upon an unchangeable truth.

And no, the Bible doesn't describe the Earth as a sphere.  Indeed, it refers to the "corners of the Earth". What sphere has corners?

My family and friends are mostly atheists, and like myself at the time, they don't believe everything science dictates to them. None of them that I know believe in evolution. We thought of it as bullshit, like the American public school's teaching of myth and legends, propaganda and outright lies in the guise of historical fact.

Birds of a feather flock together -- ignorant birds, in this case.