Suppose we do assume there is a supernatural creator of some sort.  Let's suppose one additional thing: that we would like to know as much as possible about this supernatural entity.  Where might we start looking?

The OP sums up exactly why I am scaling back on this board a bit and not trying to enter into any more debates just yet.  I have learned one thing that I should have known all along: I don't understand the atheistic worldview.  Any Christian who tries to argue from Biblical inerrancy with someone on this board doesn't understand your worldview, either.

That is why I'm going to study a little bit harder before I engage anyone seriously.  Something tells me it won't glorify God to have my ass handed to me in a debate.  And you don't have to be a theist to at least concede that last point to me! 

Why not creation itself?  The variety of plants, animals, and human personalities shows the Creator is very creative.  The similarities right up the line show that He employs a common design aspect to His work (in other words, He finds something that works and sticks with it).  So He is therefore unyeilding.  The fact that you can see layers at work--lower orders to higher orders--show that He is in pursuit of excellence in His creation.  That every living thing seems to fill a niche within its environment shows that He possesses suberb attention to detail.  The fact that humans have in them a desire to know the truth around them (we're natural scientists with great curiosity) suggests that He wants us to know Him, and  that He is therefore personal.

All logic based, not Bible based.  All I did was list attributes based on Creation. 

The OP suggested we might begin by supposing there was a creator, and that such an assumption does not inherently support the Bible (and I would go on to add any other religious theology to that).

How indeed? That's why I posed the question. How might we go about investigating the nature of a supernatural creator, if we were to start by assuming there was one?

This is wisdom. I will confess I'm a Christian myself, but I don't want to try diving into talking with people that don't share my views by spouting them and thumping on the book I got them from. It would be like dropping by a forum for democracy and talking all about how great Marx is, citing the Communist Manifesto as your sole reference.

That is a lesson that probably bears constant repeating, and particularly well-stated here.  I have tried to keep it in mind since I started posting here.  My initial interest isn't why anyone might reject mine (there are a plethora of reasons), but why someone would subscribe very actively to athiesm.  It is one thing to disregard an idea, but quite another to vocally oppose it.

My initial interest isn't why anyone might reject mine (there are a plethora of reasons), but why someone would subscribe very actively to athiesm.  It is one thing to disregard an idea, but quite another to vocally oppose it.

I can answer that with a section of an essay I wrote called: A discourse of survival, the nonsenical notion of atheist extremism.

I think in this regard, people are confusing  extremism with passion. An atheist cannot really be extreme in their beliefs because there is no doctrine to adopt an extreme stance to! The test, then, for someone to determine whether an atheist is “extremist” or not, is how outspoken they are on religion. This is hardly a fair stance.

The other objection is another arm of the attack, namely that outspoken atheists are “extremists”. If someone says this, they are essentially defeating their own argument because they are freely admitting to the disgraceful public shields around sane discourse of religion. Political debates have no limit of epitaphs to hurl, in academia a researcher can be disgraced for a ridiculous publishing. But in religion, open your mouth to criticize and you are shouted down as an atheist extremist.

From this, we can deduce why atheist fundamentalism is ridiculous. There is no doctrine for which to subscribe. There are no Holy Books for atheist philosophers to bend their backs over. There are no schools of theocratic law for atheists to butcher each other over (a mocking of the Four schools of Islamic Shar’ia) and there are no compilations of ancient documents for atheists to squabble over. Quite simply, an atheist cannot be a fundamentalist because there is no doctrine for an atheist to subscribe a fundamentalist stance to.

And as to why I am opposed to religion? Well, quite simply it is treated with respect when it should be treated with contempt. In 7,000 years it has never given us tangible results, in fact, religion per se does not do anything useful. If any other human endeavor were like this, it would be thrown out. Religion breeds extremism and mutually exclusive hatred. It holds deep within it a terrible crime, namely that it is based on fear. I once advocated that bringing up your children by telling them they will go to hell unless they believe in God is child abuse therefore a federal crime that should be punishable by prison time. 

First of all, Colby?  Am I cheese?  Admittedly, my humor can be really cheesy, but that's beside the point.

I'm glad you posted that, because it demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about regarding worldviews.  We start with different presuppositions--me from God, you from nature--and we look at the exact same details of the world, and arrive at vastly different conclusions.  Where I see a God who loves us and desires us to know Him through Creation, you see an accident of evolution that could have happened any of 1000 or more different ways.

Right now, I'm not here to debate that.  I'm enjoying the learning experience of how the world is viewed through atheistic goggles, since I've only personally viewed it through Christian goggles and briefly through New Age goggles. 

Why not creation itself? The variety of plants, animals, and human personalities shows the Creator is very creative.

LOL. When it comes to genius, I would put my money on evolution, not God. The variety of plants and animals means nothing because it is empirically demonstratable that these come from common descent, which I show here:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/atheist_vs_theist/5465 

 The similarities right up the line show that He employs a common design aspect to His work (in other words, He finds something that works and sticks with it)

No, it shows that life is descended from the same basic set of primordial chemistry. He "finds something to work" is a logical contradiction, because God is omnipotent, such a task should be unnecessary.

 he fact that you can see layers at work--lower orders to higher orders--show that He is in pursuit of excellence in His creation

LOL. 99% of all species have gone extinct. His record for good design is terrible. And 99% of the species that are still here are prokaryotic bacteria, very basic life forms. The domain of the Eukaryota make up a tiny fraction of the ecosystem. Archaea/prokarytoa reign supreme.

That every living thing seems to fill a niche within its environment shows that He possesses suberb attention to detail. 

 As Zarathrustra pointed out, this proves nothing except that evolution works very well at fine-tuning adaptation.

 . The fact that humans have in them a desire to know the truth around them (we're natural scientists with great curiosity) suggests that He wants us to know Him, and that He is therefore personal.

 No it doesn't. It shows that there is an evolutionary advantage to Hominidae higher cognition.

you see an accident of evolution that could have happened any of 1000 or more different ways

The accident of evolution? You truly have a great deal to learn. Evolution plays with no chance. By rigidly enforced mathematical axioms and ruthless natural selection, the progress up towards higher life is inevitable and mathematical. 

To me, to argue the establishment the Bible as true is the same as to argue the establishment of interpersonal reality as true.

I do not believe it can be done outside of an individual choice to accept something based on personal, individual, experience.

Some people may disagree.. I do not pretend to know everything.  I'm just a fool. 

Don't know what we are going to do about Islam. That's going to be a tough nut to crack. We gotta try though.

There is an interesting essay I wrote. The very last submission in "write a letter to someone with a theistic worldview called "the disaster of Islam". The content of this essay is horrifiying, but necessary. I am particularly dissapointed by Iran's fall to Islam. The Arabs, I can understand, but the Persians have always been far more cultured and sophisticated.

Nonetheless, my hopes are high. The only reason Islam has any power or voice is oil. No oil, no fundamentalist Islam.  

The problem is.. if the belief in God is merely the means by which to explain the unexplainable, an evolutionary beneficial phenamona, then such belief systems will continue to arrise until everything is explained.. which.. well, whether I was atheist or theist, would still be 'point never'.

Hopefully future methods by which to explain the unexplainable will have less inherent danger. 

Of course, where you see common descent, I see a common design.  The two are almost identical in every way, except with common design, a supernatural Creator is present.  Evolution is purposeless and accidental.

But the link I posted is clear evidence for common descent! To my knowledge no IDT proponent has ever given a sound rebuttal to ERV or mtDNA.

 You said, "should."  It should also be unecessary to test us, since He already knows the outcome, yet He does exactly that in the Bible.  Sorry to bring that up.  Don't flame me!

I don't like that comparison. If I believed in God, I could understand why he would test us, even if I think the ways he did it in the Bible were cruel and barbaric. However, I don't see the need for Him to toy with nucleotide formation.

 Single celled organisms that can (presumably) survive in water--even in FLOOD WATERS--not go extinct?  Shocking.

You're a young Earth creationist? shit. Arguing with those people is like bleeding a rock. Actually, a huge number of species that  went extinct were marine life. 

 A purposeless, unguided process with no intelligence behind it can somehow select and fine tune an organism for its environment?  My money is on the Creator.

OK. Now you are embarrasing yourself. I thought you were scientific minded? I wrote a long article to debunk this. Here is a piece:

Evolution is a carefully guided process.

Organisms adapt to their environment through natural selection, meaning that the environmental factors both cull the herd and remove organisms with unfavorable traits, and propagate those with favorable traits. The mechanism for this is the second rule of evolution: Evolution is brought about by genetic mutation. An organism cannot adapt to its environment per se. It is the genes that must adapt, and that process takes millions of years.

The next rule is that the determinate of what constitutes an advantage is the environment. The rest of it is really simple, Evolutionary models study this axiom because it is complex. An environment includes lots of factors like other animals, temperature, gas concentration, climate etc. etc. This axiom is the driver of evolution, the guide, Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Genetic mutation is random. It is up to the environment to nurture useful genes and ensure they get passed on, and to eliminate poor genes. This is the fundamental rule of natural selection.

This incredibly ridiculous error, to state that evolution is luck, is a confusion of genetic mutation which is luck, and evolution which is the process that selects the genes and makes sense of the randomness of mutation.

 Same evidence, different answers for it.

Where is the evidence for design, an untested hypothesis, that evolution, a tested theory, cannot explain? 

Cory, what are your views on Evolution and the age of the Universe? Just a short answer will do. YEC? OEC? ID?

I dont want to get into a debate over it right now...just curious. My head can only take so much pounding against a wall.