Spirit things are undetectable with scientific equipment
That which is necessarily undetectable to the senses (can and will never be detected in any place at any time by any means) is indistinguishable from the nonexistent and can be treated the same. If they eventually manifest or some discovery is made best explained by positing the existence of spirits, that would be evidence for their existence, and then they can be considered.
Aristotle, who believed that our earthly world comprised only air, water, earth, and fire, posted the existence of a fifth substance (quintessence) for celestial objects, since they obviously didn't follow earthly rules. They move in circles, for example. Science never needed this fifth substance. The heavens were made of the same substance as earth, and so this extra substance was discarded as unneeded. Now, two discoveries have been made that can't be explained with the standard model for cosmology, and so, two new substances are posited to account for them, dark matter and dark energy. Neither appears to need to be conscious, so they are not thought of as evidence for spirits.
many observations have been made which seem to need consciousness outside the physical body, spirit. These observations have been in the area of out of body experiences in near death experiences, where the reports are of events etc that are confirmable.
Need? No. Suggest? Yes, but not convincingly.
Genesis 2 can be explained as being a more detailed report of human creation, which makes more sense that 2 creation accounts, one of which is not even a creation account.
You haven't addressed the contradictions, and it appears you don't intend to, so we can drop that topic.
The creation of consciousness and intelligence implies those things existing in the creator.
Yes, but that means the creator didn't create them.
The existence of those things in a creator who was the first cause iow not created, does not imply that those things were already in existence in order for the creator to be created.
I don't know what you're saying. Are you saying that the creator was created? It seems so, but I'm pretty sure that you don't believe that.
That is begging the question of a conscious brain
What question? Conscious brains exist. You and I are each using one now.
is defining abstract things as non existent except as ideas
Ideas exist. They inform actions. Abstractions are inductions - rules that unify a group of objects or processes drawn from concrete experience: "from Latin
abstractus, literally ‘drawn away’, past participle of
abstrahere, from
ab- ‘from’ +
trahere ‘draw off’."
But from back when that was not known it seems to have been those people who had a universe created by a rational God, who went down the path of thinking that the universe might be able to be understood rationally.
This has already been rebutted. I showed you where those ideas came from, and I showed you that the Bible could not have served as the source for those ideas. You made no comment. You offered no counterargument. You made no effort to show that Abraham or Moses or any other biblical character came up with Thales' insights first or that Thales learned these things from religious holy books.
That makes the matter settled for me and all advocates of dialectic to settle differences of opinion. It debate ends with the last plausible, unrebutted statement, which is the one I made the last time you made that same claim. If you want to go back and find that argument (or have me help you find it) and address it now, it's never too late, but as I said, until you do, the debate is over.
And of course the Bible had something to do with that. It showed a universe created by a rational God.
No, it doesn't indicate that the universe is comprehensible to man. In fact, it calls such thinking foolishness. Christianity's frequent message is that the mind of God is inscrutable, not rational. And when man began discovering the ways of the world empirically, and they contradicted church dogma, there was a backlash that we still see today on these threads. It's typical for religion to fight innovation tooth and nail for centuries and then eventually try to take credit for those innovations, including science, the US Constitution, and the American abolition of slavery.
And it was the Church who promoted learning over the centuries.
The Greeks did so as well. And the Arabs in the Middle Ages. That's not a religious practice and doesn't come from the Bible. The church set up seminaries to teach priests and promote Christianity. Eventually, the printing press came along as well as Bible translations in the local vernacular, and the church lost control and began bifurcating. The liberal arts curriculum does not come from the Bible, either. It is a result of the secular humanist approach to learning which arose post-Enlightenment.
Here's an excellent video on the topic:
It all had to start somewhere and history shows where it started.
Yes, but not with Christianity, which seems to be your thesis.
Empiricism does not know what a wrong idea is
And idea should not be called correct if it cannot also be empirically demonstrated to be correct, meaning that it can accurately describe and predict outcomes.
if you believe empiricism is that only thing that can show you a correct idea, then that is the case under your faith and you live your life governed by your faith.
No faith is needed to believe that empiricism is the only path to knowledge about the world provided one isn't calling religious (and other) intuitions knowledge. Knowledge for me is the collection of demonstrably correct ideas. They're the toolkit for navigating life. They're the ideas that inform our thoughts and motivate our choices. If they're wrong, we make bad choices.
The miracles are the very things that God has told us in the Bible that He did.
I don't believe any deity has told man anything, and even if one did, I couldn't know it.
you say that science pushed away the need for God. That is not critical thinking. Well it might be, but it is not rational thinking.
It's a fact. I explained the progression from Abrahamic monotheism through deism to atheism due to waves of scientists who first showed how the universe operated without intelligent oversight (clockwork universe) ushering in the age of deism, followed by a second wave, who showed how the universe could assemble itself from a singularity without intelligent oversight, and the deist god was dismissed in favor of atheism.
And critical thinking is rational thinking. They're synonymous. Fallacy-free reason applied to evidence and true premises is the engine that generates knowledge. All other thinking that leads to belief is faith.
Now you are posturing as if science knows the answers to the things that God has said that He did.
Everything that we know about reality comes from experiencing it (empiricism), whether that be through a telescope or while living and taking in daily life. The whole idea of gods and revelation has no bearing on the process.
How about overcoming death? Not a problem for you, just something to accept because there is no God who can overcome death.
I have been comfortable for decades with the idea that death is likely the end of personal consciousness.
You hide behind rules that you have made your faith.
Hide? I live by them openly and proudly, and they are evidence-based ideas, not faith. They have been tested, and they work. Many forget that the success of an idea relative to competing ideas, which is evidence, is what validates that idea. How much faith is involved in using something that works reliably?