There were indeed weak people outside of Palestine, but God did not leave Himself without witness even among them, for He did the non-Palestinians good also, "filling their hearts with food and gladness", as the apostle Paul--a man once famously hostile to Christians--explained to the Greeks (Acts 14).
Here is more of the passage which you quote. Acts 14:16-17
16In past generations he allowed all the nations to follow their own ways; 17yet he has not left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.’
Why did God allow all the nations to follow their own ways, and then send messengers? If fruitful seasons are a witness to God, what are famines, earthquakes, plagues, and hurricanes? Do you think people would somehow discover Jesus without ever having heard of him, because they had bountiful crops?
Fallible teachers conveying infallible truth is evidently the manner best suited to us in our present condition.
How do you account for the contradictions in the Bible? How can you say that the Bible is uncorrupted when it has changed over time and there are multiple versions? For much of the world there were not even fallible teachers. How are mistaken teachings best suited for our present condition?
It may be that having infallible teachers around would have amounted to force or curtailed the need to seek God, an effort necessary to each individual's spiritual development.
Not giving all the answers and telling someone to seek the answers might be a way of getting someone to seek the answers, but telling someone the wrong answers is not going to get people to search for God. Might not the Socratic method in the hands of an infallible teacher be a good way to get people to search for God?
The apostle Paul explained that God chose to use the weak so that our faith would be in Him, not in the cleverness of men (1 Corinthians 1).
Corinthians 1:17
17For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.
Is the cross of the Christ not powerful enough to withstand eloquent wisdom? Couldn’t a wise find a way to teach about Jesus without glorifying himself? Couldn’t Jesus himself come down to Earth again to teach his message himself? That certainly wouldn’t lessen faith in God, by increasing faith in the cleverness of man. I guess your objection to this would be that fallible teachings are better, because “having infallible teachers around would have amounted to force or curtailed the need to seek God”. Again how do mistaken teaching encourage people to seek God?
Corinthians 1:18-25
18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’
20Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
So is wisdom bad?
Corinthians 1:26-31
26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’
So Christians are not wise?
Your statement about complex life and billions of years is fully dogmatic and yet fully conjectural.
I do not want to turn this thread into a debate about science, but I will respond to this anyways. There is a mountain of evidence supporting the fact that the universe is billions of years old and that life arose over billions of years. Here is a brief rundown of some of the evidence:
1. There is a correlation between the redshift of galaxies and how far they away from us. The Doppler effect tell us that it means that galaxies which are farther away from us are moving away from us faster than galaxies which are nearby. This means that the universe is expanding. That means the universe was smaller in the past. If you extrapolate backwards it means that the entire universe was in a single point 13.7 billion years ago. Hubble, E. (1929). "A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity Among Extra-Galactic Nebulae".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15 (3): 168–73.
2. The big bang theory predicts that there should be microwave background radiation, corresponding to a temperature of 2.7 K, coming from all directions. This is the case. Penzias, A.A.; Wilson, R.W. (1965). "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s". Astrophysical Journal 142: 419.
Boggess, N.W.; et al. (1992). "The COBE Mission: Its Design and Performance Two Years after the launch". Astrophysical Journal397: 420.
3. Radiometric dating has put the age of the oldest rocks on earth at 4.404 billion years. Wilde, S. A.; Valley, J. W.; Peck, W. H.; Graham C. M. (2001-01-11). "Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago". Nature 409 (6817): 175–178.
4. Human and chimpanzee DNA are 98.8% identical. Genome Res. May 1, 2003 13: 1022-1026
5. It is not just that human and chimpanzee DNA are similar; it is the way in which they are similar. For example there are inactive genes in the human genome which are active in the chimpanzee genome. It would not make sense for God to put an inactivated form of a gene which is active in chimpanzees into humans. However evolution explains inactivated genes perfectly. Alu-mediated inactivation of the human CMP- N-acetylneuraminic acid hydroxylase gene Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 September 25; 98(20): 11399–11404.
6. The fossil record.
I encourage you to do your own research.
Why does the brave skepticism of atheists so often and so conveniently desert them on this point?
I don't accept everything every scientist says without question.
But the issue is not popping into existence but the fact that atheism must hold to the empirically undemonstratable tenet that nothing caused everything to pop into existence, that over time a room full of monkeys with typewriters did indeed produce the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I do not have to hold “that nothing caused everything to pop into existence”. I believe that nothingness is probably impossible, though I am not very confident about that. It is also possible that the universe has always existed in some form. However you have to explain were God came from, and saying God is eternal or is outside of time is not an explanation. You also have to explain how God created everything from nothing. So you have actually increased the problem. If “a room full of monkeys with typewriters” is a reference to evolution, you have misunderstood evolution.
Variant readings apart from the Majority Text I know of, to some perhaps also there are apparent discrepancies, but there are no lies taught by the inspired Scriptures. If you are referring to mistakes in translation and copies, then they are there to teach us both patience toward our fellow men and greater faith toward the God who "teaches sinners in the way" (Psalm 25).
How do mistakes in the Bible teach us to have greater faith in God?
Now a question for you if I may: if all your intellectual curiosity is satisfied and you conclude that God is good and the Christian faith true, are you willing to follow His Son Jesus?
Yes.
What is it that is most keeping you outside where there is despair and meaninglessness?
My life is full of meaning and without despair. I am very much an optimist. I am right about where I want to be. There are many reasons I am not a Christian. The biggest reason is that it makes no sense to assume that the first thing in the universe was an amazingly complex being. Even if you did prove the existence of god(s), Christianity would still be a false religion for many reasons. You can find a few of the many other reasons I am not a Christian in my other threads.
