If I may butt in here on a couple of points...
It may have been a conclusion at some point, but at this point it's a premise.
As I said, I have my reasons for believing that God is real. It's a premise for me at this point, but I know that you have a different interpretation of the same facts that led me to believe that in the first place. I believe God exists because I believe that God is a better explanation for all the order and structure in the universe and in earth's ecosystem than random chance. You have a differing opinion. How did you decide your particular god did this? How did you rule out Odin, Thor etc etc. How did you rule out interdimentional universe constructing aliens?
Perhaps I should restructure the premise slightly: the premise that most believers work from is that God creating order and structure from chaos makes more sense than the alternative - random chance creating order out of Chaos. Atheists work from the premise that random chance creating order out of chaos makes more sense than God creating order out of chaos. Two points here. How did the god character get into play at all - without resorting to special pleading? Was it random chance or did an even godlier god create it? Can you define order? The universe is orderly in some sense but chaotic in others. Would you call radioactive decay orderly? Would you call the predisposition of some people to get cancer orderly? So regardless of your conclusion, there's still a premise that you accept before drawing your final conclusions about God. But once you've drawn your conclusion, it becomes part of your premise for approaching any evidence pointing to God's existence.
For example, you staunchly deny the witness of the thousands who saw Jesus after His resurrection, (no such witnesses exist - there is one account written by one unknown person who wasn't an eyewitness) and those who watched His ascension to heaven, which would certainly be strong evidence. Your denial (this is not a denial, this is a reasoned view of the facts) has no merit except for your predetermined idea (premise) that God is, in fact, not real and the Bible is just a story written to try to convince people that He is. Your view (that God does not exist) determines your analysis of the evidence. (no other view is reasonable since no good evidence supports the claim)
The same is true of science. Where a creationist (which I would call anybody who believes that God created the world) looks at the universe, the earth, and all the order and structure in it and sees this as evidence of God's handiwork, an atheist looks at the same structure and order and sees it as evidence of the amazing effects of random chance. (I've always considered this to be a rather disingenuous statement - as though everything just popped into being by pure random collision of atoms. That's a distortion of reality where that just doesn't happen. What exactly are the random elements? The nature of the universe at the point of expansion - quite possibly - but after that - not really so much randomness at all - yet all still natural) The analysis of the evidence is predetermined by a premise (perhaps once a conclusion) that it makes more sense to believe that random chance resulted in all this order and structure than that God exists and created it.
It would be rather fun if there was a god and we could all live for ever - fantastic even though probably a bit boring after a while - but the evidence rules against it
God is eternal. That means He had no beginning, and will have no end.
You can have a problem with that or not, as you choose. I have a problem with the idea that drawing random chance out over periods of millions of years makes it no longer random.
My choice to believe in the God Yahweh over the other gods came down to my belief that this is the most reasonable God to believe in. I would prefer to believe in a God who is unfathomable to our minds because of His absolute power, knowledge, love, goodness, etc. than in dozens of gods who get in petty quarrels and use humans as their instruments to fight with each other.
And actually, you say "no such witness exists" because it is only recorded by "one person," but there are actually 5 separate accounts of at least 12 people seeing Him after His resurrection, even if there is only one written record of the thousands of others. And we have the ongoing witness of the church that came about as a result of the word that was spread by these thousands of witnesses.
Random elements are all over the place, unless you expect me to believe that there is some natural order that drives the universe toward self-creating life. You cite things like "adaptation" and "natural selection," but there's absolutely nothing for the first cells that ever came into being to adapt to, and just the circumstances that would be required for a first cell to exist at all are so extraordinarily improbable as to make any reasonable person incredulous (unless they had already accepted that this was the only reasonable explanation).
There's order in just about everything in life. Especially radioactive decay. Do you know what a "half-life" is? How does it not represent order that the radioactive decay occurs at a rate that is measurably orderly?
And the way that the ecosystem on earth works. Do you know what a symbiotic relationship is? There are hundreds - even thousands of those on the planet. Two separate entities that depend on each other for life and sustenance.
The way cells are copied and replicated is also very orderly. And all signs point to this process deteriorating over time, which would seem really weird from the point of view that it didn't start out from a better state than it's in now.
And to reply to Archaeopteryx, it makes sense of the all of the order and structure that is present in the world and how it came into being that way.
It has been shown many times that DNA mutations - upon which the entire theories of abiogenesis and evolution of all beings from single celled organisms are constructed - are completely random. And overwhelmingly negative.
Yeah, that must be it.
