I don't have a lot of time to write any more than shorthand answers, but maybe this will explain it better:
What the bible claims for itself is 'experiential' evidence of its claims to be worth reading, and reasoning based on the experience of trying to do things in one way as opposed to another way, sometimes very specific things, as in lists of what are called acts of the sinful nature, and more generally as in try living this way, let's reason about what went wrong in this or that situation, and so on. There's plenty of scholarship on (increasingly accessible) writings from the ancient world on the kinds of things people were preoccupied with that can enable you to some extent to get inside their heads and see the bible, and society in general, from their perspective, which provides a better basis for judging it on its own merits. That is a discussion that could go on for a long time, but as one obvious example the whole idea of how man came to be man - in a practical, biological sense - was of zero interest to the writers of genesis. Their interests were varied, and included things like who has authority, who has what responsiblities, what kinds of behaviours are destructive and which promote life, how can these behaviours be worked into a system that provides a 'best possible' society, how does that society then establish and maintain it's unique identity - and a load of other stuff. These are the kind of things the bible is about, entwining aspects of the character of a super-intelligent being who embodies both the best and the most terrible aspects of the possibilities of life, the life in tune with this spirit that brings life, and the life out of tune that destroys itself, and so on. The only way to understand what this is all about is through knowledge of what the bible is on its own terms and through the experience of living in accordance with that. Questions like 'well surely there should be something about God we can test scientifically' are nonsense questions, or inappropriate questions, like saying 'well, a teaspoon is a tool so I should be able to fix my car with a teaspoon'. The writers of the bible had no interest whatsoever in the nature of nature, there is plenty of scholarship to demonstrate that plainly. The whole proof of the bible - i.e. does applying it have beneficial results - is wrapped up in the 'thinking' of the bible - you have to meet it on its own terms, and either accept it or reject it on its own terms. Anything else is nonsense, like saying that a car cannot be a machine since it can't be fixed with your teaspoon, or the teaspoon must be faulty because it can't fix the car. I was going to say something about how Christianity looks in practice but I'm running out of time so maybe that's something for another post.
Science or scientific thinking is of course about testing and applying ideas about the physical world. It has its own set of rules and ways of thinking etc, containing evidence for many things about the world we live in. So far, it has not yet successfully addressed the same issues the bible does. There have been attempts to 'scientifically engineer' societies but they haven't worked very well, I suppose the soft sciences might be said to sit somewhere between hard science and the kind of thing much of the bible is about. In any case, for the sake of brevity what the bible is concerned with and what hard science is concerned with are entirely different domains from the ground up. The idea of whether or not they are compatible is irrelevant, neither one attempts to approach any issue in a comparable way. Each carries it's own way of thinking, a person who has a primarily scientific mind will tend to see things in that way, and perhaps conclude that the universe must be entirely material, a person with a primarily experience based way of thinking will rely on their own experiences. Ideas that come from within one or other of these or other ways of thinking tend to be consistent with and support those ways of thinking, all well and good. The problem as in what leads to silo mentalities is that on the one hand we only have so much brain space and holding conflicting world views is hard, so we tend to go with whichever one seems to make most sense for whatever reason, and on the other we simply have no way of knowing what all the stuff we don't know anything about (aka pretty much everything) is. As I see it there is simply no starting point for us to make grandiose claims of knowledge far beyond what we actually have. I am sure that how people 2,000 yrs from now will think about the universe will be so radically different from how we conceive of it now that we can't even begin to imagine imagining anything about it . But, we still have an inbuilt imperative to be sure about something, so we delude ourselves that knowing a,b and c must mean that everything from d to z is just waiting to fall in line with what we already think.
Well, Tom, I read through all of that and considered it very carefully. I decided not to respond point by point, because that might be a rather lengthy business, and not even necessary.
In short, this is what I think of what you said:
You say that there are some things that the Bible (and, I suppose, religion) deals with that science can't. I have no trouble agreeing with you on this.
You also say that the kind of questions I am asking were not ones which the people who wrote the Bible cared about. Again, I have no problem agreeing with this.
Now I want to propose some ideas to you in response, and I hope you will give them the consideration I gave yours.
Let us imagine a much simpler world. We agree that the world is much more complex than the one I'm about to describe, but that doesn't mean the same principles don't apply, just that we have to be more careful in accounting for different factors at play.
So let's imagine a much simpler world. A world in which God did answer the prayers of any Christian. To save this from being a world wildly different from our own, let's just say that God only answered prayers on relatively "minor" matters. Through trial and error, Christians would soon find out what these were.
What would this world be like? Well, one thing that would immediately be apparent that prayers work. Non-Christians might not be able to see God or feel his presence, but they
would see that prayers to Him were always answered, and prayers to other Gods weren't. Moreover, the prayers would be reproducible any time anybody wanted proof. The flood of healed injuries, improving weather, patched-up quarrels and so on and so forth would provide proof of a very high quality.
Now, as I'm sure you're thinking, life isn't that simple. Some complicating factors that might occur? First, God always doesn't answer prayers. The prayer might be made in the wrong spirit. The prayer might be for something displeasing to God. God might have a different plan for you. Two people might be praying for two different things to happen. To be sure, these are complicating factors.
But in principle, we should still be able to see effects of God's prayers, especially if we were able to take a sufficiently wide view. On average, Christians ought to be luckier than non-Christians - to find lost things, to recover from injuries, to get through difficult situations. Because atheists will not be praying to God anyway, and God will not listen to the prayers of non-Christians.
You said that my question was a nonsensical one. But why? Because all we are doing is taking the Christian beliefs seriously - looking at them, and saying
if this is true, then these things should be happening, and we should see certain effects.
But do we? Only in individual, anecdotal, unreliable forms. If all of these anecdotes are true, then it should show up as reliable data across the population. But it doesn't, does it?