Re: Do you believe is God?
It makes me very uneasy that people bring reason and evidence into their justification for their religious beliefs. They'll say, look at all this evidence 'miracles of the quran/bible', teleological argument etc...' But then on the other hand, to totally accept what is being said as true, you have to accept faith based leaps here, here and here. The casual mixing and switching between two different epistemology's at their convenience, this epistemology of convenience is so odious. Any problem should only be approached with one theory of knowledge, you don't fill the gaps with a new epistemology where the old one can't quite cover it.
By the logic in your first question, I could also argue that God has existed forever. My belief is derived from the principle that something creates something, and nothing creates nothing.
Here is an example of something coming from nothing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
Say you accept this idea that the universe is initiated by a force, this only leads to at most the god of einstein and carl sagan -"God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe." - It's an argument only for an unknown initiating force creating the physical laws, not for any necessary relationship between this force and humanity - "This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
Which other book in the history of mankind has been composed by authors hundreds of years apart, yet managed to flow together so smoothly while simultaneously predicting world events?
It flows together because the authors read each others work, they weren't writing in a vacuum. Large parts of the gospels of matthew, mark, luke are identical, directly lifted from each other. Revelations is nothing like the other books of the new testament.
What would be more impressive than a temporal difference in authorship, would be a spatial difference. It's funny how god clustered all his prophets and authors regionally
For example, it can be argued that the disintegration and subsequent rise of the state of Israel was foretold in the bible years before it actually happened.
Incredible postdiction