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toskalawannabe, I can't go along with that kind of nihilism: in one swell foop you've compared the Bible to history books based on research into period documents and stated that neither can be trusted. In other words, you've negated one of the basic axioms of science, namely that we can share in and build on the knowledge we've acquired. If you don't accept that we can actually know anything, or even come close because it's all just a matter of opinion, then there can be no systematic sharing of knowledge.
As for God, it seems to me that the only possible scientific position is agnosticism. God is not subject to scientific investigation, therefore science has nothing to say about it. One can safely make scientific hypotheses that do not invoke God (actually, that's the usual practice, because once you invoke God in a hypothesis, it ceases to be scientific). It's petty safe to say that God does not exist, but not to insist on the statement as fact.
Which brings up the "Intelligent Design" "hypothesis". I put "hypothesis" in scare-quotes on purpose: It's not a good scientific hypothesis because it makes no scientific predictions. Any feature that "looks designed" (whatever that means; no one has properly defined it) could be designed but it's okay for it not to have been. So there's no way to even in principle falsify the idea ... just like there's no way, even in principle, to conduct an experiment that would prove or disprove the existence of God.
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