Was the Bible written as a joke?

With every new scientific advance, explaining some aspect of reality in terms of natural causes, people cry out "what about God? Where is God in this new understanding?" What do they mean, exactly? Are people so desperate to be subservient to something? Is God just another parent? Besides, God is still there if you want him, but why would you?

It might be useful to say that all of reality as we know it may be either explainable or unexplainable. If it is unexplainable, then we cannot progress any further in our attempts to understand it; there is nothing to understand. Religion explanations would remain feasible and attractive, and so would a brand of science that holds form right up to the present but suddenly falls completely apart tomorrow; as well as any other cosmology one could possibly imagine. But again it is not profitable to speculate on these things - no 'theory' is possible of a completely unpredictable system.

If reality is explainable, there is still an infinite array of possibilities as to the nature of that explanation. A religion that claims everything happens as a result of divine will is explainable only in the broadest sense, but cannot say much more than that, since such a divinity may change its mind capriciously. Thus, this type of reality is only a step from an inexplicable chaos. To truly achieve an explainable universe - a deterministic universe - we must insist that cause precede event, and that natural law govern the two. This is not to say that this is indeed the case, but it makes for the most sensible universe (literally, one we can make 'sense' of). It is satisfying to the mind, which is accustomed to the logic of cause and event and predictability (if only in the lesser statistical form allowed by quantum mechanics and complexity) from its experience with everyday life. Rocks fall when dropped.

In the infinite scope of possibilities, it is certainly possible that the Christian God exists, that he created the earth and man and planted fossils in the hills to test our faith and that he cares whether or not we believe in him and that we worship and obey him for some reason. Possible, but OVERWHELMINGLY unlikely. Why would someone single out this particular explanation out of an infinite number of others, and give over one's life and mind to it? For comfort, presumably, to cease the uncomfortable process of wondering. But certainly not for intellectual reasons. Why not (as others have asserted) a flying spaghetti monster instead of a Christian god? Why not creatures from another planet seeding ours? Why not any of the literally inifinite number of explanations that could be advanced which require no proof but only faith?

The one tool we have in our biologically-limited arsenal with which to try to understand the world around us is science. That is, our own senses. We implicitly accept what our eyes see, what our ears hear, what our hands touch. And we use that other innate faculty, reason, to try to piece this sensory information together and draw conclusions about it. The process is far from perfect, and many people will disagree even over basic sensory information, not to mention its interpretation. But it is all we have to go by, apart from that bewildering infinite array of speculation.

Unless we wish to surrender all efforts at making sense of things (a Buddhist view that is often very appealing to me), we have to use the tools we have at our disposal, and the only tools we have are our senses and our reason. They are the only tools allowed in the philosophy of science. Imagination is not expressly forbidden but must be tested by these other tools. Religion and other supernatural phenomena are by their nature untestable, so they cannot be meaningfully discussed scientifically. Neither proved nor disproved. They remain speculations, articles of faith, and why anyone would choose one of these scenarios over any other baffles me.