Brian,

You wrote:

> . . . I am becoming more convinced every day
> that one of the results of the elevation of
> man's ability to reason [apart from God] is
> entirely unreasonble.

I'm becoming more convinced every day that the faster we throw off religious superstition, the faster we will progress as a society.

You seem to be suffering a similar kind of part-science, part-religion split mentality that I used to suffer and many religious scientists still suffer today. These people want to keep their childhood religious superstitions, but also accept the advances of science. To do so they have to try to separate in their minds the reasoning part (science) from the faith-based part (religion). It's apparently possible to do, but causes problems in the free-thought processes our brains are capable of when the reasoning part tries to work on the faith-based part.

I'm amazed at the number of religious scientists (Mormons are the ones I know) who seem to act rationally when dealing with scientific questions, but religious questions are dealt with entirely differently. For example, Mormon scientists will accept, "Yes DNA research can accurately identify who my ancestors are for geneological research," but no, "DNA studies have not been able to show that the American Indians are of Asian descent and so the Book of Mormon theory of an Israeli descent is false."