Does your version of objective reality include resurrection of the dead 2,000 years ago, or men taken up bodily into the heavens never to return (Enoch, Elijah), or a woman who was a virgin giving birth to a child who was God? Apply the materialism you've accepted elsewhere to these Biblical occurrences. Can they possibly meet a scientific standard of objective reality?
You are conflating science with a philosophy of "materialism". Militant, aggressive atheists enthusiastically agree with you, btw, insisting on the same identification. But most in vast range of perspectives between militant fundamentalism and militant atheism find it gratuitous. (Including non-religious philosophical theists like me.)
You might indeed apply "materialism" (depending on what you mean by the term) critically "to these Biblical occurrences," but I can't imagine how you would apply a "scientific standard" thereto. Science, as science, generally doesn't have any way of addressing unique events that are part of an historical narrative, nor does it have any reason to do so.
You're putting Him in a box
You're putting God in a box yourself. And, again, the same box in which "scientific" atheists would confine Him. Your only disagreement with these atheists is as to whether or not the box exists.
Your disagreement with Christians like Gautier, and non-Christians like me, and many others, excepting literalist creationists and aggressive atheists, is whether God fits in that box. We think He doesn't.
It's a conflation that is all but impossible to avoid. Name the science that posits the existence of deity in this era, or even allows for the possibility of a deity. It certainly isn't evolutionary theory. All causes must be naturalistic and therefore material. I've actually had FReepers inform me, in all sincerity, that science cannot allow for a deity of any sort.
That is the materialism to which I referred, and I'm sure it's something you've encountered and perhaps even championed yourself.
I’m not putting him in a box, I’m simply declining to climb into an intellectual coffin and being buried alive in bovine scatology.
Your vision shows a Supreme Being with no greater imagination than a Dungeons and Dragons fanatic: any tinpot dictator god can create the world in a flash and a minute. I find a God who takes 13.9 billion years to create the human race and to create ME through a REAL act of ex-nihilo Creation to be *far* more impressive.
The reason why you pathetically hold on to this young earth foolishness is simple: the thought that the universe is not made precisely as stated in the Genesis recipe is intolerable because it reveals biblical literalism to be the stinking BS that it is.
And yes, I DO believe in the Resurrection along with accepting the Big Bang: a God that can cook us out of His primordial soup in 13.9 billion years is of course capable of much else.
But your pathetic clinging to objective falsehood (6000 year old Earth? heh....) against all evidence shows that you are really afraid of having your religious prejudice challenged by reality.
So, go ahead and believe the earth is 6000 years old if you want. (You’ll still go to Heaven anyway, most likely.) But in the meantime the grownups will go on doing what needs to be done.