Obesity, skiny, tall, short, unibrow, hairy, flat figure

[STM1993]

Things that previously needed a god to explain how they worked (how did we come into existence? (evolution)

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And now that I think about it, was Evolution tested?

Forgot to address this. Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, but rather how one form of life passes on to the next. In fact there could be multiple origins as far as I'm concerned. I would assume Someone Else was referring to "we" being modern humans having diverged from our ape cousins against the idea that modern humans were created just like that.

Yes, evolution has been tested. I'll try to explain as simply as possible:

1. Creatures pass on their genetic traits to their offspring. If you paint a red bird blue, his children will still be red, not blue.
   
2. Creatures must produce viable offspring. You can cross a tiger and a lion, but the resulting hybrid creature, while incredibly strong, is unable to bear children(not viable); its the end of the line. The fittest(most adapted to their present surrounding) survive only because they live long enough to mate while the unfit die before they can mate.
   
3. Suppose a type of bird that is always either red or blue. I neuter all red birds but leave blue birds alone. Because the red birds cannot reproduce and thus cannot pass on their red genes, the number of red birds will decrease or outright go extinct. The red birds don't necessarily have to be neutered by me, it could very well just have been that birds prefer blue over red and so blue birds mate more than red birds, or the red birds isolate themselves from the blue birds by living in some other part of the world.
   
4. To further illustrate the above red/blue bird example, this table shows the concept of dominant & recessive alleles. Suppose the red alleles are dominant(B) and blue alleles are recessive(b) - it'd mean that out of 4 possible combinations, only the combination where the child bird receives both recessive alleles(bb) will end up being blue. That means there won't be any carriers(Bb or bB) of the red gene, and by neutering all red birds, I've ensured that these birds will only ever be blue; red birds will go extinct.
   
5. Incidentally the table also accounts for a population trend, in my example there should be 3 red birds for every 1 blue bird (1 full red, 2 carrier red, 1 full blue).
   
6. Mutations, because sometimes the genes aren't copied correctly or are altered/damaged along the way. Most of these mutations don't do anything or are very subtle changes, and even then it only matters if these mutations get passed on to kids.
   
7. Which brings me to the concept of descent with modification. Using the birds example, even if I let completely dominant(BB) red birds mate, their child would still end up a little different from their parents. Suppose a child is always different from his parent by 1%. Is it a stretch to suggest that at some point, after maybe 100 generations in my example, the 100th generation bird is completely different from his 1st generation ancestor, to the point that if the 100th generation bird were to mate with the original bird, they wouldn't produce viable children? That's how we get many different species.
   

These ideas can be applied to many things, including explaining the emergence of drug resistant bacteria, overfishing leading to fish being smaller compared to many years ago, fossil records that support the concept of descent with modification, useless traits in our bodies like our appendix and useless DNA, domesticated silver foxes and dogs actually diverged from ancestral wolves. I remember coming across an article about some creatures(lizards I think) that were left alone in an isolated area and scientists coming back a few decades later to find that the original type of creatures are no longer there but instead finding a new species very similar to the original.

So yes, evolution has been tested and in fact stands as one of the strongest theories we have in the scientific community, even better established than gravity.

I think it is equally arrogant to claim to know for a fact that gods don't exist. I'm open to the idea that gods exist, but I've yet to hear anything beyond weak or unprovable propositions. There's the idea that maybe I should believe in god just in case, but which one? Not to mention I find a lot of religious teachings to be toxic or even contradictory. So rather than try to believe in a virtually unprovable/unknowable being, I would rather treasure the life I already know and live as though divine beings don't exist.

It's you who gets to pick your way of live, and I respect that. I can help you narrow the "Which" one by linking you to Occam's Razor. It basically says that when faced with theories, you should stick to what proposes the least number of assumptions. Only 1 God is enough to be the cause of the universe.

My problem is more with the various doctrines attempting to describe god(s). If a scripture has mistakes/contradictions or can be overwritten, then its not infallible like followers claim and thus becomes unreliable. If the scripture is said to be metaphorical, then which texts can be taken metaphorically and which ones can be taken literally - and as a result spawn so many ambiguous interpretations and thus religious denominations? I'm forced to take the one with least assumptions etc as you said, in this case assuming its all literal and go with that interpretation. And of course, I still often find mistakes in scripture going by this route.

It is also common nowadays to believe that god(s) are omnipotent and all-good (if you look at a lot of old myths, gods are often portrayed as jackasses with their own limited dominions who are born from something else). Problem is, a truly all-good God would not allow injustice or unnecessary suffering, yet that is what I see around me in the world today. I can only conclude that this God isn't good at all, or he is nowhere near as powerful as he is claimed to be. At best, god is more like a team of developers making a video game world, and then moving on to new projects after its done while the characters in the video game are none the wiser.

At the end of the day, even if the question about God is answered, is there anything we can do with the knowledge? If there's really nothing we can do with the knowledge, then we shouldn't worry about it. We should live our lives pragmatically, and in this case treating life as a limited one-time gift and that god is irrelevant is most pragmatic option.