Oliver, thank you for this posting of yours which I could understand better than some of the previous ones. You use words like quest, discovery etc. which seem to indicate that you are moving strictly within the realm of science, using scientific methods. However, you cannot find God - whatever understanding you have of Him - this way, otherwise all atheists would have to be seen as ignorant (like those who deny the existence of electrons, bacteria or Alpha Centauri). They are not, they just look - if they look at all - in the wrong places. “Do not go afar: seek within thyself. Truth resides inside of man.” (St. Augustine) or more explicitly “Truth descends only on him who tries for it, who yearns for it, who carries within himself, preformed, a mental space where the truth my eventually lodge” (Ortega y Gasset). As concerns such basic beliefs as are part of religious faith, science can only illuminate what you have found, be it a belief in (the Christian model of) God or a belief in something else or a belief in nothing. Science (or history, or philosophy, etc.) can give your faith a new quality, a new dimension but it can neither prove nor disprove something as basic as that, the ground of all existence. Like you cannot prove or disprove axioms: you accept them (within a given system) or reject them. Therefore, I was also somewhat surprised - I have to admit - that Peter was scared of this extra dimension that science (notably physics) can give his faith (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=439).

"This means that bodily life is to be taken seriously and never as a preparation for real life in a disembodied heaven." - Sells

The above dichonomy is also present in one Christian belief with which I would differ, that the temporal exists, within the orbit of the moon and heaven is outside the moon's orbit [Van Doreen]. Contrarily, secularists deny this posit. For four hundred years, in the secular world, it has been held that comets would have broken the celistial spheres; notably, the claimed supra-luna barrier claimed by Christians to exist between Earth and Heaven.