I feel that there is one core issue here that must be addressed first: everyone has a creation story, or if you prefer, an origin story,
I'll grant this point. However, the origin story from modern science is backed up by a very large body of evidence.
He who spoke the universe into being was also capable of providing us with a record of it, and did so.
That body of literature is full of logical contradictions and other problems. But I'll get to that in a moment.
a Nothing (a quantum nothing? a flucuation of nothingness?) was (became?) a singularity of unfathomably great mass/energy, which exploded. After this very hot material expanded and began to cool, and processes occurred over millions or billions of years to somehow form protostars.
As far as I know, nobody claims that the singularity at the beginning of the universe came from nothing, do they? I thought it always existed?
I've read somewhere or other that there is solid evidence that the universe is still expanding. Perhaps the flipside of the big bang is a big crunch, where the universe reaches a certain size and then begins to contract? Maybe there have been infinitely many bang-crunch cycles before this one, and there will be many such cycles after our own big crunch has happened.
To be honest, there are lots of unanswered questions here. Even closer to home, right here on Earth, there are unanswered questions. Like, what got life started here in the first place? There are proposed answers, but there are none that we can say is definitively correct. What we can say from the evidence is that life evolved from lower forms to higher forms over a process of billions of years.
Honest minds will admit that there is a connecting thread here, a Force, Tendency, or Consciousness at work
Force or tendency, sure. Force or tendency do not imply consciousness. Gravity is a force. If I fall from the top of the Empire State building, I will tend to fall with an acceleration of approximately 9.8 m/s^2. No one would argue that there must be a consciousness involved in any of that.
and he outright said that he believes the Universe itself is God,
That's pretty much in line with my own personal beliefs. But that isn't a scientific statement. There is not the least bit of physical evidence to back it up.
When I stated that the universe was created by the God of the Bible, you demanded that I prove it. What kind of proof are you looking for? Certainly there is not some one experiment in a laboratory I could do that would prove my origin narrative any more than it would yours.
The god of the Bible could trivially prove his existence to me. I'm blind, and the cause of my blindness is optic nerve hypoplasia. For all intents and purposes, I have no optic nerves. I do, but they're so underdeveloped as to be useless. If you can convince him to regrow my optic nerves, then I'd believe in a heartbeat. I knew this chick in college named Melissa, who was missing an arm. I didn't know it at first until I reached out to shake her hand, and she was like, "Uh, I don't have an arm." So if you can convince the god of the Bible to regrow Melissa's arm, or anyone else's missing limb(s), I'll convert in a New York second. It really is that easy.
what we see in the universe is consistent with the Biblical narrative of Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, and that the Bible explains things well when you look at the universe from a Biblical framework of thinking.
I could say the same thing about dualistic creation stories from Manichaeism and Gnosticism, both of which were viciously persecuted as heresies by the early church.
The basic Gnostic creation story goes something like this. The material world was created by an evil small-g god, the demiurge. In Christian Gnosticism, Demiurge is essentially Jehovah.
This particular creation story not only answers the question of how we got here, but also handily answers the question for which most Christian sects have no satisfactory answer. That question is: how and why would a god who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely benevolent create this world when he knew a priori that his act of creation would inevitably lead to a practically infinite amount of suffering? The Gnostic answer is that Demiurge ain't benevolent, and suffering is how he gets his kicks.
I don't consider myself a Gnostic Christian at the moment, but I do find myself drawn to it at times.
I'd like to jump to the argument from Egyptian mythology. That mythology as you described it sounds ridiculous to me as well, so I certainly won't be defending it.
I don't think it sounds ridiculous at all. It makes perfect mythic sense.
The line of argument is that, if there are some origin narratives that cannot be believed, therefore all origin narratives cannot be believed.
Is that the line of argument, though? Myth is not synonymous with falsehood. The Atum story was mythically / symbolically true to some folks living in the Nile Valley four millennia ago, just as Genesis was mythically / symbolically true to Origen, who scoffed at the idea of a talking snake. What makes Genesis literally true and the Atum story not so?
things that we have never observed dolphins doing:
We have, on the other hand, seen them go out of their way to save human lives. This would seem to point to an ethics or morality. I suspect someone could devise an experiment that would cause a dolphin to struggle with a deep moral dilemma.
It is worth noting that humans are this very moment probably intentionally murdering dolphins and other cetacean life. Or human militaries are blasting their habitats with sonar that causes them all sorts of problems with navigation and communication.
There's a pretty good case to be made that the biblical god is unashamedly and irredeemably evil. The book of Genesis contains two outright genocides caused directly by God: namely, the Great Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both instances involved the overwhelming obliteration of populations, including women and children.
Let us now turn to the Book of Numbers chapter 31 verses 17 and 18, wherein God calls for genocide with the fervor of a Slobodan Milosevich rallying his troops:
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
What thoroughly convinced me that there is no such thing as Hell was the calculus course I took in college. During the first few weeks, we were studying limits and infinities. It was really mind altering. At the time, I remember thinking along the lines of: "This is amazing, and it's about as close to wrestling with the mind of God as somebody can get." At some point I came up with a moral axiom: no just god could inflict infinite punishment on a finite being for a finite number of transgressions. That equation doesn't balance.