Am I Atheist or Agnostic?

For a while after I lost my wings, I thought of myself as an Agnostic. I wasn't really sure if God existed or not, didn't really care, and it didn't really matter because we'll never know. Or at least that's what I told myself.

But I've always wanted to believe in God. Growing up, I kept making excuses for my own religion. I would have to say, "oh, they were just being metaphorical here" when something in the bible didn't make sense, like the creation story or the Flood. My scientific mind would try to turn to reason and allow for the shortcomings of the bible. For example, I would say "Well, we don't know how long a "day" is in the creation story, what if it was a million years? And that way if evolution is true, it is still supported by the different stages of animal creation." Or I would say "Ok, let's assume that an old man built a boat and collected two of every "kind." Then it seems reasonable that these pairs of animals were able to repopulate the planet."

But I was just lying to myself. If you are going to make excuses for parts of the bible, you are already on your path to losing your wings. Take the story of the Flood for example. There is no way story can be possible through scientific OR biblical beliefs. We are 1st to assume that the only period of creation was in the first couple of days of the earth's existence, and God didn't create any more animals afterward, especially after the flood. Now you have 2 paths to take:

1) Noah only collected two of every "kind" like the bible says, and from these, their offspring were able to produce the 2 to 100 million different species we see today, or

2) Noah in fact was able to collect 2 of every species that we see today and keep all of these on the boat.

Either way you look at it, the biblical story is a contradiction. If you accept path 1 like many scientific-leaning Christians do, you are already opening the doors of evolution, which is a big no-no. If you tell yourself that these original pairs kept producing life that were able to adapt and change in order to better suit the environment they lived in, and eventually give rise to the millions of species we have on the planet now, then you should be reading Darwin instead. And if you take path 2, which I think a fundamental Christian would have to take, you still have some issues to consider. How would Noah be able to collect a pair of every species on earth (not including aquatic animals)? At a minimum, this would mean a couple million animals on a boat. The bible already gives us an approximation to how big the ark was. It wasn't the size of the titanic. We can say God was able to allow this miracle through his grace, but again, you are making excuses, because the bible doesn't say that he had to create some imaginary shrinking spell. It says they even had stretching room.

I guess what I'm trying to get at, is if you are having these battles in your head, you need to stop lying to yourself. If you only believe in the "good" parts of the bible, like the new testament, then again you are being hypocritical. Religion is supposed to be an all-or-nothing thing. You can't make excuses for the parts you don't like, or decide where God was being metaphorical or literal. Stop fighting with yourself. 1st accept the fact that you may not believe in God, and then go from there.