“I don’t know” never means God did it.

This morning my 5:30AM toilet visit was entertained by this status:

I’m not complaining. I needed some motivation to shit. Thanks, oh enlightened one…

I replied to it with only two words: False dichotomy. Do I need to explain all the faults here? Here are a few of them…

1. The opposite of creation is not some other kind of creation.
2. The opposite of “I don’t know” is not creation by an intelligent designer. There is no opposite to it.
3. The argument from first cause simply moves the problem to a magical answer named god that is assumed not to have a cause, violating it’s own premise (Everything has a cause and the first cause is god, but god does not have a cause), but is defined as something you are not supposed to question. In other words, special pleading.

As with all such arguments, the theist believes he knows his god is real. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. That’s literally what faith is. And as long as you are making a statement about your faith, it’s all good. But you shouldn’t pretend to be logical.

There’s nothing logical about starting with your assumed conclusion and working backwards. It’s intellectually dishonest. I know this is what’s going on because I used to be a believer. Since the person is indoctrinated, he assumes his god exists, then does not admit it but instead uses motivated reasoning to come up with a pseudo-logical argument that comes to conclude what he assumed upfront. (That was not enough for me. Fundamentally that is why I lost my faith as a teenager.)

Making that leap is equivalent to writing the non sequitur, “One plus one is equal to two. Therefore dogs are better than cats.” There is no logical connection between the two sentences, other than the one in the brain of my hypothetical person in this analogy. Likewise, every argument for a god does exactly what my example does… but usually in a way that jumps through a few more hoops. Bullshit baffles brains and the verbosity and/or apparent sophistication of such arguments fool the ignorant as well as those who make the same assumption. But such “logic” isn’t logical at all and never fools anyone who actually can think critically about the subject.

When you examine the arguments raised in this poll, they are very weak. God is nothing more than an alternative to “I don’t know” and is synonymous with magic. In other words, magical thinking.