the god hypothesis

What I love most about myself is the courage I have to constantly challenge my conclusions.  I argue against them and I seek out new evidence.  And I keep doing that until I come to conclusions that I can show are logically impossible to argue against.  Atheism is one of those conclusions.  God might exist, but belief in god is never substantiated by science or philosophy.  It's always illogical to prefer an explanation that requires the existence of god over literally ANY other explanation and for ANY phenomenon.

For example:

The oceans turn into blood and all the Christians start floating into the sky and the heavens part and a giant bearded Palestinian descends in a fiery chariot and begins to smite the unrighteous.  Or whatever.  Pick your crazy.  We could say that the existence of the universe itself is sufficiently crazy, but let's go with the revelation apocalypse scenario.

It's tempting to say that prophecy has been fulfilled and that the becharioted brute must be the son of god.  But there's a better explanation.  Maybe an alien race from another galaxy has decided to enslave us for fun and profit and they've decided that the most cost effective enslavement strategy is to convince everyone that they are one of the gods that most of the world already believes in.  They have nanobots that turn water into hemoglobin and they have tractor beams and they have a big alien in a suit who loves killing lesser beings.

And that's just one explanation.  Maybe it's mischievous  time travelers from the future.  Maybe it's an elaborate hoax orchestrated by governments or mega churches or magicians.  There are literally infinitely many explanations for this scenario.  And of all the explanations, of all the ridiculous and nearly impossibly unlikely to be correct explanations, the least likely is the hypothesis that there is an all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, eternal being who created the universe out of nothing and has now come in human form to murder people who disagree with him.

"god" will always be the least likely explanation for any phenomenon because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  And the more extraordinary your claim is, the more evidence it requires.  Literally any and every explanation you come up with to explain any scenario will always be INFINITELY more likely than the god hypothesis because the god hypothesis requires the existence of a being who is infinite in at least 4 ways.  God has infinite power.  God has infinite knowledge.  God has infinite spacial presence.  And god has infinite temporal presence.  Can you even think of another way in which he could be infinite?  You can't make a more impossibly unlikely hypothesis than that.  It requires an infinite amount of evidence.

And that's just one way in which the god hypothesis is always the least likely explanation.  If you want to bring up the existence of the universe, then we can talk about how the god hypothesis is actually a worse explanation than no explanation at all.

So when you see a "ghost" or have an "out of body" experience or seem to to get your prayers answered or whatever the experience is, you can be convinced that god exists.  I don't fault you.  I've never had those experiences.  But don't pretend that those experiences constitute sufficient evidence for your conclusion.  I'm sympathetic to people who have had the kind of profound experiences that lead them to believe that god exists.  But I have nothing but contempt for anybody who tries to pretend that science or philosophy justifies that position.  Believe in god if you must, but have the courage to admit that you're being illogical.  It's called FAITH, right?