This, and the rest of your post, is not an argument for God or for the existence of God. Just because we don't have definitive answers doesn't mean we ought to grasp onto some idea - however appealing (and I understand the appeal) - at the expense of the same rational analysis that makes us not cross a road when there's traffic hurtling along it.

Two things can be equally true; 2+2 is the same as 3+1. But these concepts you're dealing with do not amount to the same conclusion. That's another fallacy. There have been books and books and books written on the world from a religious point of view, and it's normally with the already-chosen agenda of somehow using the world as a proof for God's existence. Scientists don't research to directly disprove God, they do what they do so we can understand why and how the world around us works. And they do so with rigour, with consistency, with the continual attempt at disproving themselves. And with such research and technology, they can tell us how and why a plant photosynthesizes; they can predict the weather for us based on real things such as wind movements and changes in temperature. In contrast, where's the purpose in saying, 'plants photosynthesize because of God' or 'it is raining because of God'. That's idealism, and it's vague and it doesn't really help us at all. It might be appealing, it might be comforting, but it doesn't really offer much in the way of self-honesty.

I could just as easily reduce the entire Holocaust to 'God'. That's ignoring all the social and historical forces that allowed the Holocaust to happen: technological modernity, a largely indifferent and complacent Europe, the subversion of an entire history of anti-Semitism to a seemingly logical end by the Nazis. All of these are 'God', in that they are no less 'God' than Moses parting the sea, than the creation of the Earth in six days. They are no less coincidental. But 'God' remains a vague explanation for the Earth's beauty, its horrors, the seeming inexplicability of a purposeless humanity. I don't see a defence for such vagueness, neither socially nor intellectually; I can see a need for it, historically, as a means of understanding something that we didn't have other means of research to find out with. But as I said, 'God' is now an outmoded tyrant; perhaps a vital system of belief that has helped get us where we are today, just as the bourgeois revolution was a necessary part in the development of mankind. But look where capitalism is heading now, and us with it... Like I said, I think we need to change the fundamental forces that create these contradictions, and perhaps we'll see an eradication of 'God' as a 'social need', because as an 'intellectual need' he's been long dead.

I disagree that 'disproving something is easier than giving an alternative answer'. That's a harsh reduction of the entire history of Darwinian thought; of all intellectual endeavour, actually - the development of modern philosophy, of genuinely groundbreaking ideas in science and art that have given us new insights into the world.

Why does it make sense? Why does it have to make sense?

I'm not saying there isn't a God. I'm saying that socially, we don't need one - or shouldn't need one, as I've argued already - and that if there is one, he isn't the by-default morally good power that we supposed him to be. Again: he's the product of anthropomorphic self-projection (and self-protecting because of that), which is why there are so many flaws in God's apparent mode of operating; he's the product of primitive thinkers.

Again: without God, we do not become immoral beings without purpose. Without science, however, we remain primitive tribesmen.

Science allows us to 'overcome' God, whereas a belief in God is always going to be in spite of all the scientific development that points against creationism as well as other things.

Not only this, but all the other coincidences that had to occur after that in order to establish certain dominant bloodlines and the evolution of species. But that they did happen means they could happen; a coincidence is not an impossible occurrence occurring, but an improbable one. The odds are stacked against it, but then people do actually win the lottery every week.

The world is far stranger than you've even posited here; and science hasn't and doesn't explain these strange things overnight. It's always limited by and related to the economic and intellectual state of society, which is always changing. But why should questions of probability be washed away with 'The Grand Designer' in the name of, frankly, what I see as an intellectual convenience, a way of putting an end to all curiosity? I actually think it's a shame, and I'm not even a scientist.

Blib, try thinking of all the coincidences in your life that didn't occur, that haven't happened, to try and get an idea of the meaninglessness of attributing one improbable event to some sort of morally conscious being...

Since you're already thinking about this subject, which is a good thing, and since you recognise your belief as a conscious choice, which is also a good thing, you should also ask why you choose to 'believe in something more powerful than you'. Why does it have to be something or someone more powerful than you? What needs is that belief fulfilling? What psychological state warrants a 'hope' in 'something more powerful' than the self? Is it to account for the atrocities around that self? The social injustices? More than this, is it to account for one's sense of guilt in relation to these injustices and atrocities, one's sense of utter futility as an individual in a system full of individuals?

I don't know, and am not pretending to know. But these are all significant questions if we're to search for any truth within ourselves, with any sort of honesty. Faith is not called 'blind' just for the fun of it.

That's the first step to self-debilitating scepticism in the fashionable name of relativism.

How do you know the chair you're sitting on isn't a table?

No, because again the two opposing concepts do not weigh the same in research or rigour. It's true I've had a few jerk-off digs in this thread at the would-be nature of would-be God. At a God with an agenda, anyway, since a God without an agenda becomes redundant and meaningless. I guess that's me trying to show how 'absurd' God would be, if he existed.

But it's not a cop-out to say I don't know if there is one. Atheism isn't a belief there isn't a God, it's a refusal to believe in God.

You can argue that a belief either way is arrived at through reason (though I'd argue religious people are more likely to have inherited their faith, through family indoctrination, which is more or less child abuse; little reasoning involved). But though the process might be similar between the following two approachesthey do not amount to the same, because A's reasoning is sound and B takes a leap in logic for its answer; it's a fallacy.