I was asked recently by someone whose name I don't even remember (thanks, internet anonymity!) for a response to something his father had said. "How can you look at all of existence and not see the hand of God? How could any of this exist without Him? I can't imagine how it could all come about!"

How could it come about? Oh crap, what have I been doing?!... wait, does that make any sense? The answer, of course, is an emphatic "No!".

Okay, let us think about this for a second. This is what we know as the Argument from Improbability, very similar to the Argument from Ignorance ("I don't know about it, so it can't be true&quot. Lets do another little experiment.  I want you to imagine a ball. I guess you could pick up a real ball if you really want, but it isn't going to help you that much. Now that you've thought of the aforementioned ball, nice and round and bouncy, even, imagine that there are two squares of tape on the floor right next to each other over there (no, other way... yeah, there). Now if you were to throw the ball at the two squares you could reasonably expect it to hit, say, the middle if you're a good shot, or that rather expensive lamp if you aren't (see why I'm only having you imagine this?). But leaving aside your pinpoint precision, or my wild side-arm tosses, the ball could be thought of as bouncing inside one square or the other. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

Okay, we're through the set-up for our little experiment. So, we've imagined a person with somewhat good aim tossing the ball, and we're imagining ourselves looking very closely indeed to determine in which square the ball bounces, but for some reason it bounces in both at the same time! Wait, that's not right! How can that be?! There must be a trick here!!! We'll put some saltine crackers in each square - if they get broken, we know for sure in which square  the ball bounced. She tosses it again... WHOA, same thing! and we were watching carefully that time: One ball left her hand, one ball bounced away from the boxes, and one ball clearly broke the crackers in both boxes at the same time without changing direction. But how can that be? They're next to each other, it was a single bounce, it didn't split into two balls, but based on everything we know about reality this is impossible. I guess god did it?

No... not quite. Let us reword things a bit, and put them into their proper scale. We're not talking about bouncy balls, we're talking about single electrons. Similarly, there are no saltines or taped squares on the floor; instead we have two holes through which a single electron is shot to a detector screen on the other side. Electrons behave like particles most of the time - hence the bouncy ball analogy, but in these experiments they pass through both holes simultaneously, behaving instead like a wave.  Why? I don't know. I could not have imagined that anything would have behaved like that in reality - schizophrenic physical identity and all - nobody who can be expected to be taken seriously could have seriously postulated such behavior. The fact is, however, that despite our personal incredulity it does behave in such a manner. Did you catch that? Even if we can't imagine something, physical proof over-rides our limited comprehensions.

"Well, then" says our friend's father. "In that case you should have no problem with believing that there is a God! You said it yourself:  incredulity is not a legitimate basis for understanding reality, so your disbelief in God is just a failure on your part!" Whoa, there, Mr. Jumped-the-Gun. You left out half the conclusion - the same part that always gets left out of a theistic proof: the Proof part. Nothing in the universe needed, or needs, some outside theistic guidance or control. No proof of a god - any god, not just a specific pet deity like Allah or Zeus or Yahweh - has ever been submitted to scientific inquiry and found to be legitimate, or even slightly compelling, so sit back down.

All of this leaves us right back where we began, unfortunately. None of this has disproved god, but that was never my intention with this article. All I've done is provide a response to one of the less compelling arguments for the existence of a god. It seems to be a growing hobby, so watch me for some more of the same!

(Originally posted at http://www.thisisby.us/index.php/content/argument_from_incredulity )