Essentially what your friend subscribes to is "Deism", a belief in a non-intacting god. I found this was an unnessecary answer to a question I do not have the answer for. I do know of a solid argument to refute this other than, "if you don't know, why plug in an answer at all", just say "I don't know".

I love your avatar by the way.

Deism seems like an awful lot of work just to be able to say you believe in something.  lol

Theist: "You can't prove that version X of God doesn't exist."

You: "You can't prove that leprechauns don't exist. Therefore, by your standards, I should be able to hold a belief in leprechauns that is unassailable by you. I should be able to get exempted from taxes and wars on the strength of my leprechaunist tenets. I should be able to raise children to believe that all gold comes from the end of the rainbow. I should be able to insist that Lucky Charms be offered as a menu choice in all schools."

What theists are doing when they present the "cannot disprove" argument is attempting to win the game by shifting the goalposts. They cannot rationally defend any traditional claims about God, so they redefine God into something that cannot be investigated.

The problem is, there is only one basis on which a rational belief can be held: evidence. There is no basis for believing in anything that cannot be discovered, deduced or induced through examination of evidence. And the fact remains that there is not the slightest shred of evidence for the existence of this deist, non-interventionist God. In fact, if He were to leave evidence, He would obliterate His whole paradigm. He is firmly in the same category as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, except that no one even claims to have a picture of Him.

When a theist claims you can't know that God doesn't exist, point out that we can't know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow. We can't know that our house will be there when we get home from work, or that a murderer won't kill us in our sleep at night. Using the theist's standard of the word "know," there is no level of probability that satifies this criteria. We might as well forget about "knowing" things and simply admit that all we ever have is belief. After all, we might all be in the Matrix, right?

The fact is, there is no "knowledge" as the term is used by theists. All we have is rational beliefs, and irrational beliefs. Theists operate from the assumption that there is some Knowledge that exists outside the brain, a Truth that transcends our ability to perceive it. Bullshit. They can pretend in arguments that they think this, but the fact of the matter is that in their daily lives theists use the same standard of knowledge and truth as the rest of us. If something seems sufficiently improbable, they know, just as we do, that it isn't true. You don't see theists throwing their money away on bad deals any faster than atheists. They are perfectly capable of telling real from fake and likely from unlikely.

The real reason that theists make these ludicrous claims about God and the universe is because they don't really care about the real answers. Being able to believe that Aunt Jenny is alive and looking down from heaven is more important to them than knowing the actual age of the Earth. They can remain secure in their belief that all their values and prejudices are backed by Divine Commandment, or they can have an accurate mental model of how species evolve. Not a hard choice, for many people. Add to the mix the fact that religion is a social and economic club, and you multiply the reasons why people find it convenient to suspend their disbelief.

We do know that God doesn't exist, in exactly the same way as we know the sun will come up tomorrow. Anything else is a bunch of philosophical nitpicking. 

Not sure what you're looking for. IMO, the "flying toaster" IS the knock-out argument for ANY God or god-like claim. By claiming that they have knowledge of things without evidence for those things, deists are commiting a huge fallacy and are in total violation of reason and logic. If they wish to abandon reason and logic, you can accuse them of intellectual dishonesty the minute they try to make ANY argument, since argument requires reason and logic.

You first tactic should be to force them to abandon the use of the word "know," since no one really knows anything in the formal sense.  Then you can have a discussion about rational and irrational beliefs and show them that they are firmly in the latter camp.

You can use deductive and inductive reasoning to make perfectly good conclusions about things that you cannot directly observe. But you must always have evidence to work with, and your conclusions must satisfy Occam's Razor ie the theory that requires the fewest additional elements should be prefered. Theists try to take everything they see as evidence for God, but the Razor always defeats them because science always has a theory that doesn't require magic. For instance, proponents of Intelligent Design (IDiots) put forth the theory that the living things we see must have been created on purpose by some intelligent entity. This requires us to postulate a whole raft of things we have no evidence for, including the being(s) itself, an undiscovered method of creating and editing living things, a reason to do so, an explanation for why the being(s) is no longer around etc etc. Evolution explains life's diversity by noting that a genome can change through sexual combination and mutation, and that natural selection can guide the process to create adapted forms. Simpler, requiring no elements that we don't have evidence for, and therefore a better theory. 

*shudder* That is terrifying. Was this a Christian college? 

Yes, there's one thing I've come to realize whenever I ask myself the question "how can they think that?": it's that IDiots and Christcons DON'T CARE what the answer is as long as they get to keep on believing. Discovery and the love of truth is totally alien to these people. Knowledge exists for them only as a means to an end, never as an end in itself. Therefore, their only motivation for addressing issues like evolution at all is a POLITICAL one, not scientific at all.

What it boils down to is this: Christcons want to be able to mold society along the lines of their religious views, the way it was before secularism exploded in the 20th century. To do this they need political power. But they are faced with the fact that most people do not want to live their lives according to a strict religious ideal, and with the fact that there are now large groups of people with religions other than christianity. This means that they can't get power democratically with an outright declaration of their intentions. For many years through the middle of the century they were stymied by this problem. They finally found a way out by copying the tactics of the enemy, namely, the minorities who were trying to open society up to admit their lifestyles. The tactic is to seek out emotionally charged "wedge issues" and take up a stance of martyrdom in relation to them, fostering the idea that the government is oppressing them. Abortion was the first of these, then school prayer and now evolution. The fondest hope of the IDiots was that they could force governments to act to ban them from the schools, thereby mobilizing their electoral base to vote in Christcons in large numbers. That's why the whole "debate" was framed in terms of "fairness" and "equal time." The IDiots don't care if they are right or wrong, as long as they get to look oppressed.   

Why is it that when I hear of Deism, I automatically imagine someone playing 'Pin the tail on the donkey'?

As an agnostic, I often say, my theory is that, if there's a god, he (or she, it, or they) set the world in motion and doesn't interfere.  How you react to people and the things that happen to you is what gets you into Heaven or Hell, if they exist.  And I point out, it's only a theory, and not something I firmly subscribe to.  I didn't realize this is the same thing as Deism. 

 It's the only explanation I have for the existence of a god and him allowing the things that happen in the world.  I recently argued with a religious woman on a message board I frequent, who, along with others, says prayer works and all that.  I brought up one of my usual scenarios:  I've seen adults who said that, as children, they prayed that Daddy or Uncle Bill wouldn't come in their room again that night to molest and rape them, but night after night, it continued.  Why wouldn't God protect that child?  This woman said the standard answer, that she didn't understand why God did the things he did, but she has faith in him.  Typical non-answer.