[Phil153]

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Questions of this nature have been dissected by some incredible minds for milleniums.

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Incredible minds with barely any knowledge about anything. I'm not sure that people realize the amazing leap in understanding that has happened in the last two centuries. We take the knowledge of genes, germs, evolution, geology, meteorology, cosmology, the brain, microscopy and so on for granted these days. They didn't exist a few hundred years ago. All people knew was a mysterious world and an even more mysterious "heavens", where nothing really made sense without a designer. Thus the God hypothesis was perfectly reasonable.

Now, we have a direct and strong link between almost everything we know and the basic laws of physics. Almost every spot where God was hypothesized has been shown to be not God at all. That should give any thinking man incredible pause when invoking God for the mysterious. No other hypothesis in the history of mankind has such a horrible record at being wrong.

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Don't get me wrong, science has dispelled a great deal of mythology, but count me amongst the people that the more they understand of the Universe, the more persuaded they are of the existence of an architectural force

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The universe is awe inspiring and miraculous, but it's also fundamentally strange. The odds of it conforming to simplistic human understanding and expectation (i.e. a conscious dad-like figure who loves us made the world) is minuscule. The Copernican Principle has been validated over and over and the God hypothesis has been crushed again and again.

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Moreover, the dominant religeons have not been about "explaining the weather" for milleniums as well.

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Of course not. But the idea is the same - people invoke a conscious entity behind forces or structures they can't understand. Western knowledge has just set the bar at a different point.

Consciousness remains a mystery, I agree, but a lot less than it once was with a direct link between basic physics and the intelligence via the brain and its cells. If you want to invoke God in the last remaining mysteries of life, that's fair enough. But be aware that people have been doing exactly that for thousands of years, and history has made fools of them.

And a final point...why God? Why can't the universe just "be", without invoking retarded notions of a conscious entity that we can relate to? If God exists, the concept of God is not God.