That's the thing: if you're talking about people who claim to KNOW God's motivations, then all you're doing is wasting your time and giving them the pub they're looking for. If you're talking about those who "believe in belief," then they've all probably prefaced their opinions with some derivation of, "I don't really know, but..."

Just like the scientific layperson can acknowledge the validity of things like quarks or parallel dimensions without knowing the means by which they were discovered, observed, or even the means by which they exist, so are the religious chancing guesses as to what means created the ends they're observing.

Here's an aside that interests me. Scientists don't know what happened -- what was -- before the Big Bang. By all rights, it is quite possible that the time before the Big Bang is unobservable, since our current knowledge suggests that not much survives a singularity. But what if we one day see beyond that singularity, and it is some glowing humanoid figure floating around the cosmos, shaping the universe like modeling clay and then stuffing it into a galactic plastic explosive?

I can understand dismissing the "The Earth Is 5,500 Years Old" creationist crowd (though it seems hopelessly narcissistic to me), but trying to say God is a physical impossibility when all we've been able to do is discredit certain human perceptions of him is awfully closed minded coming from men of science.

PS: Did you know that even Dawkins has acknowledged the possibility of intelligent design theory?

 

I don't think "before" the big bang will ever be an answerable question. Even if string theory or the multiverse or whatever comes after the current theories is proven to be correct, it would be such an abstract concept that most people would never accept or understand it. (Most people still don't even understand basic Darwinism, which was cutting edge science... 150 years ago.)

Two main problems with arguing for creationism/intelligent design, of any level of sophistication. 1) it's not science, and 2) it runs into the regression issue.

It's not "science" since postulating some magical force outside of the laws of physics is untestable and it avoids the question, rather than answering it. It's the metaphysical version of "a wizard did it."

As for regression, even if you allow that some god (or whatever) created the big bang, that doesn't answer anything, since it just begs further questions. Who created God? How? From what? And those aren't questions that can be answered with anything more than theological hand waving.

All that said, it is, of course, unprovable that it didn't happen that way. The Old Testament account of creation could be literally correct in every scientific way. God made everything 6000 years ago, on a Tuesday. And in the same effort made Himself undetectable, created the cosmos to appear to be 15b years old, the inflationary universe, red shift, the earth appearing by all scientific methods to be 5b years old, etc, etc. That can't be disproven, but then neither can any other creation myth past, present, or future. You've just got to invest the deity with untestable powers and magical "a wizard did it" abilities. I find it a fairly empty, pointless argument, though.

 

There's a large difference between ignoring the issue for more scientifically meritorious endeavors and actively campaigning against those with any derivation of that belief system. If you don't buy it, fine. But examining the dementia of those who do believe only leads to defensive amplification of the behavior being decried, not to mention a needless diversion from issues that might have a chance of impacting mankind (if nothing else, the battle lines in the issue of religion have long since been drawn...people are just lopping shells into enemy territory at this point).

That said, the idea of God isn't scientifically obsolete. We're expanding our notions of physical possibility every day, and we've barely scratched the surface; all we know is how little we know. At worst, intelligent designers need only reminded that looking for the end without yet knowing the means is not scientifically sound.