User talk:SouthWriter/sandbox/An atheist's objections/@comment-257949-20100706070616

As I keep saying, science is the pursuit of ever more simplistic ideas. The Big Bang theory exists only because we can't devise something more simple and logical. Have you heard of epicycles? Back in the Medieval times, before we adopted heliocentricism, astrologers would find that at times the planets would double-back on themselves before progressing forward again. They couldn't explain it, so they said that the planets were revolving in circles around hidden points. It worked for a while, but then it started to get complicated. Orbits would have dozens of epicycles imprinted upon them to explain the motions of the planets, sometimes with epicycles on epicycles.

And then Copernicus came along, made a good case for the heliocentric model of the solar system, and suddenly the cutting-edge idea of epicycles were worthless. They had been replaced by a much more simple and more logical idea. That is true science at work, that is Occam's Razor. The Big Bang and the holes of logic it creates (dark matter, expansion, and so on) exists to be superseded by a better idea.

This is the issue. If you can observe nothing of the workings of the universe, then you are left with two options: a) it was created by some form of supernatural being, or b) it is the product of countless unknown laws. You'd assume the former. But at our stage of development, with a fair amount of the universe's workings known to us (or at least a handful of useful principles we can work with) we have to face a new dilemma: either a) it was created by a supernatural being, even though virtually the entire universe can be explained without Its intervention with only a handful of unanswered questions, or b) everything of what we see today is the product of provable laws which for the most part we know, and what we don't know we can determine and explain.