How to easily defeat any argument for God

[Belacqua]

I'm really interested to know what you guys think of this argument:

CommonSenseAtheism.com/?p=8854


Theists often don't know how to respond I find or their responses are poor.

From the transcript:

So if in order to offer something as a ‘best explanation’ you had to have an explanation for the explanation, then you could never explain anything, because you’d need an explanation of the explanation, and then you’d need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then you’d need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and so on… into infinity!

Here he's talking about "brute facts," I think. 

Since about the time of Newton, science has given up on explaining a lot of important things. Instead, it occupies itself with describing and measuring those things. We can say how gravity behaves, we can measure and predict how strong it will be in a given case, but nobody can explain what it is. 

So science isn't really in the explanations business, and hasn't been for a while. 

I've even been told that if we continue to wonder about such things, we are asking questions that "aren't valid." I'm not sure what that even means. Not answerable maybe. 

Does this part seem to contradict what came before?

“Poof! Magic” is not an explanation.

But I can’t just say that “Poof! Magic” is not explanation. I have to argue for it.

Scientists and philosophers, when looking for a best explanation, have identified some qualities that are often associated with good explanations. What is it that makes something a best explanation? What is it that makes one thing a good explanation, and another thing a not-so-good explanation?

Well, the first thing is that they are testable. In fact, if a theory wasn’t testable, it wouldn’t make much sense to say it’s the best explanation of something, because there’s no way for you to test whether it’s true or not! These theories render specific predictions, so you can go out in the world and see whether those predictions are true or false.

Nobody says "poof! magic!" Although they might well say "poof! nature!" "That's just how the laws of physics work, chump, and don't ask why!" 

The qualities he gives for good scientific explanations seem good to me, although I think he has already accepted that in some cases they just aren't possible. 

I wonder if the speaker in the video has ever heard of metaphysics? I know some people haven't. I encountered one person on an atheist forum who couldn't believe that a reputable university would even discuss such a subject. Apparently some people think it's about ghosts and UFOs or something. 

But metaphysics is just about all the stuff that science by definition can't address because, very wisely, science limits itself to things that are empirically repeatably testable. 

And when you do that, it becomes immediately clear what’s really going on here. Believers aren’t really offering a ‘best explanation’ for anything, what they’re offering is a good-old argument from ignorance.

“Woah! Lightning! I don’t know how that happens, so… it must be an angry magical being in the sky throwing down lightning bolts!”

This explanation of religion -- that it began as a pre-science explanation for natural phenomena -- seems to be accepted pretty much universally by "New Atheists." But it's completely untestable. These days anthropologists and historians of religion are skeptical about it. (It's good to be skeptical of things that everyone believes without proof.) 

Anyway, there may be people like this at your neighborhood church, but that doesn't exhaust the category of believers. We have to rule out the prejudice that all believers are a priori stupid. 

How do you defeat all religious arguments in one easy step? You pick out the part of the argument that posits God as the best explanation for something, and you ask: “How is God the best explanation for that? How is ‘poof! Magic’ the best explanation?”

He's just making the same dumb mistake that Dawkins and the others made. He's assuming that this is all religious people have to go on. All he can see is a God of the [scientific] gaps. He doesn't know the first thing about metaphysics, or the traditional arguments for why a God (or something like it) is considered necessary.

This is just sad. He thinks he's so smart. He could at least address one or two of the real theological arguments that have been around for centuries, which everyone educated in the subject has heard of.