Theists - how certain are you that a God exists?

[robvalue]

Thinking about the origins of the universe, and if there even were any origins, is hard.

So instead, we put a personality behind it. Some guy did it. We dress it up in lots of fancy language, but at the end of the day, we're saying some guy did it with magic. That's a very easy concept to imagine, even if you have no idea of how the magic works.

I can see this being a coping mechanism. We tend to want to personify things, because we understand people better than bizarre questions regarding physics.

But all we've actually done is replace the question with a dude. We're comfortable with there being a dude. But the dude is still the question, and has provided no answers. We've just added another unecessary assumption and layer of complexity, and face all the same questions that we had originally. But the dude is very special, and normal rules don't apply to him... That's no different to saying the normal rules don't apply to the origins of the universe, which is a very sensible thing to say in fact. Things get mighty weird near the (possible) beginning, and it's this insistence that standard models still apply that causes all the confusion I think.

All these cosmological style arguments follow the same pattern:

1- The way I understand things creates a paradox which cannot be possibly solved.

2- The paradox must have been solved, because the universe is here and working.

3- Therefor, some being must have the power to do impossible things, and he must also not be part of the paradox, or else the paradox would still be there.

Usually, part 1 is completely false, there is no paradox, just an oversimplification or misunderstanding of reality. Part 3 is just special pleading and trying to define impossible things into existence. Defining something does not mean it's even possible such a thing can exist.