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As far as the existence of God is concerned, the burden of proof for such a hypothesis has never yet been lifted from the shoulders of the believers. To wit, there are many questions that demand answers, and a good deal of them are still left unanswered - questions to which the believer replies, "God did it", and the response most proper for any rational human being is, "Prove it." No appropriate reply from the believers stands on record to this simple demand. That is not to say that a good many replies of some nature do stand on record, and among some of these people find persuasion.

Today, the most popular defense of God's existence is a phalanx of personal testimonies. Poetic and deeply emotional, these spiritual diatribes explain how important God is in the lives of the writers, how much they have been moved and transformed by His love, etcetera ad nauseam. Religious sympathizers wave these in the face of skeptics, forcing them to cower in deference to the sublime power of faith (regardless of whether or not it is true). It is now positively impolite to tell another human being that their God is not real, or that their faith is misplaced. The important point that these testimonies miss (and miss by a long-shot) is the very question with which we skeptics prompted them: how do you know that God exists?

Imagine if I had told you that I never worry about money, I just act responsibly and then rest comfortably in the knowledge that if my finances ever get too strained I always have a briefcase containing one million dollars in cash underneath my bed. I explain that the briefcase was stashed by a stranger who snuck into my room while I slept one night; I don't know why the stranger did this for me, and I have never crawled under my bed to find it or glimpse its monetary treasure, for fear that greed would get the best of me and I would start spending it, whittling away my wonderful source of comfort. You might ask me how I can know that this briefcase actually exists under my bed if I have never seen it. At such a question my eyes will well-up, my bottom lip will quiver, and I will begin, "How can you ask such a calloused question? Believing in that briefcase gives me such a feeling of security and confidence in life. The briefcase transformed me into a completely new person. I wouldn't want to live in a world without my precious briefcase! And you think to question it's existence so flippantly?"

Hopefully with this context you can see clearly enough that this template of reasoning belies either the lunacy or depraved stupidity of the defender. However, when we move this argument into the defense of God instead of a briefcase, this argument becomes the staple product of mainstream piety: it is smeared across all of our magazines, newspapers, talkshows, and radio stations - and even our peer-rated writing websites! What's worse is that people (sympathizers and detractors alike) mostly just swallow it, as if this sort of thinking actually made sense. The simple fact is that a good hypothesis is one that explains the largest quantity of data while invoking the least amount of assumption. Positing the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, and ineffable personality is the mother of all assumptions; it is an infinitely complex and, thus, completely useless explanation. A rational mind will always be on firmer ground with the answer "I don't know" than with "God did it."

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