"Does god exist"; sometimes the answer can be sillier than the question.
Many years ago, my friend Paul and I attended a debate at the University of Guelph entitled "Does God Exist?" There were two fellows there, both of whom purportedly arguing in favour of a scientific worldview. One of them, however, was - perhaps unsurprisingly - being a trifle more thorough about it than the other. I can't remember their names, but for the purposes of this anecdote, their names aren't terribly important. What's important is that they were spokespeople for two fairly well-represented approaches to this question.
There was the one fellow arguing essentially for an evidence-based approach to learning, and for what any reasonable person might call "actual science". The other fellow, who was taking the "pro-god exists" position at that debate, built his argument around what is called the "first cause" or "prime mover" argument. In the briefest of terms, this argument goes something like this: Everything we can perceive in the universe has a cause, and usually one we can in some way understand or theorize about. We can go back further and further back in the history of the universe and find one thing before another before another, each causing the thing after it in a giant chain of causality. At the beginning of this chain, he argued, there must be an "un-caused cause"; something that caused the next series of things, but which required no cause for itself. This cause, he furthermore argued (and here we get to the insultingly ridiculous anthropic principle), did such a jim-dandy job of setting up this string of causes in such a way as to eventually cause human beings to exist that it must have been an amazing super-intellect which had human beings in mind as an end result of his act of creation. So we might as well call this entity "god", and therefore conclude that he exists. He went on in much greater detail, of course, but I don't feel the need to expand upon it too much; you should easily enough be able to find any number of other Christians out there parroting the same material.
And I use the word christian advisedly here: The man was a christian, and intended for the audience to be convinced that his christian god was real and thus subscribe to his bronze age mythology. If we had all walked out of that lecture hall and become Muslims or Hindus, or started a hundred different and distinct religions, each of which were confusingly named "The Church of the First Cause" (which, come to think of it, actually isn't a bad-sounding name), I doubt very much that he would have been very happy with the outcome of having convinced us simply of the existence of this "first cause"; he had a specific identity and personality in mind for this entity which his hypothesis didn't seem to contain support for.
This is an obviously vacuous hypothesis for a number of reasons. I was ten years old when I first asked "Oh yeah? Well then who created god?", and to this day, I've never heard a christian (or any other theist) provide an explanation for their pet deity's existence which wasn't laughable and which was supported by their own mythology. This fellow - the debater above - took the stance that his god required no cause, no reason to exist, and that was that. It seems to me that this falls apart for a couple of different reasons.
The first, which occurred to me several years ago, is that even if he were entirely correct and that there WERE a divine "first cause", there's no reason to expect it to be the christian god he plainly meant to convince us to worship. And I don't even necessarily mean "What if it were Odin or Zeus or whatever" (and yes, I acknowledge that neither was a creator god in their own mythologies, but bear with me here). I mean, even if we entertain his idea that there IS a christian god, that he is essentially as-described in the bible, and that he created our universe, this does nothing at all to support the idea that such an entity might be his "prime mover". What if this god exists, but was caused by some super-god in some higher plane, and whom the christian god is nothing but a helpless insect before the presence of? What if that super-god was himself created by some super-duper god on some higher plane than that? What if this goes back another sixteen or sixty levels further back than the first link in that chain of causes he posited, and the true first cause is actually just some primordial chaos with no intellect or will or what-have-you, and which caused a situation in which his god came into existence by means of what we might teasingly call a naturalistic process?
I'm not saying this is true, or that we have any reason to believe it. I'm saying that the hypothetical structure he's provided gives us at least as much reason to believe this crazy bullshit hypothesis as the crazy bullshit hypothesis he actually wants us to embrace, and thus his argument does nothing whatsoever to accomplish underlying his goals, if you give it the scrutiny it deserves.
But there's an even bigger problem than that, and one which occurred to me quite a bit more recently: If we accept his idea that we live in a universe where things - even very complicated and unlikely things like the spontaneous generation of a hyper-intelligent and immortal substance-less intellect such as his "first cause" - then what does that tell us about the sort of universe in which we live? It tells us, among other things, that we live in a crazy, arbitrary universe where things CAN happen without cause or reason, and that as such, there's no reason to believe that any GIVEN phenomenon needs to be traced back to some primordial prime mover. Why do human beings exist? No reason. Just because. Why does gravity exist? No reason. Just because. Why does god exist? No reason. Just because. Again, if we accept his premise, that we live in a universe which plays home to these sort of random and arbitrary events, why do we suppose that there is a SINGLE first cause? There could be dozens, hundreds, an INFINITY of "first causes", each of which came into existence for no reason whatsoever, and the first first cause to have come into existence for no reason whatsoever could have little or no impact upon the universe at all as it presently exists, having long ago been marginalized by all of the subsequent "first causes".
Indeed, even if we grant his hypothesis the boon of the little bit more rope which it needs to hang itself and say that this first first cause is - as he believes - this christian god of his, then who's to say that in a universe where things can happen without any cause or reason, this god might not have at some point ceased to exist or had its nature changed or somesuch... again, for no reason, and without any cause? What if this god DID exist and was at one point immortal, omnipotent and omniscient and all that, but at some point, for no reason and with no cause, he suddenly became a drooling, mindless, and somewhat spiteful invalid?
Again, I'm not saying this is true, or that we have any reason to believe it. What I am saying is that - again - the hypothetical framework he set up seems to allow for this sort of event, and that if so, there's no way we can take anything he - or anyone else - says very seriously.
"And so you see, this is how you get yourself into heaven."
"Oh, yeah? When did we first hear about that?"
"Two thousand years ago!"
"Well, how do we know it hasn't changed since then?"
"Why would it have changed?"
"No reason. Just because."
It's self-defeating reasoning; a hypothesis which by its very nature cannot prove anything, since its core premise prevents anything from being explained by its very nature. The very definition of a self-defeating argument.
Oh, how I wish I could travel back in time to that day so I could have asked this question to him during the question period at the end of the debate. I expect I would have destroyed him on the spot, causing him to bodily disappear in a puff of logic.