Postulating a Creator just complicates things unnecessarily.

We implicitly assume that the Universe had a beginning, then we ask what happened before! So we want to keep our cake & also to eat it. We want a definite starting point, we don’t like infinities…

Possibly the Universe is some sort of multidimensional sphere – so asking how it started is a sensible as asking what is South of the South Pole, which is a meaningful sounding question that in this context is meaningless!

Claiming that God did it, leads to the question where did God come from, if the answer is that God always existed, then one could also say that the Universe has always existed in some form (Some string theories suggest that the Big Bang was simply a phase change). So insisting on a Creator God, simply complicates things without providing a useful answer. Besides which, no useful explanation is forthcoming on how such a God could create the Universe.

There is nothing to know. Given sufficient complexity for positive feedback plus energy to run the system, it merely happens. A shaken bag of watch parts does not make watches. Mix a ketone or aldehyde, an amine, an isocyanide, and a carboxylic acid to get a marvelously complex bis-amide from the Ugi reaction, within minutes. Starting materials to product, the atom count difference is one molecule of water,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ugi_Reaction_Scheme.png

“A single failed reaction is a setback. A million failed reactions are a combinatorial library.” Managers cannot manage discovery, they can only manage to end it (Hell’s Bells Laboratory to Lucent Technologies to nothing).

It has long seemed to me that the Creationists and IDers that I have encountered classify objects into “designed with purpose” (objects that we know from direct experience are designed by people), “looks designed with purpose” and “random assortment, possibly without purpose.” From this starting point, the leap to natural laws producing apparently designed and purposeful objects seems immeasurably large; it’s much simpler to suppose an Intelligence behind the design.

This becomes important if we begin to think about how to convince a wider audience of the beauty and logic of scientific theories.

Having a single class of functional object suffers from the need to postulate an intelligent designer of which we have no direct knowledge, but it’s a much shorter leap of intuition from all the intelligent designers that we do know to one that we don’t than from the ones we know to a set of natural laws that accidentally create functional objects that look designed.

My point is not an attempt to convince you that intelligent design is correct—far from it. However, I think that Okham’s Razor only really comes down on the scientific explanation when you have a good grasp of the elegance and inevitability of natural law. This usually requires a mix of predisposition and extensive study of natural phenomena. In other words, an appeal to parsimony will work on scientists, but not on those who are experientially far from the scientific paradigm.