I will start with a certain bold and uncompromising contention. Arguments for the existence of God are ridiculous.
I know it is not a novel thought, that arguing about God's existence is a fool's errand. Here my particular take on the subject with be the assertion that believing in the existence of God for "reasons" means merely that one believes in the reasons, not in God. Any number of godlings can be asserted to exist "because" of this or that reason, but inevitably the "reasoning" entailed thereby must involve observations, assertions, or conclusions on the part of the arguer that must, by definition, have the finality to produce the immediate and immediately adjacent postulated deity. An indisputable evidence of the existence of a god is as firmly ascribed to by the arguer as the god itself, and the arguer is shown to be a believer in an effectual pantheon, even if this pantheon consists only of the deity paired with the increment of asserted evidence.
God, on the other hand, is the curator of reasons--there is no "reasoning" God out. This fact is not unknown to Christianity, but like all other things that happen to humanity, the fact of the unknowable nature of God does not abide with us humans--rather it glances off. "Glancing off" happens in the movement of--and therefore impermanence of--time and space. The commentators will assert--as simultaneously-held propositions--that the Bible does not argue the existence of God (witness the stately presumptions of Genesis), while also the Bible as canonized includes Paul's convenient presumptions about what other people think when they look up (for example) at the purported majesty of the skies. Paul does not loiter about, however, to explain how deity found without question in the evidences of Creation was an idea to have been seized upon by third- and fourth- cursed-generation Israelites, cursed when they went in and cursed when they went out, hunching and staggering under skies of storm and drought.
This is the fact of arguments about the existence of God. They are played-about with by the denominations, because even if they are found abiding by particular persons--persons whose purported constancy beggars belief--even so do such arguments glance about among congregations and schools of thought--now holding sway, now being seen as cheap and threadbare. God is beyond argument. God is beyond compare to--or worse still, intellectual derivation from--observed phenomena.
And so belief exists within the person, or it does not. Or it exists to some extent, greater or lesser. And the existence himself of God is the least "believable" of all--if belief in God hinges on those impious assemblings of deity and phenomena I described above. The "argument from Creation" is ridiculous on its own terms--and this argument is made only more pathetic when the notion is added either of godliness supposedly implied by the beneficial quality of Creation, or of godliness supposedly implied by the skillfulness (however fancied) of the creation act.
And, of course, that is not all. Creation, in the Christian conceit, is cursed because of the sinfulness of humanity. Not cursed simply because human beings do their lamentable and loathsome things upon it, but cursed intrinsically--so that the very Creation of beauty from which it is said often that we draw, willingly or not, our recognition of the Creator, is at one and the same time a Creation of ugliness. And of horror. And of misery.
This is where I must return to my beginning statement, to the effect that certain vast implications of strands of thought can lie neglected not because they are undiscernible, but because they capture no one's attention. To the Christian, Creation is simultaneously cursed and yet also reflective of the goodness of Providence. To the materialist, Creation so-called is a neutral mass of matter and energy. That certain materialists will describe Creation as a hellscape of suffering is merely a retort, meant of ridicule the believers' rapture with divine handiwork that the believer is duty-bound to be enraptured with. I will hope, however, that certain believers will come to accept that belief in a God worthy to be called "God" is a belief that prostrates itself before a God who can be believed in simply because he can be believed in.
And if God is not to be extrapolated from a--presumably good and well-executed--Creation, then we are no longer under compulsion to ensconce God in arguments for belief that are really arguments that make God contingent upon the supports for belief. For we do not exist in a good and well-executed Creation. We exist in that hellscape referred to above. We exist with the chance to believe in a God of goodness, but it is not to call God "good," to ascribe to him our conceits about what we look about ourselves and call "good." We do not even have anything but unreliable conceits about Jesus--we do him no honor in condescending to pronounce him "good." We can only honor Jesus in reaching through our Jesus-conceits toward a lure of goodness that exudes from the ineffable, not from a God who we estimate as being worthy of our babblings about his goodness being "inestimable."
And then at least we can take the Creation-curse notion at face value, for the abiding implication of the Creation-curse is not that we can look around us and see good things with smudges and flaws. If we see anything around us that we think "good," it is a thing of a moment of time and of a shuddering of space. The more we look, the more we see Creation as sawing itself to bits, for even those things that we see as timeless (or at least "enduring") are but manifestations of what the scientists call "stratified stability"--momentary aggregations of fascinating interactions of particles that persist even as functions of their non-persistence, that is, of their ceaseless vibrations and permutations. And eventually these motions will rend everything apart.
What Creation God created at first is represented to us only in our ability to hold conceits for moments, for we have no warrant to look at this or at that and say, This is How God Made It. Behind this realization is the fact that we have no warrant to conjure up this or that proof that This is How God Is. At first we can merely believe, and then we can look at what is around us and see not goods to be plucked (or plundered), nor evils to be squirmed away from (or cast into the teeth of those whom we deem more evil still), but rather we can see the great wound of all. It is this great wound that Jesus dared to encompass, and to which he applied the balm of his ministry--and he demands the same of us.
