Certainly, but "God created it" is the ultimate wild-card explanation. It's identical to saying "because." Not at all. It could be used that way by lazy and i

Certainly, but "God created it" is the ultimate wild-card explanation. It's identical to saying "because." Not at all. It could be used that way by lazy and irresponsible thinkers, but that is not an inherent property of the explanation. To return to my earlier analogy, "You know, just because John could have written that letter is no reason to suppose he did. John could have done just about anything to your computer; if you're willing to invoke him as an explanation for whatever you find, you'll never learn anything about how computers work." "Nonsense, I'm not saying John wrote the letter because I don't have any alternative explanation. I'm saying there's positive evidence he wrote it: Look, he signed it. Plus, he's my boyfriend, and this is how he writes, and this is the sort of thing he would do. Why make it complicated?" We constantly deal with intelligent agents who have great power -- roommates who could do arbitrary things to our living areas, other human beings who can create nearly arbitrary literary output on our computers. And we are able to intelligently distinguish between what these beings can do and what they did do based on the available evidence: what they claim to do, their habits and tendencies and methods, what we know about natural laws. Reasoning about what God did is no different. "God did it" is one of a number of competing explanations for any event, subject to evidence and revision just like any other explanation. There is no a priori reason attributing an event to divine intervention need be evidentially vacuous. The correct statement in the absence of evidence is not "God did it" but "I don't know." (Note even my line of reasoning above followed this trail -- a God I already believe in claims to have created the universe, he seems to be capable and credible, and the natural evidence seems to back up the claim: the universe begun, and it looks pretty clearly designed. It even looks like his handiwork. So from my perspective, why make it complicated?)