But you could also say that with modern understanding of how unbelievably amazing the universe is and how unfathomable a place it really is that modern skeptics are also victims of their own imaginations in thinking that they understand enough of existence and the universe to say with such certainty that there isn't a God. When in reality the true value of how much we actually know is probably more or less nothing compared with what there is to know.
It is unquestionably true that much, even most of what we think we know is imprecise, wrong to some degree, and that our present store of knowledge as a species is a woefully deficient subset of the sum total of knowledge required to wholly understand the Universe. We are ignorant; we can only ever be ignorant, and all of the learning and science that has ever occurred or ever will can only ever help us to be
less wrong about the world.
And yet your reasoning suggests that, since we are ignorant, the darkness of our ignorance provides some form of evidence that god(s) may actually exist.
No one except the very foolish says that there is
certainly no such thing as god(s); it is impossible for us to know
anything with absolute certainty. The simple fact is that we could all exist in the Matrix, and literally every thing you think you know could be an elaborate lie.
But in the absence of positive evidence, the
vastly more probable hypothesis is that a thing does not exist. To use an analogy, I could suppose that there may be a teapot orbiting the Sun halfway between Earth and Mars. There is no evidence of such a thing, and our instrumentation would be too imprecise to be able to detect it were we to search. Yes, there
is a non-zero probability that such a teapot actually exists...but as with
all unevidenced assertions (even if the same assertion is made by every person who has ever lived, the ultimate appeal to popularity), that probability is so
close to zero as to be zero for all practical purposes of reasoning. That is, we would not attempt to plot the course of probes sent to Mars accounting for the
possibility of a collision with the teapot - because the teapot is so unlikely to exist that we consider that may as well just
not.
This is the case with all hypotheses that are not supported by evidence. They are quite simply no more likely to be true than any of the infinite random guesses the human mind can create within itself. It is
possible but unlikely in the extreme that an invisible unicorn is watching over your shoulder while you read this post. It is
possible but unlikely in the extreme that there really are leprechauns in your garden, and they simply hide whenever you or anyone else is present.
God(s) are no different. The hypotheses that suggest god(s) exist (and there are many, and they are often mutually exclusive; it's wrong to even conclude that the popular belief in god(s) suggest that god(s) exist simply because the vast majority cannot even agree on what these god(s) are supposed to
be) are not supported by any evidence whatsoever. Books, tradition, and popularity are evidence only that books were written, that beliefs were held, and
nothing more. They do not and never can provide more than the smallest suggestion that such beliefs might actually be
accurate reflections of objective reality.
The reason is simple: evidence is any observation that adjusts the probability of a given hypothesis being true as compared to alternative, competing hypotheses. If I hypothesize that there is a pen on my desk, I can test that hypothesis by making an observation of my desk - and the observation of a pen being present would increase the probability of the hypothesis that said the pen was there to nearly 100%, while the competing hypothesis that said that the pen was not present would be adjusted to a near-zero probability of being accurate.
In the grand scheme of things, the vast, vast majority of the infinite number of possible hypotheses are inaccurate. Therefore, the null hypothesis, the most likely answer when we ask, in the absence of evidence, "does this exist," is "maybe, but probably not" until and unless evidence is discovered that alters that probability.
By this reasoning is the "god of the gaps," the god(s) who occupy the spaces of ignorance within and around our understanding, shown to be a logically worthless idea in itself. It is
not impossible to reason in the presence of uncertainty - indeed, as we are never certain of anything, uncertainty is the natural state of all human reason, and it is inappropriate and intellectually dishonest to make exceptions for certain
favored hypotheses.
Not to mention the fact that such god(s) must forever flee to new shadows of mystery as we continue to expand our knowledge.
The argument from ignorance is every much a logical fallacy as the argument from popularity, or the argument from incredulity.
There may well be god(s), Mike. It's not likely, but it's possible. But your fallacious reasoning cannot be the way we discover them.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.
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