Please explain yourself, because no atheist argument that "there is no god" has ever convinced me that the lonely, yet repeatable physical laws we observe weren't created by something higher than ourselves.
I think it is the wrong question. The interesting question would be, what is the nature of god? If it is just some entity that create a universe (like maybe we could simulate a universe in a computer), then you have to ask where does god come from? You have not answered the question at all, you have only pushed it up one meta-level.
Imagine we were beings in an artifical life simulation, created by droodlewhoops. Maybe one day we would figure out that that's the case. Then we still don't know what droodlewhoops are, hence we don't know anything.
You are right that atheism is also a kind of belief, that is way these day it is more common for rational people to be agnostic.
Thanks for the reply, it's interesting to think about recursive creation. I do agree that atheism is a belief system just as much as classical religion is, they just beleive very different things.
I still think there is difference. At least atheism encourages you to look for other explanations, whereas religion simply is the end of the story ("things are what they are because god made them so - that's it").
I'm sure if there is a God he wouldn't have resorted to anything as crude as 'creating' the laws. It's more beautiful that they weren't sledgehammered into existence. It gives them some substance, instead of just a proxy for something we couldn't possibly understand.
Besides, we're been explaining anything inexplicable as the work of the gods for thousands of years. This conversation could have happened in Greek times and you would still have been convinced at the existence of Apollo at the end of it.
The problem is that explaining something by invoking a "god" is not an explanation at all. There is no piece of evidence which points to a god and excludes other hypotheses.
