God? and Fallacy

The argument that god does or does not exist is one of the most infuriating arguments have ever had the displeasure of having with a multitude of people.  This is because a majority of the arguments that are used are fallacies. Starting with the one I feel is the most irritating, “I don’t have to prove that god does (does not) exist because you cannot prove the opposite” which is an argument from ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam). Following on the scale of irritating is the argument for the existence of god of “because the bible says so” where the user of the argument assumes that because there is some historically accurate facts in the bible the whole thing must be historically accurate. This is called an argument from scripture (which Wikipedia amusingly calls a spider-man fallacy). Another fun argument that is used to “prove” the existence of god is called the “First Cause Argument” which states that something had to start everything so there for it must have been god. This is called “Fallacy of the single cause” or causal oversimplification. An argument that I find particularly amusing against the existence of god is called the argument from poor design, this argument states essentially that things suck and god should have done a better job if he exists and is omnipotent. This is an fallacy because it makes an assumption that god did not make the universe in an optimal fashion, since there is no way to prove this there is no way to establish the validity of the argument.

I have encountered this set of fallacies both being on the telling side and the receiving side. I can remember when I was in high school and bit of an extremist not being  able to understand why my friends would not listen to me when I tried to convert them. Then when I got a bit older and was an extremist on the other side of the argument I could not understand why people would ever believe in god. Now I am somewhere in the middle and have the distinct pleasure of being amused by people using these particularly absurd arguments as if they were the only truths left on earth.