"The history of the struggle between religious faith and rational inquiry has been a slow, sometimes halting but inexorable, irrefutable and irreversible eroding away of the justifications offered as proof of God’s existence. Barring “shut up and believe”, consider the state of all those reasons we were once told we must believe in a higher power. Somehow “God did it” doesn’t quite satisfy when we have more eloquent and convincing explanations for natural phenomena. And the ability to explain how the world works is, and always has been, a good measure of the legitimacy of a belief system. The explanations we now have carry the dual benefit of parsimony (simplicity) and reliability (scientific answers actually work), benefits that are instantly lost with the arbitrary imposition of the god hypothesis.
We once accepted that only through a special act of creation could humans, clearly the only creatures capable of conceiving of God, have come into being. Darwin, Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection), and a great many others in the intervening years, have shown with exquisite detail how we came to be, without the need of divine assistance. The inability of religion to offer answers as effectively as rational thought had a corrosive effect on religious authority. This led to a greater reliance on supporting arguments in defense of the faith, or apologetics, on the part of believers hoping to bolster religious belief. Apologetics is not new, but with the ability of science to explain so many things that religion once claimed sole knowledge of theists have had to resort to intellectual appeals to maintain legitimacy."
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"Religion has traditionally laid claim to many of the explanations that are now clearly within the magisteria of science. Before science, religion attempted to explain such issues as where we came from; how the cosmos works; how we should treat each other; what is moral behavior; and what happens to us when we die. Even as science clearly explains most of these things far better than religion ever hoped to, theists cling doggedly to the idea that the really important issues are still theirs alone to address. In spite of how science explains, with piercing clarity, the movements of the heavens, the inner workings of the atom and the various “flavors” of quarks from which sub-atomic particles are made, the religious apologist still insists “ah but the really big stuff is ours still”.
"For far too long the apologists have been allowed to skate by pointing out that science is powerless to explain these really big questions and acting as if, de facto, that means God did it. This is a terrible and illogical assumption with no justification or basis in rational thought. This also ignores the fact that in many cases science actually does explain the phenomena in question quite well; the apologists are simply ignoring that inconvenient information."
Much more in part 1 of 8 parts here:
http://www.examiner.com/skepticism-in-washington-dc/refutations-of-christian-apologetics-bad-reasons-for-believing-god-part-1
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