...I would next like to bring up your blog about;
"The Method of WLC's Madness"
Specifically Occams Razor and how it applies critically AGAINST your (special pleading) statement;
"...The major problem with a god solution is that the god solution raises questions that are more difficult than those it answers. That’s negative explanatory power."
The God conclusion answers the HOW and the WHY.
Your non-theist model effectively leaves our existential "WHY" questions unanswered.
(See Coyne, Dawkins, Krauss, Myers, etc. dismissing these with the wave of a hand.)
Now, I ask, which is the simpler, neater, more satisfying theory according to Occam? The complicated one which has all those loose thread, unanswered questions dangling enigmatically, or the neatly bundled Unified Theory of Everything we call the God Conclusion?
I argue that it is atheism - not theism - which has all the unnecessary 'embranglements'.
And that Occam would prefer the neater bundle with fewer loose threads.
Occam is not authoritative. Sure, if we have two possible solutions to a problem and one is simple and the other is complicated, we should possibly look at the simple one first. But even if the simple solution appears to work, this does not necessarily make the complicated one wrong. It all comes down to evidence. Is there evidence that supports the simple solution (evidence that would not exist if it were wrong, so it useful for falsification)? Is there an apparent total lack of evidence that falsifies the simple solution directly? If so, then we can tentatively accept the simple solution. But if we turn to the complicated solution and try to falsify it, which should be easy, because it's complicated, but nothing we do falsifies it, then we need to look at points on which the two solutions differ and see if there is any evidence regarding those points.
What we can't do, as rational people, is rely on the arbitrary application of Occam's razor. That would be lunacy.
Your complaint, however, isn't really about Occam's razor at all. It's about explanatory power. And even more specifically about an attempt to misapply explanatory power.
Atheism, as opposed to the god conclusion, totally removes the "why" question as an issue. There is no "why" other than "by what mechanism". Meaning of the sort that you are grasping for simply doesn't exist. It's dispensed with. You seem to grasp this, to some extent, even if it leaves you feeling unsatisfied. The god conclusion, on the other hand, has an infinite expanse of "why", it's "why" all the way down and very little by way of answers beyond "god is mysterious". It is almost as if you are less interested in the answers and more fascinated by the ability to ask questions to which there
aren't answers. These questions (without possible answers) are not explanatory.
You seem to think that there is a difference between "unanswered" and "unanswerable" questions, as if the latter are intrinsically superior. This might in fact be your claim, but you'd have to provide an argument to support that position.
As for me, why are "unanswered" intrinsically superior to "unanswerable" questions? Because while they are unanswered today, they might be answered tomorrow, or next year, or next century, or in the far distant future, or, perhaps, never at all. But even if we never manage to answer them, they give us something to work towards.
Pretending that you've wrapped up all the loose threads, as you claim to have done with the god conclusion, when all you've done is hide a mass of potentially dangerous ignorance under a pile of pixie dust and glitter, is not intellectually honest.
This is all a side show, however, since I don't think that you've really addressed the core objections in
The Method of WLC's Madness - namely the misapplication of "explanatory power" to issues like the beginning of the universe (I'll generously give him a pass on the resurrection, since at least there's a claim to history there).
