How Can Anyone Know Anything About A Mysterious God?

Recently in a rejoinder over at Debunking Christianity one of the participants made the following comment challenging a non-believer to

"Account for the information design that every atheist scholar admits that exists but lives in denial explaining away."

If I can reliably predict the outcome of an event 80% of the time because I know how most of it works, is what I think I know "explaining away" the truth that it must be that "god did it"?

To call scientific explanations, which are by their methodology designed to be reliable or repeatable, "explaining away" is to dismiss the accumulation of knowledge as irrelevant in favor of keeping a worldview that favors remaining anchored to reacting to chance.

A course in probability and economics will give a TASTE of how new properties and characteristics "emerge" from the interaction of "elements". They will demonstrate that "cooperation" or even "coopetition" is rationally, logically, and mathematically the best outcome for all participants. A rudimentary type of morality emerges from the self-interested behavior of actors in an iterative series of events.

Its the "golden rule" and it comes from self-interested behavior of participants, not god.

Dismissing knowledge accumulated through the scientific method, or even scientific theories as "explaining away" negates the natural processes of deviation and mistakes in the system being observed. There can be no unintended errors. Its all got to be god or nothing. And in a more liberal viewpoint that will admit that "God set it in motion and then nature took it from there", then there still exists the problem of explaining why information about any particular god (scripture, personal "experience" what have you) is more valid than any other religion.

All these arguments boil down to ancient information and circumstantial evidence.

If it is said that "god did it", its not enough. It must be shown why the other hypothesis fails, and it must be ensured that its repeatable. The hypothesis that produces the more reliable information should be the one that gets the commitment from the observer. For any given religion there are at least two competing hypotheses that must be eliminated, Science and some other religion. It must be shown why a religions hypothesis produces more reliable outcomes than any other, otherwise, it should be admitted that they are all eligible to be probable.

If someone is not willing to do that, then they are at least obligated to say that either hypothesis might be true, and then they become an agnostic. Logically a religious person should be agnostic anyway, especially with what they think about they know about their god. Just when they think they've got a characteristic identified, something happens that is not consistent, and they struggle to account for it somehow.

"gods ways are mysterious" is just another way of saying
"I don't know anything about this".