I agree with this letter in the Times today:

To the Editor:

The theological anguish of religious apologists like William Safire over natural disasters like the tsunami always makes me wonder why they don’t just accept the obvious conclusion that God does not exist.

To be sure, there are always convoluted theological explanations for why predictions of a benign universe ruled by a loving deity are so often violated. But when scientific theories fail to agree with observation, they are modified or replaced by better theories.

The accurate atheist prediction that such tragedies are natural occurrences, bound to happen in a morally neutral universe, has the virtue of avoiding such unnecessary psychological pain.

Amen (as it were). It reminds me of Ptolemy and epicycles. You create a system of explanation that clearly doesn’t work, but instead of scrapping the system, you keep adding corollaries and exceptions and complicated additions onto it until it all just collapses under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

In fact, thanks to Google, here’s this:

It’s an attempt – a ridiculous attempt – to bring all the resources of a profound intellect to bear on something that won’t bear that weight. So it’s an epicycle. It’s a way of accounting for something. Whereas if you make the sort of Copernican jump and think, “Well, instead of trying to account for the fact that God is everywhere but you can’t see him, so what’s he doing?” say, “Well, God isn’t there.” The need for epicycles vanishes. It’s a smooth, easy cycle. Take God out of it and you don’t need epicycles.