How do you know God is billions of times smarter than any of us? What makes you think he knows better than we do what is best for us?
You are giving us the 'God knows best, it's not for us to question him' argument, and it's not good enough.
I'm intelligent. I have experience of the world. I have a sense of right and wrong. Why is it futile for me to question the notion that the world has been created by an all-powerful God who loves me? Isn't it better to look for truth than be constrained by the archaic superstitions of the myth-makers?
Victor
I'm trying very hard not to insult your intelligence, so I am going to assume that this response is pure unadulterated hubris on your part.
What part of "Extra-terrestrial being capable of understanding multiple spatial and possibly temporal dimensions with the power to create an entire universe" does not translate for you into "This being is phenomenally smarter than humans can ever aspire to be in their lifetime." Are you really so arrogant as to assume that somehow nothing can be beyond your imagination or that within our pathetically short lives of a hundred years that we can come to grasp the existence of a being that might have existed since before the Big Bang (assuming there even was a BB)? I guarantee you, there are humans that defy your conception right this very moment. The possibility that a multi-dimensional or pan-dimensional entity being within your ability to conceive was not a possibility that even remotely occurred to me.
Maybe you are a smart guy; I'm willing to give you credit and assume that you are book-learned and have a fair handle on
some aspects of rationality (intellectually humility is probably lacking though). But we are cosmic infants: ants really. Our best models of how the universe was formed are so full of holes that to presume we are even close to understanding it is pure folly.
When anything is possible you have precisely zero knowledge. There are scores of variations on BBT out there, and that doesn't include all the non Bang theories out there. These are not things proposed by people without knowledge; these are all theories that some astrophysicist came up with. So at the very least they are largely consistent with the current body of knowledge. The "tests" for several of these are beyond our ability to experiment (how do you test whether or not in a trillion years the universe will collapse and you get another BB?).
If you decry religion's hubris for assuming that they have a great handle on life and the cosmos, then you have to not commit the same fallacy lest you become a hypocrite. Are you a hypocrite sir? I get the impression that you aren't or at least aren't trying to be.
It is a difficult pill to swallow to admit that you don't understand something that you love. Knowledge of the cosmos appeals to a great many people. But don't mistake the desire for knowledge for actually having that knowledge. I would be well and truly shocked if there were
Not some fantastically powerful being out there somewhere beyond the bounds of space and time. But that isn't "God" to me, and even if it might technically qualify as a "god" if it were the intervening sort, the fact of the matter is that if there is such a being then it is not intervening in a way that we can detect experimentally. Prayers to "God" to win the lotto don't improve people's chances of winning. But on the flip side of things: Why should some cosmic insect think that it is important enough to warrant the attention of a greater cosmic being that possibly spans multiverses?
MTF