There is a HUUUGE methodological principal in learning explicated by Rav Chaim Soloveitchik: An explanation that answers the most questions is most likely the correct one. If a person acts in crazy ways and you can offer a different explantion for each behavior in such a way that he would be considered sane, it would still be more plausible to assume he is crazy because that explains everything in one fell swoop [see Chagiga 3 about a שוטה]. If you have 15 question and either give 15 different answers or one answer can solve all 15 problems it is more likely that the latter approach is correct. Certainly if you have fifteen problems and have only 5 possible answers to explain 5 of the problems and another answer that explains all 15, it is more plausible that the one answer is correct.
So take the world. There are trillions upon trillions of phenomena. That all present questions - How did they come onto being and how do they know to be as they are? A few examples [like I said - of trillions and trillions]: How does your DNA know and store so much information? How does a drop of semen and an egg produce a real live human being [with consciousness]?! How does my body know how to digest my food? How is there a law of gravity in the absence of which life would be impossible?
Believers have one answer to EVERY QUESTION on earth [and in the entire Universe for that matter]: G-d.
Deniers have to find an new explanation for EVERYTHING. And there are many things they admit that they can't explain [like the gaps in evolution or how the first cell came onto being].
So what is more plausible??
I often think about this idea and was glad to see it in the book The Case For A Creator by Lee Strobel:
“This is a form of practical reasoning that we use in life all the time. It says if we want to explain a phenomenon or event, we consider a whole range of hypotheses and infer to the one which, if true, would provide the best explanation. In other words, we do an exhaustive analysis of the possible explanations and keep adding information until only one explanation is left that can explain the whole range of data.
The way you discriminate between the competing hypotheses is to look at their explanatory power. Often, more than one hypothesis can explain the same piece of evidence. For instance, as we just agreed, deism and theism can both explain the beginning of the universe. Okay, fine. But if you keep looking at the data, you find that only theism can explain the evidence for design in biology after the origin of the universe. And so theism has superior explanatory power. We reach conclusions with a high degree of confidence using this form of reasoning in our everyday life. This is what detectives do. This is what lawyers do in courts of law. Scientists use this approach. This model can enable us to achieve a high degree of practical certainty. And when we look at the evidence I’ve mentioned from cosmology, physics, biology, and human consciousness, we find that theism has amazing explanatory scope and power. The existence of God explains this broad range of evidence more simply, adequately, and comprehensively than any other worldview, including its main competitors, naturalism or pantheism. And the discovery of corroborating or supportive evidence is accelerating. In 1992, the historian of science Frederic Burnham said the God hypothesis ‘is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years'".
