God is a point in an uncertain future. The more uncertain the future the bigger God wil be. This also explains the friction between science and religion,because science makes the future less uncertain and thus god smaller.
Not sure if that's too abstract, but your statement that "the world has been significantly less predictable since the Enlightenment" made me wonder, because you'd think "less predictable" means that understanding has gone down.
Of course our understanding has increased. But that has generated rapid and accelerating changes in society and a monumental increase in its complexity, which together, make it significantly harder to predict the future of the social world.
I am not saying that we don't have a better predictive grasp of the natural world. We obviously do.
But you also don't need a religion to play with the concept of God. And you certainly don't even need God to have a religion.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
I don't mean this to argue otherwise - it is my personal belief that it is not possible to prove or disprove the existence of God with reason alone, thus why the argument has lasted for millenia. The mass of texts written to do one or the other are worth, in my opinion, for nothing much besides exercising your mind.
Not it doesn't. It assumes there's at least one moral compass.
Or to put it another way, perhaps you're asking for a three dimensional array, but you want its contents to only have two-dimensional qualities. Or you want force and acceleration, but no mass.
You want a God that hands out straightjackets and drugs. I think he has a higher goal than that.
I can't really empathize with someone who sees no value in suffering. Suffering is not the ultimate evil, and pleasure is not the ultimate good. Go read some Cicero. He tears Epicurus a new one in much better language than I can muster.
My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks in reality.
That being said, it's a pretty involved discussion, and I agree that a Hacker News thread is an odd place for it, though a rare thread like this is the closest it ever gets.
However, since God operates physics, he certainly could "violate" it, but we believe he has done so only in very rare cases to get peoples' attention.
But I wholeheartedly agree with your first statement, and I find it profoundly frustrating that atheist tracts immediately assume that you do believe in a God of the gaps.