An honest answer of "I don't know" is fine if you have no other explanation. But, as I said before, based on science, we know that only minds are capable of creating. So it is not a "god of the gaps," argument since it is an inference to the best explanation.
The mechanism that creates mountains is well understood, and there is no need to invoke a mind for any part of it. Your claim that only minds are capable of creating does not seem to be correct.
And that's what scientists do all the time. So can I prove that God exists? Certainly not to anyone and everyone. But there is sufficient evidence that God exists. People who don't believe in God either believe science is in conflict with theism (it's not and that's the great lie of secularism) or they deny the evidence they are given. So saying "I don't know" when we have evidence of minds (you and I talking right now) and saying we, as people with minds know that only minds are capable of creating anything, then it's a reasonable belief to have that a mind created the universe and life.
I have never claimed that science and religion are in conflict.
It's like you are saying the only people who know anything about anything are people who specialize in something. So if someone specializes in religion and theistic arguments, you have no excuse as to why you don't trust their expertise. What is your excuse for this? That only science is valid? If that's the case when you say "So what?" you are defeating your own arguments.
But the thing is this...
Every physicist in the world will agree with all the others on what the speed of light is. Every rocket scientist in the world will agree that if you send off a rocket at such a speed with the engines burning for this long, it will go in that particular direction. Every mathematician will agree that one number raised to the power of some other number will have this particular result.
But when you get people who specialize in religion, they all say different things. priest, a rabbi, an imam, they all say the evidence clearly points towards their own faith and away from all the others. How can this be true? They obviously can't all be right, at least some of them have to be wrong. And if some of them are wrong, how do we determine which ones? We can't just say, "The one that agrees with my faith is right and all the others are wrong," since if we do that, a Muslim will conclude that Islam is correct, a Jew will conclude that Judaism is correct, and a Christian will conclude that Christianity is correct. And we're right back where we started.
So we need some way to test and verify the claims. This works for all the other fields. When the physicist makes a claim about the speed of light, then that can be verified and checked. And every single time, the verification works. Everyone always gets the same answer. This is what we would expect if something is actually real. And the same thing happens with the rocket scientist. They can claim that the rocket will go in a particular direction, and other people can run their own calculations and see if they get the same result. And they can also just wait to see where the rocket actually goes. That's the important thing - if something is actually real, then everyone who investigates it should get the same results. If different people get different results for the speed of light, for example, then you know someone's messed up somewhere. And it's only by investigating it that we'll find out where the mistake is.
But we can't do this at all when it comes to religion. Religion makes pretty much no testable claims. The idea of God is unfalsifiable. No matter what results you get, there's always some way to explain it that's consistent with your own personal beliefs. Can you imagine if we did that with other things? How could the rocket scientist figure out how long the rocket engine needs to burn for in order to get into orbit around the moon if the results for one person said it needs to burn for five minutes, and the results for the other person said it needs to burn for a whole day?
So I'm not saying that only science is valid. I'm saying that the only valid way to get accurate information about anything is by going with
what can be tested and verified. And if it always gives inconsistent results, then we can't say it's valid at all.
