Attn: Theists - What would it take to prove you wrong?

[Cyberman]

Well, I'm pleased that my little contribution to the conversation managed to tickle the little grey cells, as it were. It's rather gratifying to be able to have an effect on another's point of view and altogether exceedingly rare. The last similar occasion was in a Facebook exchange with a person who used the phrase "patty de fwa grar". I offered the correct spelling, fully expecting to be shot down in flames for being a Grammar Nazi, whereupon he thanked me for setting him straight. He said he'd only ever heard the term before but never seen it written down and so found my input really helpful.

It's nice when we can learn from one another.

So correct me if I'm wrong, atheists want proof that God exists, not proof that he doesn't exist?

Of course. We atheists already don't believe any gods exist, so why would we want to prove they don't? Quite apart from which we can't anyway, generally speaking, unless the god being proposed is so vastly incompatible with what we know of history, physics, astronomy etc as to make such a thing incredibly unlikely as to be impossible. For instance, the god of the bible is supposed to have created everything in six days, with light and photosynthesising plants before creating a sun to make those things possible; to have made the stars as tiny lights fixed to the dome of the sky "for signs and for seasons" and which can be shaken down to Earth during the Final Battle; to have drowned the world in a giant, physically- and geologically-impossible flood apart from a select élite group. That god we can be reasonably certain does not exist, to the extent we can know anything at all.

Incidentally, we generally ask for evidence, rather than proof. Something, anything, that we can actually examine and assess on its own merits. So far, when any evidence is offered at all, literally none of it has withstood even the most cursory scrutiny. That is why I, at least, remain atheist.