Atheism is unreasonable

[Mister Agenda]

I've debated atheists on this forum who say that atheism is not a belief that God doesn't exist, but rather a belief that God hasn't been proven to exist. I always thought that agnostics believe a god exists, but don't understand the nature of god.

That's true of some agnostics, it's a wide field. You understanding of atheism is better than a great many of your co-religionists, you're not far off the mark at all. Agnostic works best as an adjective: there are agnostic theists (don't know, believe) and agnostic atheists (don't know, don't believe) as well as the 'gnostic' versions of both theists and atheists.

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Do you believe that there is no God or just that God hasn't been substantiated?

Most likely FatandFaithless holds the latter position, but there are some atheists who frequent the forum who hold the former position.

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Do you think that there is a chance that the energy that makes up the cosmos either always existed or that it came into being from absolutely nothing?

I can't speak for Chuck, but yes, I think there's a chance that one of those alternatives was the case, with the caveat that I think the possibility of there having ever been 'absolutely nothing' remote, but the possibility of there haveing been 'practically nothing' very plausible.

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The reason I'm asking is that according to scientific "fact" matter had to always exist and will always exist.

It's a natural law of the universe that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It doesn't hold up well at the quantum level, and it may not hold up well in conditions before the expansion of the universe. We can't extrapolate that a property of this universe applies prior to our space/time beginning. But the total matter/energy of the universe seems to add up to zero, with the positive matter/energy balanced by negative matter/energy. A case of 0=1+2-3=0.

It's really hard to fathom something that always was and always will be.

True that.

Since matter always existed, it couldn't have come from nothing (the total absence of anything), but obviously some of you hold that one or the other of these assumptions is true.

No. The total absence of anything seems to be physically impossible. The closest we can come is 'quantum vaccuum', a state which hypothetically can produce a universe so long as the net energy budget of the universe is zero, as appears to be the case for ours.