A simple challenge for atheists

[Esquilax]

IF God exists, then it is possible that He created the energy from nothing. By definition, God can do this. It is outside the realm of science, and of our understanding. It is the realm of faith - believing without evidence.

Well, we'd best not believe that then, eh? After all, things that require you to believe them without evidence are indistinguishable from things that don't exist.

IF God does not exist, then this energy could not have come from nowhere. To believe that this energy did come from nothing requires faith - believing without evidence.

There's lots of problems with this: for one, what you're saying would only be true in a causal framework similar to the one we experience now. We have no reason to think that this was true prior to the big bang, and in fact, given the radically different set of physical properties a pre-big bang universe would have had, we have far more reason to believe that time would work differently there. Something happening before our local iteration of spacetime began, by definition, is not bound by the rules of it necessarily.

Secondly, when you say the energy couldn't come from nowhere, it's equally true that we've never seen anything come into existence from nothing; all the things we've ever observed are arrangements of pre-existing matter. Given this, we can propose a third possibility, easily within the bounds of our observations and evidence, which is that existence is eternal in one state or another.

Thirdly, since we're on the subject, I must point out the false dichotomy at play here; either the energy came from nothing, or there's no other answer? No no, Bob. That's very evidently untrue, meaning your premises are equally false.

Fourthly, I can't let this end without pointing out the tremendous hypocrisy involved in an argument that paints your faith as acceptable, Bob, while simultaneously trying to denigrate atheists for the same. Can you get any slimier?

Logically, it would require greater faith to believe that something came from nothing, than to believe that someone created the something - despite there being no empirical evidence for either.

Therefore, atheists have more faith than theists - in this respect.

Who the hell told you you could tell us what we believe?

Seriously, doesn't that seem a tad presumptuous to you? The atheist position, I'll have you know, is that we don't yet know how the universe began, but that leaving our beliefs on it up to faith is irrational, something you've adequately demonstrated here. So you can drop this whole "atheists have more faith than theists because they believe X!" schtick right here, because you are flat, fucking, wrong.

Do I sound mad? I think I sound mad. Frankly, I get tired of guys like you trying to denigrate my position by dictating to me what I believe, simultaneously oversimplifying our position to an insulting level, and robbing us of the chance to speak for ourselves, as though we don't have anything substantive to say about the contents of our own damn heads.

Imagine if I did that to you. Imagine if I came to an intellectually insulting conclusion about your position, based on lies that I made up myself because I didn't just ask you. Would you be irritated?

Now imagine if ninety percent of the people you met in conversations like this one, and in fact just on the street too, did exactly the same thing. Get it yet?