If I were an Atheist

[AdamLOV]

Sure, atheism isn't about deciding once and for all. Atheist can be undecided about all of it. Well, unless you take the gnostic stance, which I don't in general. I'm open to anything, if evidence is presented. It could be proved there was a god once, I'd accept it if there was evidence. There could be one now, likewise. Could be one in the future.

It's more reasonable to think there was one in the past than there is one now, but not much more reasonable. The "evidence" of tatty books written by desert nobbos means nothing to me.

The main problem is that there isn't a coherent claim of what the evidence would even be for.

Inconsistency of claims need not entail that one reject the veracity of those claims. On this basis, one would have to reject scientific laws as fallacies or, at best, social constructions that have no more claim to truth than so-called "hard" science (a la Bruno Latour). My claim would be a more generous one; at different times in history, humans have believed different things about basic, unprovable ontological precepts. These have competed with one another, and over time, one worldview became predominant, the "scientific" one (although there is, at present, no unitary view of the universe because of the multiplicity of theorems expounded by physicists since Antiquity and, in any case, this view, whatever it was, never was the exclusive one). Just as various religions compete, so various scientific hypotheses comepete with one another, until the strongest wins out. Just because a worldview has, momentarily, carried the day, as Atheism has in a few technologically advanced areas of Earth, does not make that view truer than those it has defeated. There will always be a multiplicity of views. In my opinion, which is, of course, merely an opinion, what we take to be evidence is culturally relative. Objective, culturally independent evidence does not exist. An extensive network of machines, cultural norms, cosmologies, instruments and assorted paraphernalia are required to elucidate a view of the world that either

A). asserts that the world we live in is inhabited by gods, malignant spirits and the Peruvian hairless dog affords some kind of special protection from these malignant demons.
Or
B). the world we live in is not inhabited by gods or malignant spirits, and the Peruvian hairless dog contains no mystical properties, i.e. it is just a particularly smart breed of dog.

What constitutes evidence for one subscribing to View A (let us call that person the pre-Inca) is completely different than what constitutes evidence for the one who believes in View B (let us call that person the Atheist American Tourist). They have different sets of truth-verification tools at their disposal. Now in the debate between A and B, I am an adherent of the following:

C). The world we live in is, to the best of our own knowledge, uninhabited by divine beings. However, this is not to say that other cultures might not be capable or might not have been capable of detecting such mystical agencies, hidden forces. We lack the cognitive instruments that would make access to such beings possible. To us, the Peruvian hairless dog is merely an animal, one of man's best friends. For me, that knowledge is enough. I do not really care about the hidden, mystical properties of the dog pre-Inca cultures discovered. Therefore, our best guess is that they do not exist. However, this in no way implies that we know better than the Inca or, for that matter, that the Inca knows/knew more than us. However, it is an interesting thought that the Peruvians breeded the Peruvian hairless dog, and therefore, they might have access to other realms of insight into the dog that we could, perhaps, lack.