Evidence: The Gathering

[Pat Mustard]

It doesn't automatically follow that you lack confidence in each, no. You may simply have so much time left in the exam you want to spam the markers with arguments I guess. I would have thought two or three different sound methods would be sufficient. More than that and I am becoming suspicious that it's quantity over quality.

Interestingly, I heard it said once that the theist only needs one of those arguments to be true, but the atheist must be sure that all of them are false.

Wrong, dead wrong. The theist needs a whole pile of massive improbabilities to be true in order for there to be a god out there, and that leaves aside the fact that there are thousands of different gods not all of whom can exist side by side, so for a specific god it is a pile of a pile of improbabilities.

All the atheist needs to kick the stool out from under any specific god is to turn one improbability into an impossibility, e.g. for yhwh and his descendant religions, all we need do is point out the impossibility of a being being both omnipotent and omniscient or point out the fact that his whole mythology starts with two mutually incompatible creation myths, both stolen from other older theistic traditions. To use an older set of examples, all we need to do to disprove the various thunder and lightning gods is to show how thunder and lightning actually work.