How much pain can atheists withstand ?

[Paleophyte]

Give me one good reason why not. Kindly save us your ignorance and read up on chaos theory, emergent behaviour, and self-correcting systems first.

If you think you can avoid these hard questions by rattling off a few titles from pop sci magazines, you're sorely mistaken. Everything you mentioned depends on pre-existing conditions, or initial conditions, without which no life form can ever arise even in a gazillion centuries.

You're telling me that evolution had 4 billion years of "practice". You forgot to mention that before that we had a .. um .. a universe around. An entire universe governed by elegant laws (whose discovery, by the way, was only done by the smartest elements of our species) is the framework within which the evolutionary process took place. This framework is the equivalent of the oven in the analogy above. You need a smart cook to set the right intial conditions for the oven, that will yield, some billions of years later, human beings. The theist sees this is as more evidence of the superbly skillful master agent that set out all this. The atheist, on the other hand, will be happy to posit an infinite regress of ovens in the past, that kept screwing around until a "good" oven arised. This scenario certainly takes a bigger leap of faith than the theistic scenario: the theist posits an elegant and plausible solution: a personal agent intended to bring about human beings so he did all this. The atheistic scenario is manifestly convoluted. All the principles of reasoning favor the theistic scenario: use Occam's razor, the principle of sufficient reason, etc, whatever you want.

You think my worldview is convoluted when your requires an infinitely whatever this time, unknowable, invisible daddy figure? Godidit explains nothing, which is why Occam's razor cuts god's throat every time.

And you're making the classic mistake of looking at the universe being finely tuned from the perspective of life that has evolved to inhabit it. Viewed accurately, the universe is barely sufficient at the present for life to survive on one insignificant ball of dirt. The universe is not well-tuned to suit you, you are well-evolved to survive the universe. Even that you will only manage to do briefly. And it's a passingly odd creator who builds an oven 93 billion light-years across just to get one half-baked planet.

Or perhaps you can explain why god needed dark matter and dark energy.