Q: do you, Christian, claim that God exists, rather than you believe that he exists?

[max-greece]

Wow - covered the gamut this thread hasn't it.

Too many assumptions and statements to address so a few wildly fired shots will be all I can manage (weekends hit forum time for me).

An atheist doesn't actually have to be a believer in science. An atheist merely rejects faith in God. They don't even really need an alternative explanation in order to reject another, for example:

I walk out of my front door one morning to discover a newly planted apple tree sapling. It wasn't there when I last looked the previous evening. As I am standing there puzzling over its origin a neighbour leans out of his window and says:

"See that. Pixies did it last night - they woke me up. Bloody pixies."

With that he closes the window.

I do not know where the Apple tree came from. Should I therefore accept the pixie explanation?

Atheists are nihilists:

For me I'd answer kinda yes, kinda no on this. I see no grand plan. I see no evidence that there is anything other than this life. There's no point, as such.

The strange things is that I find that thought liberating. The idea that there is a point to my life given to me by a third party I find demeaning. Does it, for example, mean that anything that I might do that is not on point is somehow reduced in value? If our point (as we have seen claimed by many theists on this forum) is to praise the deity of creation how is that better than not having a point? What does it mean for the value of things we do that are off point? Is Beethoven's Ninth worse less if it does not praise God? Was Rodin's kiss a waste of material?

Obviously the side point to the above is why an all powerful, universe creating God needs or wants our praise in the first place?

Whilst there may be truths in any religious book that in and of itself proves nothing as to its origin. Where, however, there are obvious, factual errors in that book I would argue it does indeed prove its origin to be, at least, not that of an omniscient, moral God.

Supposing God:

How do we know he did all this for us? What if he did it for something else entirely and we are a byproduct?
Why does God have to be omniscient or indeed morally perfect? Could he not be perfectly immoral, for example? Or, merely a bit different from us?
Even if he is our one and only God how do we know that in the world he frequents he is not a janitor, who created the universe to pass the time whilst he waits for the bell to ring so he can go and clean the toilets?
Why is he so astonishingly inefficient?

A 13.72 billion year old universe - 70% dark matter, 30% dark energy, 1% everything we can see, 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars per. One planet - living in a shooting gallery 4.6 billion years old.

4 billion years of life, 3.5 of which was entirely single celled. 570 million years of multicellular life. 5 great extinction events.....

All for us? With our 200,000 years - of which he has only apparently shown an interest in the last few thousand.

Are we well designed? Physcially - not really.
Coding wise? 90% redundant.

Don't see it myself.

Note: Bit long winded but even this is the short version - really, really short version.