Strong Atheism

[Confused Ape]

Why not make the positive claim “gods do not exist” and take on a burden of proof?

We’re tough and smart; we can handle it!

Humans have come up with many different concepts of God/the Divine/Supreme Reality.

Brahman - The Universal Self -The Highest God Of Hinduism

He is the incomprehensible, unapproachable radiant being whom the ordinary senses and ordinary intellect cannot fathom grasp or able to describe even with partial success. He is the mysterious Being totally out of the reach of all sensory activity, rationale effort and mere intellectual, decorative and pompous endeavor.

I wouldn't know where to start if I had to prove that this concept doesn't exist.

Though impassioned and above the ordinary feelings of the mind, the masters of the Upanishads some times could not suppress the glory, the emotion, the passion and the poetry that accompanied the vast and utterly delightful , inner experience of His vast vision.

It seems that he exists as a subjective experience so over to neuroscience - Andrew Newberg - Research

Is God only in our brain?

Our research indicates that our only way of comprehending God, asking questions about God, and experiencing God is through the brain. But whether or not God exists “out there” is something that neuroscience cannot answer. For example, if we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture “out there” or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part.

Not very helpful so I had a look around for something else - How Your Brain Creates God - Great article in the latest New Scientist (04 February 2009):

Fascinating stuff but not very helpful when it comes to this -

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

The position in the first paragraph, while strong, is starting to look more and more like a cop out to me.

Sorry and all that but I'm staying with the cop out and leaving the burden of proof to the theists.