If I were an Atheist

[Thumpalumpacus]

Every time I read this thread's title I start humming the theme from Fiddler on the Roof: "If I were an atheist, dada dedle dedle dum.

I think of the old folk standard, "If I Had a Hammer":

If I were an atheist,
I'd athie in the morning
I'd athie in the evenin'
all over the land.

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The problem is we all know what the alternative explanation is. If the universe and humans weren't purposely caused to come into existence intentionally by a creator designer, then we owe our existence to mindless mechanistic forces that unintentionally caused the universe with the characteristics to cause stars, planets, solar systems and life to exist. I can appreciate why most atheists don't care to defend or advance that alternate explanation and many atheists will attempt to argue its a false dichotomy. Its the former explanation that explains nothing. There is no rhyme or reason why mindless mechanistic things would happen to be as they are it just is.

I will be happy to explain it to you, and defend its explanatory power; but the fact is, it is a hypothesis, and the difference between an atheist proposing a mechanistic beginning (such as myself) and a theist such as yourself is that while I'm happy to admit I might be wrong, under no circumstances are you permitted to entertain that thought by your own dogma. That is the result of you fetishizing faith instead of knowledge.

The upshot is that your position is brittle and impossible to defend, because at any point where what you claim is disposed of by facts (and those are many!), those cracks spread, because you have no systematized method of improving your faith -- you can only repeatedly remind the audience that "you gotta believe!" as if that will fix everything. In contrast, the scientific method has done wonders in unraveling the arcana of the Universe, and by dint of two procedural points (peer review and burden of evidence), it greatly reduces the possibility of a new idea being faked. It thereby remains open to expanded knowledge, while at the same time filtering out bullshit. In contrast to that, religion filters out any new process that is against the inherited dogma by complete rejection (unless, of course, social pressures demand it! -- but at that point, it is still much more likely to be wrong, because it has no process of fact-checking.)

You can gild the lily all you want, but there is no religious claim about the divine that has any concrete evidence. Zero. None.

You can say all you want that your little god created this Universe, but until you bring firm evidence (not argumentation, data), all you have is argumentum ex culo. That is all you have.