If I were an Atheist

[Mister Agenda]

(emphasis is mine)

It keeps getting pointed out to you that this is not a majority opinion among atheists. Please quit trying to tell us what we believe.

Okay so the majority of atheists believe God does exist....

Yes, blatanty lying about us is so cute that it deserves a cute emoticon.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Hello Salesman,

Hello! From this point, I would like you to open your mind as wide as you can. Place your beliefs aside for a moment, and be willing to change your mind if something I say happens to make more sense than something you've previously thought. I assure you that I will do the same thing.

I believe (strictly opinion) most people would rather know and subscribe to the truth of a question.

I'm inclined to agree that most people would "rather" know things and that they believe that what they claim to "know" is true. However, research shows that all too often people think they "know" things that they do not know, and both adults and children tend to make inaccurate snap judgments about the plausibility of a given proposition. Since these snap judgments are often misinformed, the confidence value they assign to their beliefs is not as reliable as they may believe it to be. This makes people prone to assigning undeserving confidence values to unfalsifiable hypotheses.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/5/382.short

I think you misread this. Its not belief in my opinion I was referring to, I was referring to belief in Santa.

I understood that, but when I challenge you to refute Santa, ridiculing or drawing attention to the belief rather than the subject of Santa's existence is off topic. That was my point. I also want to just plug this in here real quick:
Unfalsifiable Hyptheses: Something that is confidently asserted as either a true or false even though the so called theory or hypothesis cannot possibly be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of any physical experiment, usually without strong evidence or good reasons.
Making unfalsifiable claims is a way to leave the realm of rational discourse, since unfalsifiable claims are often faith-based, and not founded on evidence and reason.
For example: "I prayed that I would get mail today, and I did. My prayer must be responsible if you cannot prove that it is not."
If one were guilty of committing this error in rational discourse when an objection is raised about it, in addition to the blatant shifting of the burden of proof they've just committed, there's a good chance that if we press them to defend this line of reasoning, they will offer a circular argument, such as:
"I have mail, and I prayed for it, The mail is proof that the prayer worked. You'd need to prove to me that my prayer couldn't have influenced the mail to have arrived in correlation to my prayer."
Notice that any attempt to demonstrate mail appearing in other cases that did not require prayer, the individual could still make the case that no proof has been offered to refute the specific case in which they believe prayer DID cause the arrival of mail. The problem is, there's no evidence that could possibly distinguish the regular arrival of mail from mail that arrives as a result of prayer. In conclusion, the normal arrival of mail is the only one to believe. Mail is a natural part of our culture, natural occurrences are all we see, you would need a reason to invoke supernatural stuff. Does this make sense?

Do you disagree that most sane lucid adults don't think Santa exists?

I need you to understand why that is irrelevant to this experiment. I've been trying to convey to you that you've misunderstood the purpose of Santa being brought up in conversations about God. Put this aside for a moment and imagine that we are discussing whether or not God exists, and I begin to express my opinion that belief in God is irrational. I would be attempting to refute God simply by discrediting the belief. When it comes to God, there are innumerable different versions and the details of those beliefs vary in detail. Some people think the world is literally 6,000 years old, some people think that when they die they'll get their own planet, some people think that their God literally transforms wine into the blood of a 1st century Jewish martyr.all of these things are things they believe to be corroborated by the God they believe exists, and there is no way that I could possibly know or address all of the things that are believed from one individual to another. Do I think they're crazy? Sure, but that doesn't matter because my target is God, and if there's no good reason to believe in God, the other things, whatever they may be, no longer have reasons either. I would not begin to presume anything about the beliefs that stem from your belief in God, and yes, you do have some that I disagree with. But I would rather address whether or not there's even a reason to posit a God in the first place. If you use your supporting beliefs to defend God's existence, you're putting the cart before the horse. When I ask you what evidence could there be to change your mind, you said that you couldn't imagine anything because EVERYTHING that exists is evidence for God. That's a secondary belief. If the question is "Where did everything come from?" and You say "God", you're evidence can't be "Everything exists".

I wouldn't expect to find anything, I wouldn't expect you or I to be alive. I wouldn't expect living sentient beings to emerge from mindless forces that didn't plan or intend our existence. I wouldn't expect to find a universe governed by seemingly inviolable laws of physics and that those laws would result in stars, galaxies, planets (from second generation stars with the properties to create rocky matter).

That's a circular argument. You say you are a Philosophical Theist, my friend, there isn't a PHIL101 text book that doesn't explain what it means to "beg the question" in the first chapter.

I'll ask you the same question. What would you expect to find (if anything) given that mindless forces somehow bootstrapped themselves into existence (or always existed)?

The default position is that the universe we see is entirely natural, and since there is no evidence for supernatural, the default position is that this is exactly the universe we would have that could be created by mindless forces. You've made an error by thinking this was the same question put to me in reverse, and I'll address that in a minute.
The first problem with your question is that it is born from an unestablished presupposition. You are presupposing that a mind can produce universes, and you have no evidence to think that could even be partly true to begin with. Then you have concluded that EVERYTHING that exists, could not have a natural explanation, and so "minds" are true by default. Before you can begin to posit minds as universal causal agents, you'd have to establish that idea as something other than hypothetical conjecture. In this reality, minds don't create sensible objects beyond subjective experience. Yes, the universe contains creatures that possess minds, but it's a fallacy to presume that the entire universe must then be born of a mind. Where did the mind come from? If the mind is infinite, how do you decide that the universe could not be infinite? We are very limited in our understanding of the universe, but everything we know about it thus far has a natural explanation. You have to establish that there's a reason to invoke a "supernatural anything", and that has yet to be done.
As an aside

Would you expect such forces to produce sentient life?

Obviously, yes.

I'll ask you the same question.

That's not the same question. The same question in reverse would be "What evidence would convince you that an omnipotent, omniscient unembodied mind created the universe." I would need to see that any mind is capable of creating external objects, and I would look for evidence that supports that the universe could have been created by such an entity. Since you are a Theist and you believe not only these things, but you also believe that this mind takes a personal interest in our specific species of primate, I would need to see evidence that supports this universe being created by such a mind with our interest as the focal point. The majority of the universe prohibits life. Not only that, but it is eventually going to kill everyone on this planet. Putting aside the terrible things that people do, there are natural events that cause people to needlessly suffer by the thousands, and some of them happen at least once a day. These are things that are simply because our planet, while capable of having life, is not constructed in such a way that makes it easy for us to survive. Tsunamis, Earthquakes, an inherent lack of resources that are scarcely and unevenly available from one part of the planet to another, just to point out a few things wrong with this planet that point away from your hypothesis. What about our bodies? Why do we need sunscreen? Why is it that we are unable to detect radiation, or harmful gasses that would kill us instantly? Why do we breath and eat from the same hole? Neil Degrasse Tyson gives a hilarious account of things like this and for starters, the reverse of all of these observations would serve as compelling evidence to support that it was the handiwork of an omnipotent & omniscient creator with our best interest as Its motivation. I am open to be convinced otherwise, but as it sits, I have not been any reason to conclude supernatural forces, so, I still don't believe in any of the sort. I know you probably had a predisposed notion of how Atheists think, and I hope that I have been able to explain some things that you may not have considered before.

[Tonus]

The point is if neither side has enough evidence to prove their point then all the two sides have is a difference of opinion.

Based on that reasoning you would have to relegate nearly every single mythical god and creature to "opinion" status... including Santa Claus.

If I believe that something doesn't exist, and you cannot prove it does, then it's not unreasonable to believe that it doesn't exist. If sufficient evidence becomes available to prove its existence, then belief becomes the reasonable approach. This is how we operate in pretty much every other facet of our lives. Only when it comes to the possible existence of god(s) do we abandon the approach that has worked very well for us otherwise.

Most of the gods that people believe in today were very bold and active in the distant past, when the lack of longevity and technology made it nearly impossible to verify such claims, and when the lack of knowledge and understanding made it much more likely that those claims would be accepted at face value. The more we resolved those issues, the further and further into the background the gods faded, until we live in a world where "god" is intangible and utterly undetectable in any possible way save for those which can only be verified on an individual basis and must, like the claims of old, be taken at face value. If we have to revert to that mindset to find god, then that is a very big problem IMO.

[Ravenshire]

(emphasis is mine)

It keeps getting pointed out to you that this is not a majority opinion among atheists. Please quit trying to tell us what we believe.

Okay so the majority of atheists believe God does exist....

Wow, you really are a disingenuous little shit aren't you.

This is not the false dichotomy you keep insisting on. It's not a case of a choice between positive claims. There is a difference between claiming that I don't believe in gawd and claiming there isn't one. Figure it out.

[Delicate]

Atheists can certainly imply that the world is better explained by explanations other than God. So it's more sensible to be a strong atheist than a theist.

[FatAndFaithless]

Atheists can certainly imply that the world is better explained by explanations other than God. So it's more sensible to be a strong atheist than a theist.

That's...not what a strong atheist is. And any position asserting a positive claim assumes a burden of proof.

[Delicate]

Atheists can certainly imply that the world is better explained by explanations other than God. So it's more sensible to be a strong atheist than a theist.

That's...not what a strong atheist is. And any position asserting a positive claim assumes a burden of proof.

Except, if you read what I said, I never said that's what a strong atheist is.

I said, atheists can imply that the set of non-divine explanations for the world around us is better than divine explanations.

And therefore, it makes more sense to be a strong atheist than a theist.

[FatAndFaithless]

What is your idea of a strong atheist?

[Delicate]

An atheist with big muscles.

[Drew_2013]

Okay so the majority of atheists believe God does exist....

Yes, blatanty lying about us is so cute that it deserves a cute emoticon.

That's another problem...no sense of humor.

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Okay so the majority of atheists believe God does exist....

Wow, you really are a disingenuous little shit aren't you.

This is not the false dichotomy you keep insisting on. It's not a case of a choice between positive claims. There is a difference between claiming that I don't believe in gawd and claiming there isn't one. Figure it out.

Good grief I put the smiley face in to give the clueless a clue it was a joke...and still you don't get it.