Atheism beyond a reasonable doubt.

Should an atheist debate theists, be concerned with religion, or with what religious people think and do?

Yes, I think we should. Because that religious people think and do effects everyone, including the non-believers.

In East Germany 88.20% of their population describe themselves as atheists.

There is a fast drop in percentage after the East Germans.

Slovenia 29.80%
Russia 27.30%
Israel 25.60%
Netherlands 24.10%
Hungary 23.30%
Norway 14.90%
Britain 14.00%
West Germany 12.10%
New Zealand 11.50%

In the United States the percentage varies between 2 % and 9%

Question:

Don’t these percentages indicate that in every country on earth the number of people who don’t believe in God are always in the minority?

Yes.

Don’t we need to believe in God to live with hope?

The answer might be yes, but if you have hope in something that does not exist, isn’t that deceptive, false hope? Is living in hope so important that even false hope is better than the truth?

But can you prove that God does not exist?

No. Theists and atheists are both embracing a conclusion based on faith. I have faith that there is no God, that life is just an interesting quirk of chemistry and evolution, and the theists believe that some higher power just spoke everything into existence.

I don’t think the data is there to prove one belief is absolutely, indisputably, irrefutable true. In my opinion there are indicators gleened from science that indicate that there are chemical, natural explanations for the existence of life and the universe.

A creator. . . would have had to be present right at the start of the universe. The whole message of evolution is that complexity and intelligence and all the things that would go with being a creative force come late, they come as a consequence of hundreds of millions of years of natural selection. There was no intelligence early on in the universe. ~Richard Dawkins in an interview by Sheena McDonald of the BBC

I tend to buy the Dawkins idea, but it is not provable. Dawkins’s idea fits with what I understand of the theory of evolution, and there are so many reasons to believe in evolution to fill many thousand of pages.

Interesting it would only take one single fact to bring down the entire theory of evolution, and there have been thousands of fundamentalist Christians, some of them with science backgrounds, who have focused mightily on disproving the theory, and, so far, the only reason anyone has to reject evolution is that it doesn’t fit with their theistic beliefs.

The case for theism is almost totally without any facts.

"Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system."--Baron d'Holbach, Common Sense (1772)

People believe because they can’t explain stuff that happens, and the psychology of human beings demands that there be some explanation. People take things that happen to them, and lay over that the template of their faith, and if the template encases their anecdotal experience they go, “See, there is the proof! I dropped the storm window, my little girl was under the ladder, I called out, ‘Lord save my child!’, and God caused that window to miss my child and her life was saved."

There is no doubt that the parent who prays and is lucky enough for the outcome to match their prayer feels that their faith has been confirmed, but if you spend any time around the ER you know that there have been a lot of prayers that resulted in horrendous injuries and painful, ugly death.

Why, I wonder, does God cure diseases that people may or may not have, but he never grows a leg back on an amputee.

Go to eBay and you can find the face of Jesus on a burrito and the Madonna on the side of a slice of toast. There are people who really take these things as evidence of God sending us food messages I suppose.

When I was growing up, I remember being exposed to Greek Mythology, and sometimes those myths resembled, to some degree, the stories I was taught in Sunday school and from the pulpit. My family mocked and ridiculed the myths. I saw a conflict. I think now that the existence of the Judeo-Christian/Islamic God is just as improbable as the existence of Zeus his gang of god-pals on Mount Olympus. I have the same amount of evidence for the existence of Yahweh, Jehovah, or Allah as I have for Zeus—which is nothing, none, zero, zilch.

The debate over the existence or non-existence of God is settled, at least for me, in a way similar to how a criminal trial is settled. In a trial, no matter how good the evidence, we can never hope to have guilt beyond all doubt. The best we can ever hope for is to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I can’t prove God does not exist, beyond all doubt, but I believe my doubt is reasonable.