An atheist is a person who rejects the idea that God does or can exist. I have never heard a definition of atheist which allows for the minute probability of God existing you mention. But let's continue along that probability line. You say atheists conclude that the probability is so low that it is tantamount to being impossible. but you see, that's just the problem. Atheists are concluding based on the experiences they garnered through their senses in this microscopic part of the universe and want to extrapolate it to all reality. That constitutes a generalization based on scanty and unrepresentative evidence. You cannot extrapolate your conclusions into areas which you know nothing about.
If the best you can do is to force your personal definitions onto people who do not conform to your prejudiced standards, then you're obviously in the wrong discussion. It's been explained many times already that you're basing your arguments on a definition of atheism that doesn't apply to anyone here. A word of advice, it's not a good idea to assume you know exactly how or what other people are thinking, especially online, where you rarely have any idea of whom you're speaking with.
For example, astronomers tell us that our detectable or visible universe is a very likely a small part of the whole which lies beyond our detection. You ignore this and say that your statistical conclusions reached here can be applied there. But you know absolutely nothing about what's over there. So how much credit can be placed in such an estimate? I would say zilch since there is absolutely no reason to have confidence in such an estimate.
That's great. You ignored what I said regarding the definition of a god. A being hiding in a remote corner of the universe is not God, because it is not interacting with us, and has no effect on our lives in any meaningful way. If any kind of god exists, based on how nearly every religion or belief system has qualified what it means to be a god, then we should find evidence of its existence in the
human realm. In fact, we should find loads of evidence.
Have you read the bible? Does God simply sit somewhere on its throne in a galaxy far, far away and never intervene with human affairs? For that matter, do the gods of any other religion that you can think of fit this description? God must be accessible, otherwise God isn't God. You can try to "prove" the existence of any imaginary being by resorting to the argument ad ignorantum as you just did, but it's still a logical fallacy, and it doesn't work on gods.
Actually, what I see you doing is putting your skepticism on hold when convenient to and reactivating it when convenient. Which is fallacious reasoning by virtue of inconsistency. So since that's the case and since it will continue to be the case regardless of any argument proposed, it's best that we agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Wrong. My stance is that, given the minute percentage of the universe we have explored, there is a good chance that there is something out there beyond our comprehension. In fact, I would even grant you that such a thing does exist, given the degree of variation we see even on Earth. However if we do one day discover something far more advanced than ourselves, I believe the proper approach would be to learn as much as we can about it, or possibly from it; NOT get on our knees and start sending up prayers and worship.
It still would not be a god, and I see no reason to call it God. It's only a god if you feel compelled to start kissing its ass, which I think is a behavior that only serves to diminish both the worshiper and the object of worship. As they say in Buddhism, "Once you worship the Buddha, you close his mouth forever." There is a distinct difference between a teacher-student relationship, and a master-slave relationship. As an atheist, I have the advantage of being able to accept the possibility of something greater than anything you might call God.
