The Atheist Christmas Challenge - Can you prove God doesn't exist? By Jim Holt

I am late getting to this but thought the article and the questions were interesting.

What does it mean to be an atheist in a God-fearing nation like the United States? Anywhere from 90 percent to 95 percent of Americans profess to believe in a deity.

The evidentiary ledger has two sides: reasons for believing God exists, and reasons for believing God doesn't exist.

By the end of the 19th century, a purely material worldview—one that excluded supernatural explanations or spiritual phenomena, let alone a deity—seemed quite plausible.

That is pretty much the worldview staked out by today's public atheists. They haven't come to terms with 20th-century science, which revived some of the reasons in the pro-God column.

There are only two arguments for the nonexistence of God with any intellectual merit. The first says that the concept of God is incoherent... The second argument, the argument from evil, has much more force. How can there be evil in a world presided over by an all-powerful and all-good being?

1) You can believe, as I do, that the universe is presided over by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective (which explains pretty much everything). 2) You can agree with logical positivists, who claimed that "God exists" is cognitively meaningless and hence neither true nor false. Or 3) you can become a Unitarian.

Which puts me in mind of a joke. Q: How do you protest the fact that a Unitarian family has moved into your neighborhood? A: You burn a question mark on their lawn.

How can you be a non-practicising Unitarian? I don't know but I try. I mostly call myself a Universalist - which is a rejection of mainstream Christianity for reason's of the heart. This is opposed to Unitarian which rejects based on reasons of the brain. For more on this debate stop by a Unitarian Universalist Church.