Atheism is a non-stance.

With regard to the previous arguments I am mystified by the line Con is taken and his inference to the necessity to simultaneously provide a refutation of each and every proof for or against 'God exists' in order to show my point to be valid. I thinks a sample survey of proofs and disproofs shows that this cannot be done.If a proof were to be given of God through reference to facts about the physical world it would indicate either a mistake in the proof, or unsoundness in the logic itself. Logic is concerned with the conservation of truth, it is not intended to be productive in the sense that it provides grounds for the extension of its domain. Logic is a means of working out tu adop the consequences of what we already know or newly discover. It is not possible or desirable that a valid logic when applied to a set A prove anything about a disjoint set B. for a logic covering a domain D=[a,b,c] it should not be possible to formulate proofs about a domain B-[f,g,h} unless the two are both proper subsets of a super-domain AB which forms the domain of predication. The proofs of logic are relative to a domain.To fall under a predicate P is to belong to a proper subset of a domain for which P holds. Materialism is not an antiquated term for physicalism. You can be a materialist without being a physicalist, but not the other way round. Basically physicalism is a refinement of materialism it posits only a material reality but allows for description of that reality in terms of immaterial predicates over immaterial objects such as causes, effects, probability, energy etc provided a supervenience relationship holds between the theoretical entities, predicates and the material elements such that any change in our material description of matter is reflected at the theoretical level. There is no general agreement about the precise definition of this supervenience relationship strictly therefore. Physicalism is a construction in progress. Semantics is a theory of meaning, theorists of meaning generally equate the content of a statement with whatever needs to be the case for its truth conditions to be met, So for example 'I am in the UK' conveys that the sate of things is such that I am in the UK. From a materialist atheist point of view the Atheist viewpoint is that talk about God is balderdash, having nothing to do with the world of science or the world at large. Proofs of God 1) Folk proofs these range from Madonna statues weeping blood, images of Jesus on digestive biscuits through, aversions of terrible calamities (you should see what happened to the next village) to angels appearing at battlefields ( A commonly held belief at the Somme), The content of these being just that something was seen felt or heard and no more. These proofs fall to the principal of simplest or most economic explanation. This being a real principle on a physicalist view. Such proofs fail because you can't ground new ontologies on a single biscuit. . Most religious 'proofs' of this kind tend fall on grounds of availability of alternative explanations. 2) Ontological Proofs seek to derive the existence of God from the concept of God much in the way as we do mathematical induction. A number has a successor so their are an infinity of numbers. 0,S(0),SS(0) being equivalent to 0,1,2 and so on. In Anselm's version that than which no greater can be conceived must exist otherwise a greater thing could be imagined that being in reality. This argument falls on number of grounds. Most importantly it lacks a rung passed which a concept must be considered as having instantiation in reality.In this case in I inability is there any differ receive between imagining something in reality. Do we imagine things as though they are note real,how can the mode of imagination have anything to with instantiation. Descartes run basically the same argument and so does Godel, No argument has yet passed muster, There are logics which support Ontological generations. But many, I think rightly, would discount their soundness on that basis alone. It is also possible that 3) First Mover, Aquinas. One of the core tenets of science is that everything has a cause It is possible to argue from this that the whole of the universe has a first cause. The theist then claims that this first cause is God and God is extra-universal, Hence there is a God. In the design view we can get further evidence of a divine plan by observing the intricacies of the universe, they have all the marks of an intelligent creator. Hence there is a God. If this argument worlds at all it leads nowhere towards to a God of faith. We can account for apparent order by noting that is part of the role of science and people in general to find order in chaos so they can make predictions about and to some extent control reality.While this argument may succeed with a physicalism it is not clear it would be readily accepted by more hard-going materialist.The content of the argument if accepted there is material causation and the universe was caused. 4) Argument from evil. This is the argument is the reverse of the the theist teleological argument the universe if it is designed shows evidence of a faulty design or evil design both of which are incompatible with a God of faith. The force of this argument is whether or not you believe in a creator, whatever formed the world created an imperfect world which contains evil. Strictly this is not against the notion of a creator God but a denial of the religious attributes that can be applied to a nominal first cause. Traditional Atheism then concerns the statements of science the ontology of science. The purely logical proofs may be seen either as an attempt to extend the ontology and face the challenge of reasoning outside of their domain, note this is not the case for unicorns or even Greek Gods, which could be a rgued for or against within the ontological categories of a biology we might even be able to bio engineer a unicorn. The resolution of such matters being obfuscated only by happenstance and the difficulties of mounting an adequate and exhaustive search. 'God' does not conceptually belong to within the realm of observables and it is difficult to see what physical facts observations follow from the statement God exists as opposed to the statement God does not exist. What establishes the supervenience of a putative God over the world of observable matter. Without such a relation the statement that God does or does not exist has no content. It asserts nothing at all about the states of affairs that do or will persist in the world. New atheists however that statements like 'God Exists' are scientifically provable. From which it follows that they have content. Ontologically this seems to be a denial of Materialism. If God could possibly exist then there can be entities which are not physical in the sense that they are not material and do not satisfy the supervenience relationship. What most puzzles me is how Dawkins and Dennett a highly regarded can even being to argue that God is possible. Con thinks this is down to a confused confutation on my part of probability and possibility. On a simple view of probability it is intuitively obvious that is if something is impossible it has a probability of 0. If something must happen, is certain certain to happen then it has a probability 1. But where do you begin assigning probality to a statement about the existence of things in an alternative domain. In summary my claim is that statements of a domain D[f1,,,,,,,fn ] and a second disjoint domain D# [g1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,gn] in a logic applied to D a state Ex( x=g] is meaningless.