“A very crude understanding of God and His nature”? He’s the omnipotent, all-seeing creator of the Universe. He explains the age-old question “where did we come from?” but unfortunately begs the question “Where did He come from?” Of course, that’s answered with “He has always been and He always shall.” Me, I skip the “God” bit and tend to think that about the Universe itself. Occam’s razor supports that decision. “Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler.”

I also don’t believe in other Gods. I don’t believe in Odin, nor Zeus, nor Shiva, nor Marduk, except perhaps that some of them may have been based on real people at some point before the stories about them grew. Perhaps in a thousand years one of your decendants will be amazed at “the reasons people give for not believing in The Almighty Elvis”.

I think there is a problem with positing that god exists because of what I believe to be an absence of proof - but I must also acknowledge that I cannot prove that he doesn’t exist either. In a lovely twist of irony, I (and all other athiests) are reduced to insisting we don’t believe in god, not that we absolutely, positively, certainly *know* he does not exist. Your friend Sagan has demonstrated that nicely - we can’t disprove the dragon’s existence.

The boundaries between science and religion are much fuzzier than most people would like to admit. Even our current level of knowledge and success doesn’t interfere much with faith. This is because explanations in terms of secondary causes need not exclude ultimate references to a primary cause - just because we can demonstrate that evolution is likely, doesn’t preclude the existence of an intelligent creator who set things up that way.

As you know I don’t believe in god, but until someone proves to me that he really doesn’t exist, I’ll be quiet and respectful of people who do believe. Who knows which one of us is right? Not me. If you have absolute proof of his nonexistence, I’d love to hear it.

God isn’t some ephemeral hard-to-test emotion, at least to people who believe in Him. God is an omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful being who created everything. When you have a lack of proof you have to look at the “Dragon in the Garage” argument that Carl Sagan put forth which asks this question: “Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?”

What’s the difference between a world with a God and one where people just think one exists? Nothing! Assuming that the more likely of the two possibilities (God/No God) is an all-powerful being that knows everything but influences it in no testable way is ridiculous.