Video: Atheists "Unbless" Highway with "Unholy Water"

First let me say that I agree that the atheists who go out and mock the religious are being tasteless. However, it is a reaction to being one of the only two groups in america where it is okay for others to hate you (homosexuals being the other).. The mockery does nothing to convert believers, but it will embolden other atheists to be more open.

My problem with the common agnostic argument is that you can't prove god doesn't exist yet because it is not possible to so with god as defined. I can't prove a negative when it comes to the existence of mystical beings or if the scale is too great or too small. For example, I can tell you there are no cats in my home office right now. However, I know there is a cat somewhere in my house. I can prove the negative because the scope is limited and the test is clear - do I see a cat? I can assert there are humans on the earth, and there are no humans on Mercury, but I cannot say much beyond our own solar system because the scale is too great.

What does it mean to prove god does not exist? God is defined as all powerful, omniscient, spiritual, etc. Consequently, the believer can say things like "you are spiritually blind," or "you can't know god unless he chooses to reveal himself to you," etc. I can use the silly example that many atheists use of things like unicorns and leprechauns to make a similar point about disproving god, and most people would assert these things don't exist. However, believers will say unicorns and leprechauns are not god. It is essentially the ontological argument for the existence of god, which I think is one of the weakest out there.

We acknowledge the limits of empirical knowledge constantly because of limits in observation. For example, the heisenberg uncertainty principle says we cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of quantum particles because to observe them is to disrupt them. Similarly, the wave particular duality of quanta make some types of observations limited to statements of probability only. When we scale up we approach similar limits because of things like the speed of light, the quadratic decay of the intensity of a light source over distance, etc.

HOWEVER, the limits of empirical assertion don't allow for the insertion of magic. There never has been any testable assertion for the existence of the spiritual. In order to assert god exists, we must first be reasonably sure that spiritual things exist. So far, no dice. Can I prove that spiritual things don't exist? No, just like I can't prove unicorns don't exist either.

The only real difference between an agnostic and atheist is how far each allows the impact of uncertainty to go. The atheist says there is no evidence for magical things, and there are limits in what we can assert about the physical world, but these doesn't mean the things on the other sides of the limits are spiritual. The agnostic says nothing in our experience prevents the magical from existing, so the atheist is making too strong of a statement. Here is something that is true: neither the atheist nor the agnostic believe in god. The differences between the two groups are pretty thin.