Slate's Christmas challenge
Mainstream media almost never allows atheist arguments to be heard. That is not true only about overwhelmingly Christian countries like the USA, but also highly secularized countries like Britain or Norway. I assume the reason is that insulting the religious is bad for business. Nobody would be more eager to jump the pen and write irate letters to the editor threatening to cancel subscriptions than irrefutable atheist arguments, so I guess it makes sense.
 Making potshot at atheists, on the other hand, is good business. And claiming that science has "found god", even though it is a pretty wild fabrication, no doubt tickles the ears of the religious.
Thus, I guess non-theists should not be too annoyed at the particularly silly article, headlining Slate at this moment, loudly proclaiming: The Atheist Christmas Challenge: Can you prove God doesn't exist? The author of this little article, Jim Hold, apparently writes a column with 'philosophical ruminations' called egghead. To me, that would imply an article by and for people somewhat well versed in the relevant philosophical and scientific topics. Not so.
Two massive misconceptions are present from the start. The first is that being an atheist is about being 100% certain there is no God. The second, that atheists have anything to prove in the first place.
Once these are removed, we find that the article has no legs to stand on whatsoever.
It is a very common belief that an atheist is one who is certain that there is no God. Even some dictionaries mistakenly define the word this way. If you wonder what e.g. Buddhism is about, a good choice would be to ask a Buddhist. Your local evangelical would be unlikely to fill you in very well. So also about atheism, even though that is not, I hasten to add, a belief system in itself.
Reading the first sentence on the introduction page at the atheism web would be sufficient to clear up the misunderstanding. The question is "what is atheism?" and the answer comes in the next line: "Atheism is characterized by an absence of belief in the existence of gods."
Now, that wasn't too hard, was it, Jim?
What then, pray tell, is agnosticism? In fact, that is about a totally different question. Strictly speaking, the world can be divided into two groups: atheists and theists. Those groups are mutually exclusive, and everybody falls into one or the other. You either believe there is a god, or you don't. Agnosticism is about something else: about whether the question can be resolved, about whether it is even meaningful. It is about knowledge. Thus, all agnostics, those who claim that the answer is unknowable, and those who argue they have insufficient knowledge to affirm or deny it, really fall into the same two categories: agnostic theists and agnostic atheists.
Another problem with the article is assuming this is about "proofs". People generally believe all sorts of things based on knowledge that is stricly speaking insufficient to make a firm conclusion. Uncertainty is a way of life. Even those things we take for granted as certain, like you reading this article now, may actually turn out to be false, even though it is unlikely (you might, for example, have a particularly boring, metaphysical dream). There is, however, a level of probability where everybody, for all intents and purposes treat something as fact.
It is impossible to go through life without accepting uncertainty. In everything, we are dealing with levels of probability. So also with the question of god's existence. Theists frequently have doubts. I am sure some atheists sometimes wonder, too. For me, I consider the existence of God about as likely as Santa Claus, and somewhat less likely than the Loch Ness monster. There are events that could convince me otherwise on all three counts, but I would be more than mildly surprised.
What, then, about the burden of evidence? Should atheists really need to prove there is no god? Assume I argued that the world was really ruled by invisible pink unicorns. You can't see or detect them. Should I reasonably be expected to get away with such a claim by saying "you cannot prove that the invisible pink unicorns are not ruling the world"? Obviously, the burden of evidence falls on whoever makes a positive claim. If I, adversely, claimed that God does definately not exist, I would have a burden of evidence. If you asked me to meet that burden, I suspect you would regret it.
Finally, Jim Hold makes the stupid claim that atheists "haven't come to terms with 20 th-century science, which revived some of the reasons in the pro-God column." Someone who just reads about science filtered through the popular media, especially in the religious US, might get this impression. In fact, contrary to what he thinks, modern cosmology has been devastating for theism. If you want the basic, nasty facts, feel free to check out this article by Quentin Smith.
And when the so-called anthropic principle is touted as a strong card in the theism debate, you know somebody has not been thinking the issues very much through.
The challenge Jim Hold makes have been met a hundred times, even though it is in fact just a straw man he tries to knock down. If he at all has any knowledge about the theism debate, he must really know this. But he also knows that the response to his challenge will never get a prominent headline in Slate or any other mainstream American media outlet. The god if the gaps is indeed a tiny god that must be hidden behind a self-censoring media.
3:54:17 PM 
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I guess no blog from a Norwegian could be complete at this time of year without a reference to the infamous Norwegian dish lutefisk, which according to a recent 
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