@JohnJonesCardiff,
JohnJonesCardiff wrote:
The atheist position is either
1) absurd (not believing in a spatial and temporal God) or
2) unsound (not believing in an experience of God).
In 1) the atheist takes an absurd stance by conspiring with superstition in arguing against a God that lives in the universe somewhere. That is an absurd stance.
In 2) the atheist either denies the primacy of experience, or denies a particular experience. The former denial is illogical: experience (uninterpreted) is exactly what it is. The latter denial is circumstantial, and so it is unsound. It depends on people having no experience of a God, as they report it.
Regarding the latter, circumstance does not favor the atheist's position. Experiences of God, or of an autonomous agent of varying descriptions are common. Even atheists have such experiences.
This is my advice. Atheists needs to redefine their argument. However, apart from the two positions I have listed above it seems that there are no other options available.
You commit logical fallacies in the above. Your "premises" aren't premises, they're strawmen infected with question-begging. In them, you assert opinions as though they were premises, but they do not entail your conclusion. You present a false dichotomy in order to set up an artificial verbal artifice disguised as a conclusion. You merely boldly declare that the "atheist position" (as if there were only one and that atheists were unanimous in their support of it) is either absurd (by means of its own definition? simply because you disagree with it?), or unsound (strawman pretending to be a fundamental atheist claim), and present them as if they were the only logical possibilities (false dichotomy).
Insofar as some atheists boldly claim that there is no god, it is incumbent upon them to provide evidence to support that knowledge claim.
Insofar as theists boldly claim that there is a god, it is incumbent upon them to provide evidence to support that knowledge claim.
Insofar as an atheist (or agnostic) says that there is insufficient evidence for a supernatural creator to justify basing one's entire life around the claim that there is, that's a solid position as long as the evidence is lacking. If theists want to convert a rational thinker, they need to provide evidence.
Thing is, they can't do that for a couple of reasons.
a) They don't seem to be able to find anything like real credible evidence, and
b) if they did, that would destroy the commanding role of faith, without which salvation (by their own declarations) is impossible, because once you have evidence, you have knowledge and faith no longer applies.
So, when an atheist claims to know that there is no god, I would challenge him/her to provide relevant, credible evidence. Likewise, when a theist claims to know that there is a god, I challenge him/her to provide relevant, credible evidence. As long as the evidence for either is lacking, I have no rational motivation to take sides.
Since I don't have a material or emotional need for belief in any such supernatural protector or afterlife, I have no motivation - in the absence of evidence - to rearrange my life as if there were.
