Hey Joe, we are agnostic. The burden of proof is on you. The cosmological argument (stating there had to be a first cause) won't do it. Neither will trying to scare us with stories of hell.

You are wrong in many premises, as I have some time now I will answer some:
"As I wander through this site and read here and there a connecting theme is that science will prove/is proving/has proven God does not exist."

No one is really trying this, the burden of the proof i for the ones that make an affirmation, otherwise you that believe in one god should first prove that all the other does not exist because your god claims to be unique, So by YOUR logic, or you prove all others false, or yours is false.

The big bang - all this from nothing? Can we ask where is the "conservation of mass" in that explanation?

Te big bang is not the creation of universe, but the limit of the observable universe. "before" the big bang all universe was "inside" the horizon limit of a singularity and i use "" in before and inside because at those stages, the way we can define time and space makes no sense as the horizon limit is exactly the point where our best models brake as it became a division by 0. So it is not the creation of universe, but the limit to OUR current capacity to observe and comprehend as the science is now.

For believers, the null hypothesis would be "There is no God."
For believers the null hypothesis is the existence, because the null hypothesis is the "natural state" the state that can be accepted without evidence because is self evident. And believers accept their divinities without evidence!!!

Quite the contrary, the null hypothesis for non believers is:
There are no supernatural entities.
And only the believers try to disprove it.... and Fail

The agnostics give one step back (that do not change any practical decision or action) that is: If there is a supernatural entity it is a "shy" god that hides itself perfectly in a way that is impossible to measure any of its interaction with reality. And this kind of entity is in practical terms indistinguishable from an inexistent one, so why bother trying to blindly guess?

As nonbelievers tilt, like Don Quixote, at this one giant windmill and fail to prove this Christian Null Hypothesis they become, in effect, God's greatest evidence.

Any action or believe of a human do not change the reality of universe's laws and rules.
If you follow this line of thinking, the repetition of cristians that there are no other gods is the evidence that they exist. So in the end any religion that says itself is the only truth only serves to prove it wrong, this is absurd in so many levels XD

UGH! I get so tired of theists falsely claiming that atheists who accept the Big Bang means we believe that everything came from nothing. That argument is bullshit. Let me clarify this for any theist who might be reading this; everything didn't come from nothing, everything came from something science has yet to identify.

What's more, science may never even be able to identify what precipitated the Big Bang and caused it to happen because prior to the Big Bang, reality, as we understand it, didn't exist. So if the Big Bang happened it was caused by something unidentified and possibly unidentifiable. No rational mind is suggesting everything came from nothing. That's not even a reasonable argument to make.

That argument is old, tired. and intellectually lazy.

Ummmm, no, science is Proving that no gawd needs to exist, everything can be explained with logic, reason, and research. If not right now, then soon. No Santa's, no fairies, no ghoulies & ghosts needed. And why exactly would you want them anyway?

Science does not address the god issue either way, since god is unprovable either way. What science has done is to knock down a lot of the props that were once used to support false proofs of god, and to support the belief that some sub-cultures had perfect knowledge of god.

Science has never taken up the question of whether a god does or does not exist because there is no scientific approach to that question. Some say that Hawking made claims of a god before he died. They say this also about Einstein. Neither man was talking about an actual being.

As i leaf through this site I find posts and comments by many who appear to be closet theists and sometimes even quite openly religious, although they don't usually last very long.

I'm sorry but to me you sound a bit smug and self satisfied'

Have you read the creation myth in Genesis which is thought to have been adopted by the Jewish people whilst in exile.? Prior to this they were polytheists.
It's a creation myth,one of many throughout the world. Nothing more

Wikipedia's definition of science :-

.Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge" )[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[2][a]

Not "the god of the worshipful non believer"

And a small point. The big bang did not originate from nothing as you say but from a "singularity" An incredibly dense particle which expanded rapidly.

Huh?

My dear Sir, according to the first book of Genesis in the bible ( Goat-herders Guide to the Galaxy as I prefer to call it), " In the beginning there was the WORD, and the WORD was with God."
Now, anyone with an iota of nous knows full well that a WORD is nothing, i.e it IS merely a succession of alternating waves/vibrations caused by and from, for example, the vibrating of the vocal cords ( voice box) causing a series of waves of compressions and expansions ( Vibrations) in a solid, liquid or gas just as the written word is merely nothing more than the mere scratchings left upon a medium such as paper by an implement.
Ergo, and logically speaking, God created everything simply from NOTHING, however, Science makes no such claim, it merely OFFERS up the Theory that the Universe arose from the POSSIBLE effects of Gravitational Compression upon a SINGULARITY ( a MASSIVE Singularity) caused that singularity to begin to heat up and eventual explode spreading it's remnants in ever increasing outward circles and spheres, ERGO, the Universe MAY have been created from SUBSTANCES and not merely, as you and the bible appear to falsely claim, from NOTHING.
As for there being in existence and, as the bible followers repeated state, " God is and was beyond ALL time and Space, etc," then HOW exactly did, a) this being, entity KNOW that it existed in the first place, and, b) how did this thing/being/entity being of nothing in itself manage create substance from nothing when it would be unaware of anything other than nothing?

For me the energy spent at tilting against a God the Atheist claim does not exist is energy wasted. Concentrating more on refuting the dogma of the Church(s) that cause quantifiable harm would I think make more sense. If God exists as I would envision it is simple; infinity is beyond our understanding at this time. Take care of your own which is the entirety of humanity. Now if God does not exist I still see the second idea as a worthy cause. The faithful like the non-believers are many in form and intent. So acting like they are all one thing, idiots, delusional etc. is not only incorrect but dangerous. If you want to destroy an institution or business (as many church's are) one must replace its services something so far Atheism and similar movements I feel fail at. A government with the best interest of its people could and one like the USA only fails at that due to greed and the delusional that the "Individual" stands alone in success or failure. The smart believers, the self aware ones separate reason and fact from faith and belief and use them accordingly. I am neither a believer or non-believer simply because God's existence is irrelevant either way. We as a species rise or fall on our own. Fighting over a impossible question only feeds our need to be right and our egos.

"As I wander through this site and read here and there a connecting theme is that science will prove/is proving/has proven God does not exist."

um, you're not reading the same posts i am, and i read an awful lot of posts! the related theme i see is that there is no need for god's nonexistence to be proven, that it couldn't be proven anyway, and that if one proves the nonexistence of one god then one would naturally be driven to prove the nonexistence of all of them, and peripheral effluvia as well, such as lephrechauns, the tooth fairy and trump's brain. while it is true these things do not exist, there is no point in wasting time proving it. when you know, you know. i am not trying to convince anyone there are no gods -- only that church and state should be well separated. only once in a long while do i encounter an overenthused declaration that science is the answer to all our questions (not, though, disproving the existence of any gods). connecting theme? no. really not.

g

This post is equal parts smug and misinformed.

The only way to win a no-win discussion is not to play. Unless you take the Kirk approach with the Kobayashi Maru.

do gods have a great sense of humor? i like the way Dean Koonz puts it in one of his novels.
"there are times when our lives seem to be following scripts written for the entertainment of the gods.. but the jokes go right over our heads."

brevity is the soul of wit

-Bill Shakesburg

Way too many assumptions to be taken seriously.

Nice circular logic. And people wonder why I have such disdane for pure philosophy.

Going all the way back, what caused god? You don't get to decide when this question stops being asked when going back.

Science doesn't set out to prove or disprove some random god that anyone believes in, but to understand the universe in a measurable, testable, way. That's it. Believers think it's more, typically because god has never nor will ever be proven, and they actually don't understand the scientific method.

What? I haven't seen that. I've seen lots of people saying until there is evidence for a god or gods, there is no basis for belief. That's way different then science disproving god. What branch of science is that, by the way? Where does one get a degree in disproving gods?

First, who says the Big Bang says it all came from nothing? What is does say is that all matter was compressed into a a small bundle until it could compress no futher and internal forces caused it to explode outward. Any obvious evidence about what came prior to the actual explosion was destroyed in the explosion. Therefore, it appears mass was conserved.

Second, MRI scans, while not totally disproving the existence of a god, do show that religious euphoria eminates from the same part of the brain hemisphere as cocaine addiction, or any other addiction for that matter, chemical or psychological. Good enough for me. Enjoy your addiction.