i am not accommodating with any of it but if you see that tooth fairy, please tell her that quarter she has owed me since the early 1960s is accruing interest.

g

God's a big word... fairies are much more specific.

God has a myriad of connotations, meaning that when we speak of God we really don't agree on what we're talking about.

I think most atheists would agree that Christian God/Bible God/Jehovah is a myth. The same would be true with Allah and Yahweh. When most agnostics debate God, they're talking about some force in the universe that may or may not be conscious... that may or may not know of our existence... that may or may not care about how things end up in the long run... whether that god is a supercomputer, the universe itself, intelligence... that's where the disagreements are. We just don't have a good definition of God.

Fairies, on the other hand, just have that one meaning... okay that other meaning, and we have empirical evidence that the second type of fairies do exist, only nobody's allowed to call us that but us and our friends.

Those arguments are wrong with respect to agnosticism. It isn't that there's a chance an agnostic could be wrong. It is that gods are non-falsifiable so technically no knowledge position can be taken up for OR against them. You can't have a meaningful discussion about something that can't be [dis]proven.

Atheism is the belief position side of it: you can't believe or not believe in something that isn't falsifiable. One does not afford belief to the unsubstantiated, much less the unsubstantiatable, which you would also not dignify with disbelief.

Critical thinking is all about resisting confirmation bias. You avoid drawing unsupportable conclusions. You learn to sit with lack of data and understand that you can only speculate about what might be so until you have actual information to go on.

As to the entirely separate matter of how likely deities are relative to other imagined things like fairies and unicorns, I think they are all equally unlikely and I think most critical thinkers would agree.

In my mind they are not mutually exclusive terms. One means lacking evidence in God ‘s existence and the other lacking knowledge in the existence of a god or gods. Almost interchangeable to me. I describe myself as both but am at pains to say that I have an open mind and that if incontrovertible evidence was found that supported the assertion that there is a god I could change my mind. There is humility in admitting that we may be proved wrong which I find absent in most believers.

With a universe as vast as ours, unicorns and fairies have a higher possibility of existing. But, in their defense, unicorns and fairies would exist in the natural realm. God would be supernatural. Much easier to deny a natural myth with a lack of natural evidence than it is to deny a supernatural myth with a lack of natural evidence.

I just simply require evidence beyond someone writing stories about people who in ancient times heard voices nobody else coudlo hear and saw people (angels) which nobody else could see. Somehow it never occurs to the religious that in ancient times the mentally ill were said to be "touched by the god(s)", , the more functional of those became "prophets" and superstition and a general lack of knowledge created religions around what those mentally ill, but functional "prophets" said.

On some level religious people know this, but they are using a kind of cognitive dissonance to create a delusion of belief.