Atheism as the default condition of rationality

I often hear from agnostics claiming their position is more rational as the "existence of god cannot be proven or disproven". I find that position weak, if not illogical. One problem wit agnosticism is that there is virtually an unlimited number of statements of this kind. Does Santa Claus exist? Who knows? It cannot really be disproven, can it? And we can always come up with an imaginative ad hoc explanation for any supernatural phenomenon. This is well exemplified in Russell's famous example of the tea pot.

Thus, agnostics should not be simply undecided about god's existence. What about fairies? What about gremlins and leprechauns? What about many gods, instead of just one, the Valhalla, the Hindu deities, what about Zeus and Aphrodite? The true agnostic should be undecided on all of them. How would the agnostic go around his or her day? Would they buy Christmas presents or expected them to be delivered? Really, the theory of chimney delivery cannot really be disproven, so there's a conundrum to torment them throughout shopping season. Also, they should probably they should take out a new insurance policy every time they break a mirror, just in case, ponder if to walk or not under ladders, and, by all means, always wear extra-clean underwear: of course they don't believe in anal probing alien abductors, but the occurrence cannot really be discounted!

However, this usually doesn't happen. Most agnostics will refer to some abstract notion of god, but would be laughing at the possibility of believing in Santa Claus, and while I hope most stick to clean underwear daily, it's probably not for the reasons outlined above. So why would they be so selectively applying their logic to god, rather than all other fantastic creatures?

There are probably many reasons, but the first one that comes to my mind is peer pressure. While there are not many strong advocates for the existence of faeries anymore, several insistent advocates of various one true gods exist. Facing insurmountable pressure, many intelligent people take refuge in the wimpish position of agnosticism.

Yet, when many of these intelligent people make intelligent choices in life, they using a very different kind of logic. They might check airline accident statistics before traveling, but they would not care for reports of gremlins eating away at airplane parts during flight.

Why is this? Because, in one way or another they have internalized the way knowledge progresses in our current era. First of all, many of these intelligent people would use some form of Occam's Razor. William of Ockham in the XIV century asserted that "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem," that is, one should not make up unnecessary entities. In other words, if one finds unmatched socks after laundry, they could sure choose to believe that little green men in the basement are eating them. On the other hand, a more rational position could be to go downstairs and look in the dryer. There is usually no need to invent entities when a simpler explanation is possible. This does not make the existence of the little green men any more or any less possible, or simply amusing: but rational people would not be concerned about their role in the mysterious phenomenon of unmatched socks.

Religious assertions are generally made about non falsifiable entities. Any statement referring to metaphysical or supernatural entities is built in such a way to be unfalsifiable. In other words, describing a concept as escaping our common ability to perceive it, define it or comprehend it, clearly moves the discourse to an arena where debate is impossible. Anything can be made up and any of these creations would have exactly the same ontological value. A funny and indisputable example of this is Pastafarianism.

One common problem that I see, is people considering the existence of "some god" as the default condition. What they seem to be forgetting is the fact that likely that appears to them as a natural condition just because of how they were raised. It is indeed very common for Catholics to have catholic children, for Hindus to have families who share their beliefs, and so on. The issue here however is not cultural heritage, but rational thinking, at least in the sense of thinking which is coherent with everyday behavior (see the example above about the choice of an airline regardless of gremlins, for instance).

What would happen if one morning someone came up and told us a dragon was laboriously swallowing all the southbound 101 traffic? Most of us would not take the agnostic position and ponder if it's indeed the case to stay home from work for the day. Our default would be the atheist position: is this a falsifiable statement? Probably yes, if a dragon were present and doing what described, several news helicopters would be on the scene documenting the hottest story since OJ's slow chase. You can easily falsify it by turning on the TV. Case closed.
"But the dragon is invisible" might then say the self-appointed prophet, "and no one realizes that this is happening but me, because the dragon speaks to me through high frequency radio waves."
Now, be nice to the guy and call your local social services. But unless you are quite impressionable, his non-falsifiable statement is pretty much irrelevant to your life, wouldn't you say? Congratulations, then: you are an atheist!