Geekzilla wrote, "You're that 100% certain of your belief in atheism that you'd bet your (after)life on it?"

Yes. Pascal's Wager is completely unconvincing to me. I don't need a sky demon to scare me into being a moral person. Even in the face of meaninglessness, I'm moral simply because I can be.

When I said "safe" I was referring to logic. If something is undefined, or worse, defined as being undefinable, then logically you can't prove or disprove it. Agnostics say, "I don't know and I don't think you know either. Let's search and find out." They are suspending judgment until more evidence comes in or until things are defined more clearly. Philosophically, that's a safe and cautious opinion to take. That's all I meant by that.

Ideally, a scientist would be agnostic on the god concept simply because there is no clear, objective definition and thus no way to start searching for evidence.

But as I said, I'm an atheist for pragmatic and emotional reasons.

Geekzilla wrote, "Have you ever had a terrible event happen to you that in the big picture worked much better than you had expected?"

Sure, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

First let me state that I don't believe in free will nor do I believe in predestination to some divine purpose. I'm a determinist. Causal chains resolve to no purpose at all. Shit happens. Additionally, noncausal stuff like quantum processes have no hidden purpose or intent behind them. There is no spook guiding things from behind the scenes and we are not the magical free agents some of us imagine ourselves to be.

But what I was really talking about in mentioning theodicy is the existence of error. (Which I think is a deeper issue than evil or suffering.)

I'm not talking about the evil that humans do to one another. That's surface detail and that's really our own responsibility.

Nor am I merely talking about random events that cause suffering, although I have to wonder about a sky demon who claims to love us and yet allows supernovas, earthquakes and birth defects.

I'm asking why error exists at all?

The universe is very interesting—especially since it might be infinitely complex—but I think it's a pretty sloppy job despite all that. It's hard for me to reconcile the claim that god loves us in the face of such messy incompetence. It looks like no one is minding the store.

It may be arrogant of me to judge the competence of god but, as I said earlier, it's also arrogant to assume there is a manager who is following the rules of stories we ourselves made up.

Saying there is some inscrutable divine plan for all this is dodging the question.

Better to simplify and say there is no manager and there is no purpose. Things just are.