What can be said, positively, unequivocally and without a doubt is that the existence of God is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence whatsoever and which neither explains nor predicts anything. Judging by my own behavior, I believe in knocking on wood, throwing salt over my shoulder and that what hat I wear or do not wear will influence whether or not Ichiro Suziki gets a base hit. I know that all of these are also hypotheses for which no evidence exists and which fail to explain or predict, but I'm not taking any chances.
I think of atheism as a sort of rudeness. Nice people, often elderly, tell a set of stories that are instructive and there is no reason to question them in public. The factual truth of these stories is not important - the people who tell them are.
The three big arguments for the existence of God are obviously nonsensical. Of course there could be a God so perfect that he could make himself or whatever. Who cares? You could substitute "God" with something else and have the same proposition. It has no relevance unless you feel that this initial proof of God leads to some rational conclusion.
As for the existence of a pre-singularity motive force, well, turns out that a consistent cosmology may *require* a "Time Before Time" to work, so there's that gone. It was in a Scientific American of a couple months ago. Meanwhile there is no evidence whatever of this motive force. It has left no discernible trace in the Universe, so who cares?
The idea that the way the Universe is now implies some metaphysical intervention or purpose is just unsupported by any data and fails to predict anything.
As for ethics, there is no evidence at all, nor is there any requirement for a supernatural rightness of ethics. Even if there was an ethics from on high, it would make no difference at all - we are free to act better or worse than those ethics suggest, so their divinity is a moot point.
As a personal matter I really love religion. I get chills at the call of the muezzin. I love Gospel and a Mozart mass. I love when a Rabbi says "here me oh Israel" and things like that. I spin prayer wheels.
I like religion because it comforts me and gives me concepts to work with. I'm an atheist because, as a rational person, I can't really believe that my belief in something for which there is no evidence would be anything but superstition. Atheist is simple application of skepticism to the idea of God and skepticism is an extremely positive and informative way of looking at the world, so I embrace it.
To me, insisting on the existence of God is a little like exclaiming "My Grandfather has *never* masturbated" at a Thanksgiving table. Nobody is going to argue with you without causing a lot of discomfort because you shouldn't bring the subject up. But if religious people insist and they push blinkered and chauvinistic views of the world on others based on the double absurdity that some being which we must assume does not exist actually TELLS them to do something, atheists have no choice but to push back.
It is not for Dawkins to prove that God doesn't exist. As a scientific matter, it is already proven - God has been swallowed and erased by the null hypothesis. The burden rests with religious people - unless they want to be polite and keep to themselves, as atheists have done for so long.
boddi