Reply #4: Atheists, however, don't claim "that the empirical world exhausts what is real".

[Silent3]

If I may presume to speak for atheists in general, I would say that what many atheists would say is that the empirical world exhausts what anyone can authoritatively claim is real.

All Reitan is doing here is giving us a dressed-up version of the old straw man atheist who lacks all imagination, who stubbornly refuses to believe anything he can't see with his own eyes, who refuses to believe that there can ever be much of anything that exists beyond the current limits of science, etc.

How can we even begin to answer such a question without seriously “trying on” the alternatives?

"'Trying on' the alternatives" is a big part of what the scientific method (the approach atheists such as myself favor) is all about.

When you "try on" an alternative, however, you need a metric for success, and you need to connect the claims you make about what you're trying on with the end results you achieve. If I "try on" being Wiccan or Seventh Day Adventist and find out that I feel great living out those beliefs, I'm filled with love and purpose and a sense of community, etc., that "success" is merely the success of finding out which thoughts, ideas, and rituals make me happy, it's not a measure of any greater truth about those ideas.

My favorite example of this is telling a small child to do his homework or else Santa won't bring him Christmas presents. The child does his homework and gets great presents, believing he has been rewarded by Santa Claus for his efforts. His desire to please Santa is "successful" in a sense, but that success hasn't got a thing to do with whether Santa Claus is real or not.