I feel he to some extend misunderstands atheism; it's very fashionable to portray atheists as people who believe there is no god, when this is in fact incorrect. Atheists - generally speaking - assume there is no god due to lack of evidence on the subject.
Why is this in contradiction to what he said? Well, it's less his points on God so much as his dismissal of Bigfoot. The evidential and logical basis for both God and Bigfoot is less dissimilar than you might think. Both have a strong body of cultural and mythological tales built up around their existence. Both have certain signs which people often contend are evidence for their existence. But evidence isn't a case of counting evidence-beans any more than it's a case of definite proof. We look at the evidence we have, then come up with the simplest explanation based on what we know.
So I know that the universal constants are in a slim range in which life could exist. I then look at theses, or ideas, to explain why this is the case:
1 - We are in the only universe, and it happened by pure chance
2 - There is a benevolent sentient being who organised it that way
This is the dichotomy theists tend to create. Due to the large probabilities involved if we assume physics could have taken any range of constants, the likelihood of 1 and 2 may seem similar. However, consider the following ideas:
3 - There may be an almost infinite number of universes with differing physics - as we are unable to observe the others we would naturally assume ours was in some way special.
4 - Life may be more resilient than we thing or may simply have evolved in different ways under different conditions: rather than pointing out that the way the universe works is fitted to life as we know it, it's equally true to say that the life in our universe is very neatly adapted to its physical conditions.
3 and 4, as brief ideas I've thrown in here, break up the idea that it's a choice between deity and improbability. We simply don't know enough to say that life is improbable (4) or that these conditions are (3).
But if we don't know enough, doesn't that leave the god idea (2) as perfectly sensible?
Well, not really. 2 requires that we put into the system a being of infinite power and complexity, and therefore practically by definition is the least simple answer to add into our understanding of the world. The question "well where did God come from" is a worn-out adage when it comes to the creation of the universe, but more pertinent is "how does God work?". That is the question which there is no evidence to answer. There are questions where God can be put in as a thesis of explanation. A thesis is meaningless without a mechanism though. If I want to prove that the Peasants' Revolt was caused by economic hardship, I not only need to observe that economic hardship could potentially be a reason for rebellion, I need to demonstrate how the chain of events worked. I need the mechanism by which economics affected politics. Similarly, when an atheist contends that there is no evidence for God, what they are saying is that there is no systematic evidence for the way God works or affects reality, and until that case changes atheists will continue to contend that due to God's infinite complexity there is literally no way of using Him as an explanation for a situation which is the simplest of the plausible theses that fits with the evidence.
(Incidentally, it's possible to argue quite well that Bigfoot is the more probable to exist of the two, and I would do; aliens are a different kettle of fish altogether, and have a pretty high likelihood of existing though probably in most cases only as single celled gloop).
