Agreed. Atheism comes from a place of a lack of opposing information. I have seen no credible evidence of gods and therefore I reject the concept. There is no faith required in making this assertion.

Once again the tired old Atheist position of "I'm not making the claim here, you are!!!". You are making a claim. Stop obfuscating. Its binary. If its not 1 then its 0. If you reject that it is 1 then you are telling me that you believe its 0.

@ Daniel Textbook Argument from Ignorance.

The atheist is asserting a negative: that god does not exist. If there is no assertion, then we are discussing agnosticism, not atheism. I refer to myself as a devout atheist since I do actually strongly believe there is no god. The data I have available cannot support the existence of god, so I reject the hypothesis of god's existence. But I don't have enough data to conclusively prove the non-existence of god. Therefore, I take a leap of faith when I claim to be 100% convinced there is no god. It is a far shorter leap than that of theists, but a leap regardless.

@a1s2d3f4 - There is a difference between rejecting a claim and taking its opposite on faith. When you don't have a reason to believe in something, the default is simply not to believe. This is distinct from actively disbelieving. Think of it like "innocent until proven guilty" - it doesn't mean that you automatically reject the possibility that they are guilty, it just means that you don't assume them to be guilty until you have enough evidence. You don't actively believe that they are innocent, you merely reject the assumption of guilt until provided evidence in favour of guilt.

@terdon I appreciate your intellectual honesty -- a rare trait these days!

@a1s2d3f4 If it's not 0, then it's 1; but if someone is claiming it's 1 you don't need to believe it's 0 to say "I don't accept your assertion that it is 1". You don't have to believe it is either 1 or 0 to say that you reject any claims that it must be 1. Lets say the person who claims it is 1 is a "oneist". This would make the person who claims it is 0 a "zeroist". The prefix "a" only signifies "not" or "without"; therefore we could call someone who rejects oneism (without necessarily supporting zeroism) a "aoneist"; just like we do with atheism. Being aoneist doesn't make you zeroist.

@terdon Many people consider what you are calling agnosticism as atheism, as in "not" or "without" theism. Theism is the assertion; atheism is just not accepting that assertion. That does not mean that you need to assert the opposite.

@Glen O You say you aren't affirming one side or the other but you are. Rejecting a claim is the same as affirming its opposite (if its binary). "Innocent until proven guilty" is a heuristic designed to protect the innocent in a criminal trial, it has nothing to do with this debate. Heuristics by definition are not logically optimal.

@ JMac Who cares what letter it starts with?? An atheist is someone who claims God does not exist. Do you dispute my definition? I say again, If the choice is binary, rejecting a claim is the same as affirming its opposite. If I reject the claim "Your favorite color is red" it means I am affirming "Your favorite color is not red". It's not really that complicated.

There is a large difference between the statements a) "I don't believe there is a god" and b) "I believe there is no god". a) is not an assertion that needs to be proven, although b) is. And therein lies the difference between agnosticism and atheism. agnostics claim a) and atheists claim b). The answer would be good if agnosticism were in question, but does not apply to atheism.

Which means, you can use up all the reasoning power of all the philosophers for all time with a computer program that randomly spits out assertions as fast as possible. That may be an unfortunate fact, but I don't think we can change the nature of the default position for pragmatic reasons.

@johnvkumpf "atheism is true" is not a claim. It is a nonsense statement. A claim would be something like "no gods exist", but that is not a claim that atheists make.

@a1s2d3f4 Yes, there is a claim that there deities do not exist. But given the lack of evidence compared to the ascribed attributes (varying wildly between people), that is a relatively small claim. The concept just doesn't seem useful for anything.

@a1s2d3f4 "An atheist is someone who claims God does not exist." Absolutely not. You can repeat this all you want but it wont make it true.