You can't lack belief, you disbelieve
That's just semantic hair splitting. Take it to the Linguistics board.
I think there is a difference between the atheist who claims to be an atheist "because there is no evidence of god(s)" and the atheist who is an atheist because he thinks God hates him, and so on.
Huh??? In order to believe that a god hates you, you must first believe that he/she/it exists. In which case you can hardly be an atheist.
What exactly, according to an atheist would be defined as God?
god (lower case G): an imaginary, mythological, metaphorical, etc. creature, usually portrayed in human or nearly human form, which exists in an unobservable and illogical supernatural universe, has supernatural powers that it uses to perturb the functioning of the natural universe, often in inscrutable, capricious or punitive ways, usually focusing its attention on and intervening in the affairs of humans. Gods are found in the mythology of all cultures in all eras and are thus a Jungian archetype: an instinctive belief in a pre-programmed synapse, from a common ancestor who had the coding for it in his DNA and for any of a variety of reasons was wildly successful in reproducing and passing it on.
There is also the problem of what "believe" means. It seems to me that atheists and theists mean different things when they say "belief" or "believe". Generally, to "believe" means to "to hold to be true". Some people use it to imply "to agree". Theists sometimes have it to mean "to have faith". Which are two different things.
The rest of us also use the word in that sense. I believe in America, I believe in the power of rock and roll, I believe in my friend as he struggles to prove himself innocent of a recent crime.
I think most reasons that atheists list as reasons to reject God are such postdecisional rationalizations.
Atheism is not necessarily a decision. There are those of us who were raised in atheistic households. I never heard of religion until I was about seven, and I laughed my head off when some kid in school started telling me about it. I assumed it was a joke. My parents explained that it was more like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, and that little boy's parents had chosen to tell him that fairytale instead of the ones I heard. I was several years older when I had the horrible realization that there are also adults who believe in this particular fairy tale. I spent several more years wondering why no one had ever had the decency to tell them the truth. Then when I became old enough to take it upon myself to tell one of them the truth, I witnessed the damage that is done by allowing a child to grow up believing in a fairy tale. He can't bear the thought that it's not true because it has become part of his identity.
I don't know why so many religious people, especially here, seem to struggle with the concept of atheism.
If they're Christians and Muslims, one of the cornerstones of their particular religions is the directive to evangelize. They believe their god requires them to convince the rest of us that their particular religion is the only correct one. (And of course they disagree to the point of warfare and genocide on which of the two it is.) They have a long history of encountering people who believe in the same god but just have a different version of the religion in which to place it, so they're comfortable with that confrontation. When they meet someone who believes in a different god, they're still on relatively solid ground because they have so much in common and they're just arguing over the details. But when they run into one of us with who sees the god motif as a metaphor rather than a literal description of how the universe works, they are uncomfortable. Our ability to see that in the first place means we have clearer vision than theirs, so we are superior to them in at least one way, and they can't tolerate that.
So. An atheist doesn't believe in God because...... Let's go with, there is no evidence to suggest that there is such a being. That is a claim. You are claiming that if there was such a being, then it would be detected by scientific means.
Once we have studied science we can put it in much more precise language:
The fundamental theory of science is that the natural universe is a closed system; that there is no supernatural universe full of whimsical creatures who meddle with our lives out of pride, selfishness, anger and paternalism. This is the cornerstone of the scientific method, and in good scientific fashion it is recursive.
The theory that the natural universe is a closed system has been tested and peer-reviewed in earnest for half a millennium since the Enlightenment, and less zealously for a long time before that. This is the most-tested theory in the scientific canon, because anyone who succeeds in falsifying it will be one of the most famous people in history.
Yet despite this zeal, it has never been falsified. No evidence, experimentation or reasoning has ever been discovered or developed to challenge the notion that natural laws are all there is, and that everything derives from them.
Like all scientific theories, this one can never be proven true. But, to use the language of the law since the language of science totally sucks as a tool for communicating with laymen, it can be and has been proven
true beyond a reasonable doubt. That means just what it says. Although we can never be certain that a supernatural universe full of angry gods does not exist, to believe that it does is
unreasonable.
We then apply the Rule of Laplace, another cornerstone of science: Extraordinary assertions must be accompanied by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.
Assertions of the existence of supernatural phenomena are accompanied, if at all, by the most pathetic evidence. But the existence of gods goes far beyond that because those assertions
are accompanied by no evidence at all.
People who believe in gods do so because humans are programmed to believe in gods; it's in our DNA. Those archetypal kinds of beliefs simply
feel true, and that makes those beliefs stronger than any beliefs based on learning, reasoning and experience. People rarely consider where archetypal beliefs come from, so they never wonder where the evidence for them is. They just assume it's there somewhere and they're comfortable with that.
The rest of us aren't. If you're going to tell us a fairy tale, you'd better have a thousand trustworthy witnesses with videocameras. Or just one, and we'll at least finally be obligated to treat your fairy tale with respect, even if we still find it to be just a fairy tale.
