Ask the Atheist

Short answer is that they don't. Atheists generally leave open the possibility that there's some kind of god. It's just that they judge the probability of that to be so small that it can be dismissed. It's like living in Los Angeles knowing it could be destroyed by an earthquake any day; you can't say it'll never happen, but you take the overpass to work anyway.

Atheism is a-theism, the lack of a belief in gods. It's not a positive belief in the absence of gods. It's not a belief or a faith at all, simply a conclusion. The premises leading to that conclusion are roughly as follows:

- A god is an incredible, unprecendented, almost unimaingable being.

- To accept the existence of an incredible, unprecendented, almost unimaginable being would require strong, definite evidence of some type.

- No strong, definite evidence for any such incredible, unprecendented, almost unimaginable being is available.

There are all sorts of stoushes going on over what constitutes evidence, whether a priori arguments can be accepted in lieu of evidence and even whether we can decide this rationally at all without a god to provide logic, but it still boils down to these premises.

- SmartLX