This is fairly correct :yes:. I am often told that atheism is "the belief that there is no god". This forms an absolute as it implies an atheist knows there is no god.
As others have mentioned before, that is hardly the universal definition of atheism. But also, claiming "belief" is not the same as claiming "knowledge". Just because you believe something, doesn't mean you KNOW that it is true, just that you have decided to accept the claim as being true for whatever reason. There is no certainty of knowledge implied by belief, just the implication that whatever is believed is accepted as being true.
Knowing something means you have some sort of evidence to provide the lack of disbelieve.
Again, no. People can believe things for a variety of reasons, and evidence doesn't have to be one of them. Also, when you start to talk about providing evidence of a "lack of disbelief" your language is beginning to spiral into absurdity.
Both parties believe in something about god (one says he exist and the other says he does not) yet both cannot provide evidence for either statement. To me this would just lump atheism and theism together since they are founded on the same level of thinking.
It's not as simple as "they're both the same". One is right and one is wrong, they cannot both be right or both be wrong, one must be correct and the other incorrect. What matters are the reasons and the evidence to support any claims made. Since the null hypothesis means that disbelief of a position is the default position, I reject the claim that my atheism means I can be lumped in with theists. They believe something which I don't, and I feel the absence of my belief is more rational than their belief.
To a deist they are equally the same since we strip both thoughts to their provided claims and remove superstition and empirical thinking out of the way. Once that is done atheist who claim they "know there is no god" and theists who claim they "Know there is a god" are mutual partners.
If you know the works of deists int he past you would have known they lump the two together and declare foolery of them both.
This reminds me of this cartoon:
I think this cartoon really nails this kind of argument on the head. When you look at two mutually exclusive positions and declare that both are fools, you are not participating in the debate, just using the debate to boost your own ego by claiming that people involved in it are all somehow lacking the bigger picture. This is called "the fallacy of the middle-ground", when you assert that just because there are two positions on a subject, the truth must lie "somewhere between", and where the very notion of "taking a position on either side" is seen as some sort of automatic indication of intellectual inferiority. It's not. There are incredibly intelligent people on both sides of this debate, and refusing to acknowledge the possibility that maybe one side has a better argument than the other or, god forbid, you might actually
agree with one side over the other is NOT any kind of admission of intellectual weakness. It's called having an opinion.
I should also make it clear my question is based on my point of view which is a deist so like all deist I am not atheistic or theistic.
Yes you are. They are mutually exclusive positions. You cannot neither believe nor reject a proposition, nor can you do both. You either believe X exists, or you do not believe X exists. That's it.
I stand out of both realms and view both as opponent to deism. Christians battle outside religions and those without religion while a deist battles ALL religion, superstition, and non-theism.
Except deism, of course, which can be a form of superstition.
