So you you are an atheist due to lack of evidence of (a) God? Couldn't you have just as easily been a believer (call it what you like) due to lack of evidence these is no God?
If your method for deciding what is true about the world is faith, then you can believe anything. Nothing cannot be believed by faith.
But if you're a critical thinker, then you are a skeptic, you are open-minded, you are able to evaluate the soundness of an argument, and you are willing to be convinced by a compelling argument. By this method, only atheism is possible, as the evidence and arguments attached to them are not convincing.
So you claim to be an atheist, the burden of proof is on you, you have proof there is no God?
That's not what an atheist is. An atheist who claims to know that gods do not exist is claiming knowledge that he cannot possibly have.
I'm an atheist, and I make no assertions about gods other than that I don't believe those that say that there is one. Did you want me to prove that? That I don't believe in gods? Why would I?
Three things need to be true for one to have a burden of proof:
1. One needs to have made an existential claim about reality. Opinions no more need to be proven than disproven. It is my opinion that theists have not made a sufficient case for gods. Did you want proof that that is my opinion?
2. One needs to want to be believed. It's not important that anyone believe me when I say that I'm an atheist, especially those who are thinking that I'm lying or mistaken. Also, there are times when I will make a comment that is common knowledge among people educated in the topic - say evolution - that will be challenged by somebody uneducated in the subject, somebody that can't define genetic variation or natural selection, who knows nothing about
3. Finally, one must be dealing with somebody like I described above - somebody willing and able to consider an argument dispassionately and be convinced by an argument that would convince most experienced critical thinkers. How often does the faith-based thinker tell us that there is no evidence for biological evolution. What's my burden with a person that wears a faith-based confirmation bias to filter out evidence he doesn't like, and is unskilled at both reasoning and evaluating evidence.
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If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, "Well, that's not how I choose to think about water"? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn't share those values, the conversation is over." - Sam Harris
But you are a deliberate atheist, you must have proof there is no God, right?
Nope. No atheist needs proof that there is no god to not believe that there is one. This is not the same as saying that you believe no gods exist.
Are you sure you are an atheist?
How could he be mistaken about not having a god belief?
So all atheist believe exactly the same thing as you do, kinda like a religion or something?
All atheists have but one belief in common, apart from the belief that nothing should be believed beyond what the quantity and quality of the available evidence supports.
I do not debate anyone who is "ready to be convinces". That is a clear way of saying his mind is already made up and he just wants to try to prove others are wrong.
So how would somebody that is willing to be convinced by a compelling argument, i.e. is open-minded, express that to you?
I can assure you that he is sincere and open-minded. He's also qualified to assess the argument dispassionately and come to sound conclusions about it. I've read enough of his words to know that.
But he's probably like me in that he knows that after years of theists making unconvincing arguments supported by no evidence or evidence misinterpreted, they never will have a convincing argument. Once again, this is not the same as saying that they are wrong about gods, just that if they are right, however certain they feel, they have only guessed correctly and can't know that they are right, just as I might have actually guessed the winning lotto numbers for tonight, and I may 100% sure that they will win, but unless the lotto is rigged, he can't possibly know that he has guessed correctly until the winning numbers are announced. That's where I place the theists making god arguments. Even if they have guessed correctly, they can't possibly know they have, and they can't give a good argument for believing their guess.
It's worse for those arguing on behalf of the god of the Christian Bible. That god has been ruled out both logically and empirically. That god is said to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. He is said to love us and to be capable of intervening in out lives. And he is said to want to be known, understood, believed, loved, obeyed, and worshiped. We are told that he created the kinds de novo, which is in contradiction to the mountain of evidence supporting naturalistic evolution. Christian creationists don't seem to realize that even were evolution falsified, it doesn't restore the god of the Christian Bible. It simply means that some superhuman intelligence and power created life and planted assorted stratified layers of fossils ranging from more modern forms with younger radionuclide dates on top to older, less familiar forms below, and also inserted various nested hierarchies into the genetics, biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology of the tree of life to make it look like they have a common ancestor.
The argument from pure reason that this god cannot exist is that it is described as simultaneously having mutually exclusive characteristics, such as being being perfect, but also making mistakes and regretting them. This is the theological equivalent of the married bachelor. One doesn't even need to get up out of his armchair to know that no such thing can be found anywhere, that its existence is logically impossible.
