Is atheism a belief?

[bennyboy]

Belief is defined by cognitive scientists and philosophers, as the mental state in which one accepts a premise or proposition to be true, or likely true.

Belief is a binary mental state. Either one accepts the proposition that a god exists, or they do not accept that proposition. There is no happy middle ground between belief and disbelief. If you think there is, and that's how you define your agnosticism, then you are using the colloquial definition, not the formal one.

This is not correct.  In order to arrive at a belief statement, the following must all be true:

1)  You need to presented with a well-framed question which CAN be considered in terms of belief.
If I ask you if you believe in boobledyboo, the right answer is: "I don't know.  What is boobledyboo?"  You shouldn't claim that since in not knowing what it means I lack an active belief in boobledyboo, I'm an a-boobledybooist.  If you ask me if I believe in God, then if you're talking about Skydaddy, I'm a gnostic atheist.  If you're talking about some mysterious philosophical principle or quantity which allows for the existence for the Universe despite problems with paradox or infinite regress, then I'd say quite possibly. If you just say "Do you believe in God?" I'd answer that I don't know.

2)  You need sufficient time for your brain to provide you with an answer.
Once you understand the question, you must process it.  Your brain has to poll your cortex, compare patterns, remember life events, and potentially collect more information in order to confirm that you do/don't have a belief. Unless you want to be more specific, "Do you, right here right now, have some vision of God in which you definitely believe," then you'll have to accept not-knowing as one of the answers to your belief question.

3)  You must not be psychologically conflicted about the answer.
The idea that a person is an individual entity, and that Yes/No questions can therefore always resolve to a single unambiguous answer, is illusory, and represents a philosophical abuse of our understanding of the brain.  It's perfectly possible that some brain systems skew toward "yes," some brain systems skew toward "no," and that the individual ego attempting to reconcile them cannot process the answer unambiguously.  You can rudely claim that such a person is atheist because they can't express an unambiguous belief.  But that's not how such a person experiences the attempt to answer-- rather, when they look at it one way, they DO have the belief, and when they look at it another way they DO NOT have the belief, and your question has not resolved for them the issue of which way to look at it.

4) The belief should not be conditional on an unknown quantity, i.e. be dependent on a state of knowledge.
I'd say if panpsychism is true, then I'd define the Universe itself as God, and such a God would be real by definition. I suspect that panpsychism is true, because of issues I have with QM, but I cannot confirm it to be true. So I have a clear definition of God, I can formulate an unambiguous answer, but I still cannot state whether I believe God under this definition is real. My belief DOES REQUIRE knowledge, it's not just a hunch.

All of these amount to a simple principle-- that it is perfectly possible not to know whether you do / don't have a belief, because your brain cannot arrive at an unambiguous response to a yes / no question. Sometimes "I don't know" has to be taken at face value, and your insistence on a bi-axial view of mind is impolite.