I think we tend to overthink this. It's easy enough for me to state my position as "I do not believe that there is a god" and it's not a definitive claim that "god does not exist." But it's not in question that my belief can be restated as "I believe that god does not exist." If the belief is held without any reason, it can also be defined as unreasonable.
Either way, I lead my life as if there is no god. And I do approach it from the same process as that used to dismiss many other myths and legends because it's a reasonable basis from which to start-- it's a human habit to create such beings and even build mythologies and celebrations around them, complete with symbols and stories and cultural impressions that last long after people accept that it's not a real being (assuming they ever did). So my view is indeed that there is no god, and I readily admit that I cannot prove that negative.
Either way, I lead my life as if there is no god. And I do approach it from the same process as that used to dismiss many other myths and legends because it's a reasonable basis from which to start-- it's a human habit to create such beings and even build mythologies and celebrations around them, complete with symbols and stories and cultural impressions that last long after people accept that it's not a real being (assuming they ever did). So my view is indeed that there is no god, and I readily admit that I cannot prove that negative.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
