Is atheism a belief?

[Belacqua]

atheism happens to be the default conclusion when examining the overall evidence. To get to theism, you have to make a big leap (an unwarranted one in my perception). If you do not make that leap, you're generally going to stop at atheism because atheism doesn't require any such leap. 

Thank you for being civil! It's a pleasure to have a conversation with you.

I'm thinking about atheism as the default condition. This sounds to me as if we grow up in total ignorance of religious claims and then, after our reason is up and working (if it ever gets there) start to consider the problems. 

But aren't the majority of people in the world raised with religious ideas floating in the environment? Being raised in ignorance of religion or by atheist parents must be pretty rare, maybe until quite recently. So for a lot of little ones, religion will be the default, and getting out of it will require some rethinking. For them, that's where the big leap comes in. As always, it will be easier for some than for others. And I suspect some people ditch religion for bad reasons (the nuns were mean), and then rummage around for better reasons after.

without sufficient evidence and/or reasoning leading us to theism, there can be no intellectual path to that destination.

I agree that if someone were already an atheist when he started thinking seriously about these things, it would require some persuasive input to believe in god. A good argument, or a mystical experience, or some kind of personal epiphany. 

And this is where the talk about evidence comes in. It would be harder to switch if one took it as totally given that only science-type evidence counts. But people have been persuaded by logical arguments of a metaphysical type. Or mystical experiences. The scholar I was writing about earlier, who went from total rationalist to her own brand of Neoplatonism, found that the explanations offered by Plotinus and Thomas Taylor, which were not scientific but very subtle ideas concerning consciousness and the structure of the universe, were the best fit she found to explain her own various experiences. 

It's not like theists generally start with different initial assumptions than we do. Both sides value reason and evidence, but one side also values other so-called means to knowledge, but they don't normally use that means until they've exhausted all reason.

Again, if they were raised to be entirely comfortable with religion, their assumptions might be pretty different than mine were as a pre-age-of-reason little skinny kid with a bad haircut. I heard religious stuff vaguely at school, but it was never offered to me as an answer to anything. (I'm old enough that the whole Moral Majority takeover hadn't happened yet. We still thought it was rude to bring up politics or religion.) Kids maybe don't have anything as conscious as conceptual assumptions about reality, but just memories of how other people behaved when they got confused by life, or passive vocabulary that gets "activated" when they're looking around for answers. 

If a person grows up in a society in which nearly everybody assumes religious ideas to be true, it is reasonable for that person to be religious. The explanations he gets for things directly or indirectly reinforce that foundation. Just as every sailor who used Ptolemaic star charts to sail safely to port reinforced confidence in a geocentric universe. 

but they don't normally use that means until they've exhausted all reason.

This I'm not sure about. 

It kind of sounds as if you're setting up a thought experiment with two groups of adults, who were raised in isolation, possess basic reasoning skills, and are now being confronted with these things for the first time. Kids who are raised with religion in the environment, though, may find it easy to accept non-scientific evidence. In fact, what kid doesn't accept non-scientific evidence? I didn't do a science experiment until I was in high school. Before that, it was all from the authority of the text book. 

I hope this doesn't sound as if I'm fighting with you. It occurs to me that I have something like "resting bitch face" in the way I write. I try to be clear and dispassionate, but it may come across as aggressive. 

Anyway, I'm not sure about atheism as a default setting, but I agree that changing from one view to another does require reasons, good or bad.