There’s a difference between something being unproven and it being reasonably impossible.
Certainly. The two don’t even refer to the same thing - “unproven” is a measure of the extent of evidence for a proposition, while “reasonably impossible” is a specific position taken.
And I’d also note that “reasonably impossible” is arguably incoherent. “Impossible” is a nominal fact, so can only be supported with a deductive argument, while “reasonably” can only be relevant as part of an inductive argument. A proposition can be reasonably improbable or even reasonably likely to be impossible, but it can only be impossible in fact.
Assertive atheists simply look at the state of research and conclude there’s nothing to hold one’s breath for and call it early…
Right. They hold a belief in an unproven position.
Their position might well, and IMO almost certainly would, turn out to be correct, but that makes it no less unproven, nor their position any less a belief in which they’ve chosen to invest faith.
Also, since faith is the belief without evidence, it can’t possibly encompass disbelief without evidence as well.
Right, but I pointedly wasn’t talking about mere disbelief.
This is exactly, and not coincidentally, what I said:
Rather than simply withholding belief in the unproven assertion that God exists, he actively believes (or more precisely invests faith in) the unproven assertion that God does not exist.
Those are two very different positions. The first is indeed free of faith, simply because it doesn’t assert a specific position, but merely withholds belief from a position advanced by others. The second though - the position that Dawkins not only takes but insists that all who do not actively believe in God must take - does assert a specific position, and a position for which there is insufficient evidence to actually prove it to be true.
And any gap between what can be proven to be true and what is nonetheless asserted to be true is and can only be filled by faith.
And there’s the straw man, right on schedule…
If you go back and read what i actually said, I never made that broad and obviously inaccurate claim.
My point, literally from the very first sentence that I wrote, concerned only those atheists, like Dawkins, who don’t stop at disbelief, but instead hold to an affirmative belief that God does not exist.
Like it or not, that belief does not have sufficient evidence to prove its truth, and therefore to hold nonetheless that it is in fact true is an act of faith. That has nothing at all to do with religion either way - it’s just simple epistemology. A claim of likelihood can be supported with incomplete evidence, but a claim of certain truth must and can only be supported by incontrovertible proof, and there is not incontrovertible proof for the assertion “God does not exist.”
I fully recognize that that’s not the position held by all atheists, and I sincerely doubt that it’s even the position held by most - it’s likely that most simply content themselves with disbelief in the assertion that God does exist. It is, exactly as I said, a position held by some, and most notably by Dawkins.
And more broadly, that’s exactly why I never claim that it’s a universal position and I never make claims about atheism broadly, and in fact, every single damned time that I try to address this topic, I go out of my way to make it clear that I’m referring only to the specific subset of atheists who do in fact hold to that belief.
And yet, just like clockwork, every single time I bring the subject up, someone like you shows up and slaps that damned strawman on me and proceeds to tediously recite all of the same tired and entirely irrelevant cant you’ve now recited.
So honestly, if you have some issue with having to cover all that same ground again, that’s entirely and completely your problem, since none of it’s relevant to what I actually said in the first place.