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@Ponygirl

> I believe the goal posts are moving here.

There are no goal posts here, that would presume an adversarial attempt to prove you wrong or me right, I dont engage in those conversations. This is an exploration of the topic and I expect the "goal posts" on both sides to move in the sense that as we each learn from the conversation that we adjust our position to match what we learn.

> Your original assertion was that atheism is faith-based and therefore a religion.

Happy to explain what happened, there, and you are right.

It will be more clear if we look at the two definitions for atheism:

1. a strong disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods

2. a lack of belief in the existence of a god or any gods

Originally I was using definition 1, which I am not refering to as non-agnostic atheism. I realized you were trying to assert exclusively #2, which I called agnostic atheism. Since I didnt care much to debate definitions and the substance of the discussion is more important I deferred debating which of those definitions were valid at all.

So while I understand that may incorrectly look like moving the goal posts it was in fact simply an attempt to use better clarifying language and avoid any debate on definitions themself.

> You can apply different shades of agnosticism to atheism all you want, it still is not faith-based

You are certainly welcome to make that case, but so far you have not made a counter point to that assertion. Please feel free to make that case if you wish.

> Also, have you ever heard of the concept that one can not prove a negative?

I most certainly have, it is one of the most widespread fallacies/myths you will hear people state. I am a professional research scientist so "proving things" is kinda my whole thing (scientific journals are pretty

Rather than get into all the technicals of why its a myth I will give you a very simple example that proves it by contradiction:

present you with a box, I claim "there is no full size american quarter in this box", this is clearly a negative. You can easily prove the negative to be true by opening the box, looking, and seeing there is no quarter in the box. Negatives absolutely can be proven, and they are proven all the time.

> I can not prove there isn't a teapot orbiting the sun. In fact, no one can.

Your language is misleading here. We can not prove a teapot is orbiting the sun **right now**. The reason for that is because the space is too vast and our equipment not sensative enough to detect it, not because it is an unprovable concept. It is perfectly reasonable to think that once technology reaches a sufficient point it would be trivial to scan the solar system and in fact prove that a teapot is not orbiting the sun. This in no way suggests negatives cant be proven, again, we prove negatives all the time in science.

@ryan