[mickeyg13]

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Your claim that atheism "has to be correct" doesn't make sense though, because you seem to be presupposing that you are correct in order to prove that you are correct.

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What choice do I have. If I don't believe in a god, I'm an atheist. ( that's what my "by definition" pointed out). When someone hasn't proven their claim, my non-belief is the only place I can stand.
How can it not be correct?

luckyme

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One can choose to believe something in the absence of proof, as long as it has not been disproven. Not only are laypeople allowed to do this, but even professional mathematicians sometimes do this, and theirs happens to be the discipline MOST concerned with proof. For example, most mathematicians that I know choose to believe the Axiom of Choice, even though we have no proof for it. In fact, not only do we not have proof for it, but it has been proven that it is NOT POSSIBLE TO PROVE IT. There happen to be a few troubling things about accepting the Axiom of Choice (like the Banach-Tarski paradox), but there are also some nice consequences (that every vector space has a basis, etc.). Actually that analogy worked much better than I expected it to...