| Fayceless said: The belief in God, or not, is based solely on faith and belief, not on intelligence. |
No, because you don't have to prove a negative. The default position is not believing in God. The theists have to prove that God exists (since they're the one making the claim) and they haven't. The fact that they maintain its a position that requires faith (or a belief thats not supported by evidence) means that they make that very fact openly. So sure atheism is a belief, but a negative one, and its certainly not a faith. Since its simply the rejection of a claim and makes no claims itself about anything, there are no practices, proposed moral systems, holy texts etc.
EDIT now Hawkins here is simply saying that invoking God isn't neccesary and that the universe can create itself without God. That doesn't seem to be a claim that God does or doesn't exist and really we'd need to read his book to be sure.
