I'm getting a little tired of Christians asking atheists, 'If you don't believe in God, what do you believe in?' At other times many Christians will actively claim that 'atheists believe in nothing'. This is utterly incorrect, but it's just more arguing for the sake of argument, and it's pretty pointless to respond to questions and statements like this.

Would it in fact matter if atheists believed in nothing? Because that is what the question implies, that somehow believing in nothing is a really, really bad thing, and that atheists should be viewed in negative light for believing 'nothing'. Why do Christians assume that because atheists don't believe in God, they don't believe anything else either?

What Christians are doing when they ask, 'Do you believe in nothing?' is equating 'faith' with 'belief' and/or 'trust'. This is entirely wrong. These things are not the same, not at all. Let's take a closer look at these terms:

I believe my car is red. I believe it is red because the last time I saw it it was red. I'm not expecting any change to that, so I can tell you that I believe my car is red and be fairly certain that this statement is true. Is that faith? No, because faith is the act of believing in something without evidence. Christians believe in God even though they've never actually seen God. I've seen my car, there is no faith involved. It's red.

Do you believe my car is red? I just said it is, but you haven't seen it for yourself, so, if you believe me, is that faith? Again, no. If you believe me you are merely trusting my word. Trust is not faith. You could still check that my car is red by coming round to my house and taking a look - the evidence can be verified. For this reason, belief in such things as complex science, which we ourselves may not understand, is based on trust, rather than faith. If I see a documentary about gene therapy, I have to trust that the people speaking about it know what they are talking about, and the fact that I, or anyone else, could check those facts makes this something to believe, not something to have faith in.

There are of course things we cannot see or measure. Love is a good one. Christians will ask if you believe in love, as if believing in the existence of love which, just like God, cannot be seen, is proof that God exists (the doorstep evangelists like that approach for some reason). If you believe in love, why can't you believe in God? Once again, the two are not remotely similar. I personally cannot describe what love is, but I know what it feels like (trapped! Christians will respond: we know what God feels like), and have seen the effects of loving someone and the effects of losing that love. I also know that biologists can go some way towards explaining the complex changes in body chemistry and brain impulses which are set off when 'love' happens. Do I believe in love? I do, because I have experienced love. Do I believe in God? No, because if we are equating the two then I need to experience God to believe in God, or be shown evidence that God exists. That has not happened as yet. So I don't believe in God.

By the way, this is why you will be asked by Christians if you believe in love: it's an intellectual trap. Unless you think about your answer and word it just so, you are going to fall into that trap when they equate belief in God with belief in love. If you say 'we can see the effects of love on other people' they will say, 'well, God has affected me too, so isn't that the same?' If you say, 'I just know when I feel love for someone' that is giving them the opportunity to respond with, 'I just know that God exists'. Don't fall into this trap and if you do, ask them for other evidence for God's existence - after all, we know that air exists even if we can't see it, but we can also measure it in other ways: weigh it, discover its chemical properties, and so on. The same applies for love. We can analyse the body's reaction when a loved one walks into a room, and compare it with what happens when a stranger walks in. That is evidence of love. But what other evidence is there for God? How can we scientifically measure God's existence? Of course, we can't.

But let's turn around around the original statement, where Christians assert that atheists don't believe in anything. Let's ask Christians a similar question: 'Other than those beliefs attached to your religion, do you believe in nothing?'

They will of course say they believe in all kinds of things. Things which have nothing to do with God, nothing at all. Why do they believe those things if they are not related to God? Ask them. Is it a silly question to ask why they have non-religious beliefs? I think it is, but it is the very question they are asking atheists.

What do I believe in? I believe in the same kind of things Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and all kinds of religious people believe in. Their belief in the supernatural is something I do not share, but equally I also don't share the beliefs of those who think that pink is the best colour in the world. I believe in all kinds of things, and share those beliefs with some people of all religions and with some atheists. Some, not all. We can all say that about different things, can't we?

Do any atheists believe in nothing? Of course not. But why should that answer have any bearing on whether or not we believe in God? And if it doesn't, why ask the question at all?

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Added Later:
Actually Christians do ask some pretty tough questions sometimes. Take this question: 'Do you believe that life exists on other planets somewhere in the universe?' Okay, assuming that you do, you're in immediate hot water with theists because of course we can't verify this belief in any way. This would have to be true faith, right? If you can believe in extra-terrestrial life without proof, why can't you believe in God?

First, let's just get one thing straight. We are not comparing like with like here. Christians believe in something super-natural, ie 'outside of space and time'. Believing that life on other planets exists is simply an extension of what science has taught us about life on our own planet, coupled with what astronomy tells us about the likely number of planets in the universe. Planets are common - we've found hundreds of exo-planets (ones orbiting suns other than our own) and are finding more and more all the time. These are all stars within our own galaxy - other galaxies are too distant to examine the stars for the existence of planets, but we should assume that other galaxies are similar, and there are millions of known galaxies. Statistically, therefore, life is likely to exist on at least one other planet in the universe in some form.

God, meanwhile, is outside the known. We cannot extrapolate from our own natural world and say, 'xyz exists here so God must exist there'. This is not like for like. There is no evidence for the existence of god. None. That's why theists need faith, because there is no proof. There is evidence for the existence of life on at least one planet - we see life all around us on our planet, Earth, so we know it exists. We know that other planets exist, and that they are in fact fairly common, so can assume that there are millions, if not billions of planets in the universe. As yet we are unable to prove that life exists on any of those planets, but we can say that the likelihood of life existing on at least one other planet, given that so many planets are out there, is statistically very high. We can base a belief on that kind of probability. But this is still not the same as belief in God, which requires faith because nothing we can see or measure leads us to believe that God exists.

More to the point, whether or not we have the belief does not change our whole outlook on life. Belief in God does, because believing in the Christian God or the Muslim God has a huge amount of baggage attached to it. If you believe in extra-terrestrials it in unlikely to make you want to knock on people's doors and tell them about it, for instance.

Religion stands apart from all other beliefs. Religion is a way of life, a way of changing rational people's behaviour, sometimes to the detriment of the believers themselves, often to the detriment of non-believers, or even those holding similar beliefs but different denominations. Nothing I believe in makes me want to invade another country because that belief system told me to do it. Nothing I believe in leads me to conclude that homosexuality is an abomination. Nothing I believe will ever make me blow myself up in a crowd of people who do not share my beliefs.

Only theists will ever argue, for example, that someone who believes in evolution therefore has a religion. Let's stop pretending that 'belief in a god' is in any way comparable to any other kind of belief. It simply is not. When someone asks, 'do you believe in anything?', simply ask them what they mean by 'belief', and pretty soon they will have to separate religious belief from other, more easily defined beliefs. Or to be awkward just say, 'No, I don't believe in anything.' That should shut them up for all of, oh, ten seconds... just enough time to make a quick exit!