That god does not exist is not a claim; It's a counter claim. Nobody has ever claimed that god does not exist without first being told by someone else that god does exist.
Atheism is a reaction to an absurd claim. Some absurd claims turn out to be supported by compelling evidence, and are eventually accepted as true as a result - for example, the claim that continents move around on the surface of the Earth over time, or the claim that a single electron can pass through two slits at the same time, as long as you don't look to see which one it went through; But the claim that a god or gods exist is not supported by evidence - the only evidence for the claim is that some people believe it.
The idea that
material things simply popped into existence one day, fully outfitted with a bunch of "physical laws" which exist for no other reason than that they seem to do, and/or have "always existed" and as such should be considered eternal
is NOT an atheistic claim. Theists make
the exact same claim - they just extend the claim to include an extra unevidenced and immaterial thing, that caused material things to pop into existence, and that has "always existed" and as such is considered eternal.
Why an unsupported claim that includes an extra, unsupported and unevidenced, entity should be held up as
less unlikely than the same claim without the extra entity, I cannot say - it makes no sense at all, but for some reason, some people find it more convincing.
It's bizarre to me that people find this 'god' idea compelling. I mean, if you were disposed to dismiss the idea of continental drift as obvious nonsense (and many were when it was first proposed), would you honestly find the hypothesis
more convincing if it included the belief that the continental plates were pushed by gods, angels, or ghosts?
