Here it is again, this time from Nigel Cutland, Professor of Mathematics at the University of York: the contention that 'atheism is also a faith'. It is so widely encountered that you have to reckon it must be based on something more than merely a desire for polemical advantage. Professor Cutland's thought would seem to be that because 'you cannot prove there is no God', thinking that there isn't one is equivalent to believing (without proof) that God exists. On this assumption, only the agnostic can plausibly claim not to be a person of faith. The atheist has made a leap beyond reason and evidence, just as the religious believer has.
This presents the atheist in the guise of someone making a claim to certainty where there's no basis for certainty. But it is misconceived. Atheists - or at least the kind of atheists whose atheism I am ready to defend, being one - think there is no God because they think that the balance of everything they know, all the putative evidence, all the would-be reasons, for believing in God fall short, whether singly or in combination, of establishing that He exists. This is not, however, a matter either of certainty or of faith. The possibility is left open that something may one day turn up to shake the conviction that there is no God. That conviction, like many others, is a provisional one, based on what we know and how we assess its bearing on the question at hand. It is no more persuasive to call atheism a faith than it would be to say that scepticism about the existence of beings that believers themselves regard as mythical - dragons, unicorns, mermaids - is a faith.