"Not really. Both believers in some sort of higher power - aka "God" -    and those who don't believe in one at all have the same amount of facts to back up their claim. None at all. That's why both atheists and believers can be said to have "faith" in the correctness of their claims."

No they can't. The one thing that you're right about in this mass of nebulous thinking is that we have no facts to support the assertion that God almost certainly does not exist (that's the correct atheistic position, by the way). Now the reason that this position is not one of faith, but one of reason, is as follows. Say Wesley and I are in the pub, arguing over a pint or five, and the talk turns to matters of faith. Out of the blue, Wesley asserts that he saw a heart-shaped spaceship made out of pink marzipan covered with icing sugar. As it hovered over his house, a two-foot tall spaceman with three heads stood on top of the icing and shouted "wibble wibble wibble", once out of each of his mouths, at Wesley. Then the fellow hopped back inside and the spaceship disappeared in a cloud of diamond dust. I tell Wesley that what he saw was an impossibility. Marzipan is an unsuitable material for making spaceships out of, as the whole thing would catch fire or drop to bits as the vessel surged through the atmosphere, etc. Wesley gets upset and tells me not to insult his conviction that what he saw was true and that my denial of it is a matter of faith. He accuses me, quite rightly, of having no facts with which to refute his claim. Worse than that, no facts to that effect will ever be available to me. I can never demonstrate that he never saw what he said he saw, in other words. So let's introduce a neutral third party to the conversation. He hears us both out, and almost certainly comes to a decision that one of us of us is clearly deluded, insane even. Or maybe one over the eight, as we were in the boozer, after all. I'll give you one guess.

Yet the story has a number of advantages over the Godly assertion. Marzipan and icing certainly exist. Very tasty. Space travel is known to be feasible, and it isn't beyond the bounds that there could be three-headed aliens somewhere in the universe. But the story fails to stack up on several grounds unless we agree to suspend the laws of physics. No-one in their right mind would ever say that my taking against Wesley's yarn was a matter of faith. It is a matter of knowing the laws of nature, knowing what they do and don't permit and applying reason. That's the very opposite of faith, which is a position which requires no considered thought at all, just meek acceptance. My evidence against is the laws of nature. Wesley's evidence for is witness, which isn't actually evidence at all (unless he has photos which are a damn sight more convincing than Loch Ness Monster or flying saucer ones, of course). Ahah, say the faithful, but there may be laws of nature we haven't discovered yet. Sadly, the more science accumulates evidence, the less likely it is that a catastrophic overturning of the laws will happen. Not impossible, but let's say we've been waiting for an awful long time now for any law that would allow a supernatural being to exist. Which doesn't mean he doesn't, or that he can't make up his own laws. But we really are going way beyond even Wesley's marzipan fantasy now. No faith required to dismiss the notion, just reason. It's about time yer man showed his hand, I reckon. He could put this to bed once and for all, and I may have to eat my hat.