Does Atheism = No beliefs?

Did it occur to you that maybe they are not committed to a non-belief. They are just not committed to a belief for which they can find no persuasive evidence.

People vary in how they use these terms.I use "agnostic" for somebody who has decided that there is know way to know whether or not there is a God. I use "atheist" for what the name suggests: a-theist or without a god.Some people distinguish between "hard atheism" (people who assert that there is no god) and "soft atheism" - people who live their lives without any concern for whether there is a god. In that terminology, Dawkins would count as a hard atheist, but the majority of atheists would be soft atheists.I think you are making the mistake of assuming that Dawkins is typical of atheists. There are many atheists who criticize Dawkins as being unnecessarily confrontational.

Personally, I would have no problem with intelligent design as science, if it actually were a science. However, in order to be a science it has to be following some sort of consistent methodology, and that methodology has to have proven its usefulness.We don't see anything like that happening at present.You cannot just say: "I am awestruck by this, so it must be designed. I cannot find an actual designer, so the designer must be invisible. I cannot find any evidence of design that is not better explained by evolution, so the designer must be so intelligent that he was able to hide the evidence of his design and make it look as if evolution had occured."There's just no science in that. Even if it happens to be true that an invisible intelligent designer managed to design biological systems in a way that make them look as if they evolved, that would still make evolution a science (because it tells us useful stuff about biology), and it would leave ID as non-science because it does not tell us anything useful.