It doesn’t. But, “God doesn’t exist” is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim “God exists”.
I’d agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don’t agree that counter claims aren’t claims themselves. The wording “counter claim” seems to me to indicate that “counter claims” are just claims of a particular type?
“God doesn’t exist” is surely a statement right? If I tell you “god doesn’t exist” (in response or not to something you’ve said), this feels like I am claiming the statement “god doesn’t exist” is true.
The very concept of a higher power didn’t even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it’s been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
The counter-claim of “God doesn’t exist” needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of “God exists” actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the “evidence” if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so… I’m not too worried.
I don’t think we need proof to reject a claim like “god exists”. There’s no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn’t say X too.