Sure I can, and it's the same reason your toaster is an appliance, not furniture, the same reason a banana is a fruit, and not a vegetable, the same reason a Ford Mustang is a car and not a bus.
This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true, but rather because of a series of chemical reactions.
Nonsense. The only way that even remotely makes sense is if your next sentence is to claim that our perceptions tell us nothing about actual reality. That sort of dorm-room solipsism may be fun to contemplate, but you'll have a devil of a time proving it.
I am not a solipsist. Whose actual reality would that be; yours or mine? You are able to assert actual reality because you (rightly) assume that truth is objective. But objective truth and morality cannot be validly derived from the premises of your materialist worldview, if all you've got is the motion of irrational physical forces. If the random collection of atoms called Dawkins says that religious instruction is child abuse and some other random collection of atoms called Diamond says it is not, so what? On the premise of atheism, what difference does it make? Are there good and bad atoms? Objective and universal standards of truth and morality cannot exist in your purely material world. That is the problem, which as far as I know, has never been successfully answered by atheists.
Cordially,