[Ratboy]

from the wiki:

"The atmosphere may very well exist as a lip upon the surface of the earth, held in by vast gradients of declining pressure."

Fluids flow from high pressure to low pressure.  With the roundness of the earth and its rotation, this makes hurricanes in the northern hemisphere rotate counter clockwise and southern hurricanes rotate clockwise.

A gradient of declining pressure is what you get in your garden hose which causes the water to flow from the house to your garden.  How would this principle keep the atmosphere in place?

It may very well exist that way, unless you think about it a bit.

[JohnAdams1145]

In short: it doesn't, and this shows one of the shortcomings of the FEs having a fundamental misunderstanding of physics.

Fluids always flow from high to low pressure, unless something holds them back. This is a fact. Tom Bishop proved he doesn't understand anything about pressure when he said temperature had something to do with it; changes in temperature change pressure, but that doesn't change the fact that fluids flow from high to low pressure.

One would need to introduce yet another force to hold the atmosphere in.

To the FEers: if you want to debate this, first demonstrate that you actually understand what pressure is and why confined gases exert pressure on their confinement device. Then come back and have a reasonable debate. This is just plain lazy ad-hoc explanation.