TITLE: If a probability is strictly positive, is it discrete?
QUESTION [5 upvotes]: Let $(\Omega, \mathcal{F}, P)$ be a probability space.
Call $P$ strictly positive if $P(F)>0$ for all $F \in \mathcal{F} \setminus \{\emptyset\}$.
Call $F \in \mathcal{F}$ an atom if $P(F)>0$ and $P(A)=0$ for all strict, measurable subsets $A$ of $F$.
Note that if $P$ is strictly positive and $F$ is an atom, then the only strict, measurable subset of $F$ is $\emptyset$.
Call $P$ discrete if there exists a countable set $\mathcal{D}$ of pairwise disjoint atoms such that $\sum_{F \in \mathcal{D}}P(F)=1$.

If $P$ is strictly positive, does it follow that $P$ is discrete?

If $\Omega$ is countable, then $\mathcal{F}$ is generated by a countable partition, the cells of which are atoms, and the result follows.
If $\Omega$ is uncountable, then either $\mathcal{F}$ is finite or uncountable; $\mathcal{F}$ cannot be countably infinite. In the case where $\mathcal{F}$ is finite, it seems obvious to me that the result holds and I will omit a proof. The case that I am stuck on is the final one where $\mathcal{F}$ is uncountable.

REPLY [2 votes]: As Nate Eldredge shows in his answer, the problem reduces to showing that strictly positive probabilities are not atomless. Here is a way of showing it without introducing a random variable.
We will show that if $(\Omega, \mathcal{F}, P)$ is atomless, then there is a nonempty $P$-null set, so $P$ isn't strictly positive. If $\mathcal{F}$ contains a singleton $\{\omega\}$, $\omega \in \Omega$, then $P(\{\omega\})=0$ (if not, then $\{\omega\}$ is an atom) and we're done. So assume $\mathcal{F}$ contains no singletons. Now, $P$ induces an outer measure $P^*$ on all subsets of $\Omega$ in the usual way and for any singleton $P^*(\{ \omega\})=0$ (if not, then there's some atom $A \supset \{\omega\}$). We can now approximate $\{\omega\}$ from above. That is, there exists a decreasing sequence $A_1 \supset A_2 \supset...$ of supersets of $\{\omega\}$ such that $P(\cap_nA_n) = P^*(\{ \omega\})=0$ (for example, let $A_n$ be such that $P(A_n) \leq P^*(\{\omega\}) + 1/n$). Thus, $\cap_n A_n$ is a nonempty $P$-null set.