Faith Is The Evidence of Things Unseen--In Other Words, Nothing

Since I've become an atheist, I find myself more frequently embroiled in arguments with the "faithful" concerning the nature of my <ahem> "beliefs;" as though something about the nature of religious belief requires that all others must espouse a system of belief too.

"I lack the faith to be an atheist."  I've already encountered this argument a number of times since I began arguing from an atheist perspective.  Being an atheist requires no faith, since one is not trying to assert anything beyond what is observable.  Faith is only required when trying to assert that some invisible, all-powerful being exists and created the universe, etc., etc..

During my Christian days, I argued that atheism was "no different than any other religion."  I then proceeded to construct an elaborate straw man, in which I argued that atheism was a religion, and science--evolution in particular--was its canon.  Of course, this argument never held up when I endeavored to argue with atheists, since--as I stated in previous blog posts--there are no unifying atheist beliefs.  Still, I persisted with trying to make atheism into some sort of religion, analogous to any of the other religious beliefs I prided my self in deconstructing.  Now that I find myself on the other side of the argument, it's amusing to see exactly how absurd my arguments actually were.

For the Christian (probably for many other belief systems as well), one's faith is how one identifies within the Christian community.  Public acceptance of certain tenets of belief often determines how others within the church perceive one another.  In other words, if you espouse beliefs that diverge from what is considered orthodox within a particular faith group, you are viewed as less Christian, whereas acceptance of the group's orthodoxy means you are a good Christian.  In short, the religious--Christians in particular--cannot imagine one being bereft of faith.

Christians, in order to make their arguments more effective, tend to deliberately conflate science and atheism.  Although atheists usually respect science a great deal more than do our religious counterparts, we usually refrain from replacing religion with science (I am sure there are a few kooks out there claiming science in lieu of belief).  Mankind does not need religion; it is, as Marx said, the "opiate of the masses."

Science is, as I like to say, a system of doubt.  Science is nothing more than the summation of human knowledge about the natural world, which has derived from both observation and the postulation that agrees with those observations.  Science is not merely agreement with scientists; for example, many scientists believe that the planet is warming and is thus on a collision course with destructively high temperatures, and that man is largely responsible for this phenomenon.  Unlike evolution, for which there are years of research and thousands of peer-reviewed papers to validate, catastrophic AGW is based on dubious premises and the subjective research of scientists trying to prove their beliefs instead of just following the evidence where it takes them.  If science were a religion, then by the reasoning of most Christians I should be a heretical atheist (is such a thing possible?); however, because I am not religious, I can accept that which makes sense to me, and ignore that which does not.  I can keep the baby and the bathwater, or I can throw either or both without fear of losing regard in the eyes of my ideological peers.  It takes no faith to believe in that which I can experience or read and understand for myself.