The creator of the thread, the OP. This thread is a carryover from their epic cage match in the GenTrek forum of champions...
It wasn't an epic cage match, it was a couple of guys staring each other down and exchanging choice words, and it ended when a guy in a police uniform (badge #11001001) cleared his throat and pulled out his nightstick.
Be that as it may, OP asked for an explanation of why I believe that atheism is a faith. Here's my explanation:
Let us first get a matter of terminology out of the way. Simply put, a faith can be simply defined as the belief in anything that the person who practices it cannot prove by concrete means.
To believe in evolution (which I do) is not a faith, because the processes that fuel it are observable and verifiable. In the crucible of nature, organisms that are well-suited to survival last long enough to reproduce. Organisms that are ill-suited to survival do not. In time, natural genetic mutation (also an observable process) allows them to upgrade themselves over time. Additionally, the selective breeding process by which humans have gradually turned timber wolves into St. Bernards, Rottweilers, and Chihuahus is simply vastly accelerated evolution.
However, evolution only explains so much. Its primary weakness is rooted in a scientific principle established in the mid-19th century, by Louis Pasteur and his contemporaries, when they shot down the commonly held theory of spontaneous generation. The primary principle of evolution is that it is fueled by death. Ergo, by extension, the process of evolution can only initiate when you have living organisms. Dead things cannot evolve. They are bound to the laws of physics and statistics, rather than those of evolution.
The problem with Pasteur's work is that it throws a giant monkey wrench into the gears of atheism, which postulates that everything on earth (indeed, in the universe) formed randomly, with no outside help whatsoever. And the problem is that the very sciences that atheists rely upon refute that belief. The laws of physics tell us what happens in an energized system, such as a planet in a stable orbit around a star: the transfer of energy causes changes in the system on a molecular level. The laws of probability tell us the nature of these changes: order can occasionally emerge
from chaos, but it is much more typical that order
decays into chaos. Ergo, nothing as sophisticated as a bacterium (the simplest self-sustaining form of life) can just "happen". Small and humble as it might be, said bacterium is a conglomeration of around ten billion precisely placed atoms. A jigsaw puzzle of such size and complexity cannot possibly assemble itself.
Devout atheists either loudly ignore this, with the same ferocity as a fundamentalist defending six-day creationism, or they try to come up with theories as to how such an event could happen. They call it "abiogenesis", I call it "spontaneous generation 2.0", the reintroduction of a scientific principle that the scientific community had declared unsound before Edison had even invented the light bulb. One common defense for it is the notion that scientists were able to observe the random formation of simple amino acids in an energized environment. Problem is, an amino acid is 10-26 atoms, not ten billion. Relying on this experiment to prove your theory is a little like throwing one pitch in a baseball game, having the umpire call a strike, and declaring yourself the winner.
Proponents of atheism call this the Watchmaker argument, and they bluster that it has been repeatedly debunked, but they cannot tell us how or why, aside from a few minor things, like amino acid creation. It really reminds me of someone kicking a few loose bricks out of the Great Wall of China, and declaring that the entire 1500-mile long structure has been reduced to rubble. Like it or not, the independent existence of life is not possible within the current parameters of science. And because atheism relies on science, it's like a building with girders made of dynamite, destroyed by what it relies on for support. And while the garden variety atheist simply doesn't acknowledge this, his more educated contemporary believes that one day in the future, through humanity's increased understanding of science, the explanation will emerge.
In short, properly examined atheism requires a person to believe in the existence of an undiscovered and unverified scientific principle that runs 180 degrees against current ones, something that makes the impossible possible (not unlike God, when you think about it). Therefore, whatever you might think,
it is a faith.
Perhaps as a compromise you could write your reply as a text file on your PC, transfer it to the device you use for going online, save it online and link to it?
