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.
Hold it. You don't get to be the gatekeeper of terminology, especially given the errors you make later in the same post. These posts do better:
Lack of certain knowledge is not the same as faith. We don't need faith to know life was created somehow, since, as life exists, it is a fact that life was created somehow. We may not know with certainty how it was created, but that does not change the fact that it was created. Actually, we may never know for certain. To quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
I think you are conflating faith and confidence. I have confidence that my car will start because it has a history of starting, IOW a body of evidence. If it doesn't start then that it doesn't mean I was wrong to have confidence, just that I was missing a further piece of evidence to bring my knowledge up to date (such as the battery going flat overnight)
Faith in a creator deity is of a different type - we lack certain knowledge of how this or that came to be, therefore we postulate an unknown force (a god) to plug the gaps and assume it to be true. There's no body of evidence to draw a confidence level from, just a series of unknowns.
Natural processes exist. Natural processes explain events that have been previously been "explained" by deities or supernatural forces. There has never been a natural process which has been overturned by a supernatural one; it's a one way street.
So really, how does it require faith to acknowledge that there are things in the universe that we don't know the processes for? It would surely be the height of hubris to suggest otherwise!
Once we have access to every piece of knowledge in the universe and find that there are still areas we cannot explain, THEN is the time to start postulating about forces beyond its boundaries, not before!
Moving on:
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.
What you've posted here,
@Oddish, is, in essence, a gish gallop [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop]:
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
Accordingly, I'll post specifically only these refutations:
1. It is not a scientific postulate that a bacterium spontaneously assembled out of non-living matter. Arguing against the spontaneous formation of a bacterium is a straw man argument.
2. The second law of thermodynamics applies to an isolated system. The Earth is not a thermodynamically isolated system, and neither is the Solar System (as one example, extrasolar influences are relevant to the orbits of objects in the Oort cloud, which in turn are relevant to terrestrial biological evolution). Vaguely arguing that the level of chaos in a system increases over time overlooks these facts as given here in #2, and it overlooks the points in #3 regarding additional internal sources of energy in the Earth and the length of the time scales involved.
3. Despite the fact that most of the energy being continuously added to the Earth comes from the Sun, this energy isn't believed to drive geological processes, because not very much of it penetrates that deeply. A major source of energy for geological processes comes from the radioactive decay of isotopes left over from when the Earth was formed. The predominant isotopes whose decay produces this heat have half-lives measured in billions of years, so it will take many eons yet for this source of heat to be exhausted. Also, the formation of the Earth itself generated a tremendous amount of heat (when gravitational potential energy was converted into e.g. kinetic and electromagnetic potential energy), and evidently there has still not been time for all of it to radiate back out into space. These sources of energy that are introduced into the biosphere from inside the Earth itself are important to the evolution of life on Earth, and perhaps even the creation of life itself; it's worth noting that the creation of life (assuming terrestrial life was in fact created on the Earth itself) must have occurred when both of these sources of internal energy were far more abundant.
These points alone negate pretty much your entire argument, such as it is. For the rest of it,
@Kai "the spy" and
@Mytran both spoke eloquently on the subject of what it means not to know how life was created in the context of scientific understanding.
When the very nature of the creation implies intelligence and intent, is it logical to declare that there was no Creator because you never met Him? That's a little like saying that because you never encountered William Shakespeare, "Hamlet" must have written itself.
But the nature of creation does not imply the existence of a creating intelligence, whether it is one having any intent or not, so the rest of this post is irrelevant.
I must admit, I was let down after the hype promised an "efficient" proof that atheism is a faith. Pretty much every refutation to that that there is, including those offered so far in this thread to what you've said, involves the idea that, in a scientific theory, every aspect of it is subject to questioning, examination, and testing. There isn't any part of a scientific theory that gets a free pass to be accepted on faith alone. Even mathematical axioms and postulates get tested every time any experiment is performed. For example, if at any point a selection of integers is made for which the commutative law fails (or for which any other axiom of number theory fails), this could be observed and detected; to date, this has never happened.
In closing, note that an unnecessary assumption that could be neither tested nor questioned would constitute glorified ignorance. Assuming the existence of a Creator with both unknown and unknowable properties is an assumption that is both unnecessary and untestable, and by claiming its necessity you are asking us not to question it. What you're essentially saying is: science doesn't presently have all the answers, therefore let us amend the set of scientific postulates to incorporate ignorance as a perpetually ingrained component of it. That itself is, to put it succinctly, simply ignorant.
