[Serious] Why are you an Atheist?

[Mister Agenda]

Thanks, that was concise and to the point. I would say that all of this makes good sense. I agree that certainty is illusory at best. Some discussion has taken place here about evolution vs creation theory. It seems obvious to me that belief in either theory takes a degree of faith. What say you?

You're welcome, moxolla. It's a serious thread and I tried to make my answer serious as well.

I think with the way you use the word 'faith', you've fallen into a fallacy of equivocation or at least seem to be setting one up. The word 'faith' has multiple meanings, and the way it's used for religious belief is quite different from the way it's used in ordinary matters. The best way to avoid the fallacy is not to use the same word to mean different things. In the religious sense, faith is the strong belief in God or the precepts of a religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than conventional evidence. In the everyday sense, faith is strong trust or confidence in someone or something. Usually in the everyday sense, such faith is based on observation and evidence; like noticing chairs usually don't break when you sit on them and having confidence that the next chair you sit on won't break either...it could, but your confidence level is high enough that you'll take that relatively miniscule chance of failure.

So if you want to be pedantic, a person who is familiar with biological evolution and the evidence for it who accepts that it's the best scientific explanation we have for the diversity of life we observe and that reams of knowledge we have about life would have to be wrong in order for the theory to be wrong, then yes, in the most trivial sense, that person could be said to have faith that the theory of biological evolution is mostly correct (we're still refining it based on new information all the time, the totality of the theory is mind-boggling complex, while the basic ideas are simple). But if you then switch to talking about faith in God, that's equivocation.

For clarity and honesty in communication, around here we usually reserve 'faith' for religious matters and 'accept' for established and well-supported scientific theories. The tendency of some theists to conflate the two senses has made some atheists in these parts wary of even using the words 'faith' or even 'believe' about something they hold as probably true as they've come to expect someone from our theist population to try to twist what they're obviously saying into the religious sense of the words.