This place sure goes in "spurts"

[Liam Proven]

2009/7/21 Chan Chung Hang Christopher <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>:
> Donn wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 21 July 2009 17:13:20 Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
>>
>>> Atheism itself is a
>>> religion.
>>>
>> In the same way that NOT collecting stamps is a hobby.....
>>
>
> Heh. If religion is defined as believing in something without basis then
> I am afraid atheism falls into that bracket. Same goes for those who
> believe in the theory of evolution.

This is not the case.

Firstly, atheism as a faith:

Belief does not equal faith, nor does faith equal belief. I believe
the sun will rise tomorrow, but that requires no faith. Drastic and
highly improbable events would have to happen for it not to.

Atheism means a-theist, from the Greek: "a-" meaning not, as in
"atom", from "a-tom", which means cannot be cut, and "theist", which
means a believer in a god or gods.

Atheism is *not* a belief that there are no gods; it is a lack of
belief that there are gods.

Atheism is not a faith. If do not believe that Benjamin Disraeli is
still alive, that does not make me an anti-Disraeli-ist. It's a matter
of record that he died in 1880 (source: Wikipedia).

Atheists do /not/ have a belief; this is not the same thing as a
belief that something is not.

Not having a million pounds is not the same as believing there's no
such thing as a million pounds.

As for belief in evolution: it is not a faith. There is abundant
evidence for evolution; I myself have dug fossils out of cliffs of
organisms that are no longer alive. I have learned to date rocks and
estimate their age. I have seen, held, handled and dissected fossils
of ancient organisms from millions of years ago that have similar
traits to living ones.

If one believes in something on the basis of observational evidence,
that is not faith. Faith is the belief in the absence of evidence. For
example, it requires no faith at all to not believe that there is a
giant dinosaur waiting outside my house to eat me, as I've just been
outside and looked. There isn't one, I've not heard one approach and
there are no living dinosaurs. There is no evidence for a dinosaur
being outside.

There is also no evidence for a god or gods, so I don't believe in
them any more than I believe in a giant dinosaur outside. This
requires no faith.

I've never been to Australia; I've only seen pictures. But I've talked
to lots of Australians, I've seen films there, I've seen it on maps
and in satellite pictures, I've seen and handled unique Australian
animals, and I own a didgeridu from Australia. Therefore it requires
no faith to believe in Australia; I have direct demonstrable objective
evidence.

But I have never seen or heard or read of any such evidence for any
god. Indeed I am aware of masses of evidence that contradicts just
about any holy book. I'm only familiar with the christian bible, but
it contains lots of stories of things which are demonstrably not true.
This counts as evidence that it is incorrect. It is evidence of
absence.

Believing something when there is evidence is not faith.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508