geo wrote:An atheist is simply someone who is without belief in a god.
That happens to be one popular negative definition of atheism, but other definitions are also possible. Atheism can also be defined positively, as belief that natural explanations are sufficient and exhaustive.
In science, the question of the existence of God—whatever flavor of God is being offered—is not generally addressed for the same reason a teapot orbiting Saturn is not addressed. There's no evidence for it, and so no reason to put much thought into it. Likewise, scientists don't generally concern themselves with the supernatural. Confidence in science is based on the preponderance of evidence.
That is true for science, which in philosophical terms rejects all certainty. However, atheism extends beyond scientific caution, to assert that the teapot definitely does not exist because it is absurd and impossible. In this positive sense, atheism is a form of faith, holding that the consistency of our universe means that claims that are inconsistent with scientific knowledge are definitely false, such as the existence of God. Scientists may regard the assertion that there is no teapot orbiting Saturn as baseless dogma, but that only illustrates the impotence of science when it refuses to comment on matters that sit outside immediate evidence. There is a broader question of whether we accept ideas that are incompatible with what we know. Neither God nor Bertrand Russell's orbiting teapot are compatible with what we know. Deductively, both should be absolutely rejected on that basis alone.
However, wherever the stupidity of Creationist thinking threatens to insinuate itself into our lives, all thinking people should take action and protest loudly. This is no longer a question of the existence of God, but the role of religious dogma in our lives. If Creationists want to do away with the study of evolution in our schools, we should all fight that, atheists and theists alike. Belief in God is not relevant to this issue, or shouldn't be at least. An atheist might be more inclined to fight against religious dogma, but the atheism has nothing to do with it.
Belief in God is entirely relevant to the problem of efforts to undermine rational tuition. Theist belief in God is not rational, so provides a threshold that once crossed allows all manner of miraculous fantasies. Atheism is a logical natural strategy to protect against the promotion of irrational fantasy.
However, we should distinguish between religion and Theism. It is entirely possible to maintain religious ritual traditions and to hold reverence for ethical teachings and symbols as a way to build community, while rejecting any Theist claims that contradict science and logic. This is the line taken by Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. Even texts such as the creation stories in Genesis can be read in a way that is meaningful for a scientific audience. The threshold of error in this material is when we start thinking that these supernatural superstitions give any basis for beliefs that contradict scientific knowledge.
I completely agree that science presents a consistent and coherent materialist explanation for reality. But for complex psychological reasons, some people seek mystical explanations anyway. I think that's why it's so important to be able to distinguish faith from science.
The term 'mystical' is another interesting one. Science does not exclude mystical explanations, in the sense that there are deep mysteries of the universe that we do not comprehend. There may well be patterns in nature that shape our destiny in ways that are completely mysterious to our current level of scientific knowledge. But that does not mean that such patterns are unnatural or supernatural. If we accept there are natural mysterious patterns in the universe, we may find there is still room for faith in a way that is compatible with atheism.
Even science has need for faith. For example, ant raised the problem of Hume's scepticism, his argument that there is no necessary connection observable to the senses between a cause and its effect. If we hold that there must be such a connection as a condition of our experience, this certainty is a matter of faith. It means we regard the causal evolutionary material nature of the universe as axiomatically true. We therefore find that true faith is at the foundation of scientific knowledge.
The well of faith has been contaminated by a pervasive error that misinterprets Hebrews 11:1, where faith is defined as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". The universal law of causality is "evidence of things not seen" and so can only be accepted as a matter of faith. But causality differs from God, because we have continual evidence for causality, while we have none for God.