Yay science!

So anyway. Way more interesting than secular humanism and Jane Addams is modern atheism!

I'm going to propose some definitions to clarify the group "arches", Atheism, atheism, and whatever else comes up in my head.

First of all, big-A Atheism I would call the worldview that there is no metaphysical or supernatural reality, and empirical data/observation/"hard science" can explain all phenomena that occur. A "problem" for philosophically minded Atheists is the question of where morality comes from, but I'm not going to break Godwin's law and discuss that here...

Any big-A Atheist uses Atheism to answer the questions about the nature of the cosmos that a religious person uses religion to answer. Some Atheists have among their beliefs the belief that the world would be improved by abolishing religion, that people with religious beliefs are deluding themselves and worshiping human creations with no power, etc. (you can see a parallel with religion here I hope?) I would call this sort of Atheism an analogue to religious belief, an arch at the 'top level'

BUT while Atheists must believe that empirical observation is the way to see everything in the universe there is to see, they cannot define themselves solely by acceptance of the current scientific theories about cosmology and the origins of the human species. Science has a property I enjoy very much: the limits to the scope of things it can be used to answer questions about. Because (even though people can make a career speculating about the first quarter-second of the Universe) it is logically impossible to speculate about what happened BEFORE that. See my corny illustration up top? While Atheists may have their opinions, there is nothing stopping anyone putting ANYTHING in the spot Michelangelo's God is taking up (flying Spaghetti Monsters, random chance, etc) and empiricism can't touch it. No decent scientist is going to answer ANY questions about WHY the Universe came into being, or the Ultimate Cause of anything.

As an empirically-minded (though mostly ignorant) Christian brought back to the sheep-area by a science teacher, I'm going to hammer that point again. Acceptance of any theory of modern science CAN'T be incompatible with religious belief, because religious belief and scientific inquiry ask and answer TOTALLY DIFFERENT questions. God works in mysterious ways, and those ways can be the origin of species by natural selection...