Atheism is nothing more than rejection of one more god than you, because just as with the others there is no evidence to suggest he exists. Atheism says nothing about how a person feels about science, nature or santa claus !
Fair enough, you got me there. I was conflating some atheists (as found on this board) with all atheists, but I should have known better, because I have seen people talk about their lack of belief in God while also demonstrating little interest in science.
My description does, however, apply to what others recently on this board have called "fundamentalist atheists". I figured out what that meant, it's people who feel the need to save others by encouraging them to have faith in scientists. In trying to articulate this, I invented a word which I felt would be self-explanatory, scientism, to refer to faith placed in scientists. However I failed to realize that one who practices scientism would be a scientist, and this was not my intended message, because faith in scientists is different from faith in the scientific method.
Here's the difference: a scientist has faith in the scientific method. He does science (meaning 1 -- the activity) according to this method, and the knowledge he gains is added to science (meaning 2 -- the body of knowledge). Then, others put faith in his work -- the laypeople. These people do not really have faith in the scientific method, but rather faith in the scientists who they assume are smart and trustworthy.
If they had faith in the scientific method then they would only believe strongly in the things they proved to themselves through scientific experiments and observations. Instead, most people place faith in the scientific community. Virtually everyone on this board is in this second category, including myself. I place faith in scientists to tell me about the world, but do no experiments of my own to prove it. I have not even proven to myself that the earth is round. Like most here, I rely on received wisdom to tell me whether we evolved and what shape the earth is.
It is not wrong, in my opinion, to put faith in scientists, as their work has borne many fruits which have created the civilization we find ourselves in. However, I still think it's important to recognize a distinction between telling someone to put faith in "science, the activity" and to put faith in "science, the accumulated wisdom". We are not present for any of the experiments which teach us about our world and so we cannot say whether the data for some new finding is accurate or made up. There seems to be a scandal occurring right now over STAP cells, for instance, due to possible data falsification.
What concerns me, therefore, is when people assign themselves to a team and root tirelessly for it without realizing that their team is not the scientists, but the cheerleaders on the side. I don't like seeing people get puffed up with others' pride.
