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JWeinCom on 10 January 2016
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DM235 said:
As many people have already pointed out, the argument in the OP is biased on the definitions that you use.

To me, faith is a strong belief in something. The Oxford dictionary says it better than I can, as it defines faith as:

"Complete trust or confidence in someone or something"

Source: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/faith

The above definition does not include (or exclude) reasonable thinking. I think faith is reasonable, but I agree that there can be cases were someone's faith can also be unreasonable.

In my view, we've all had to go on faith at some point in our lives, whether that was in church or in science class.

When was the last time anyone personally saw an individual atom? Yet we believe that they exist. More than likely, we were told that they exist by a teacher or professor who never personally saw one either. Can any of us prove that an atom exists? Or do we just accept it as fact because a book told us so? Is this reasonable? I think it is. But then isn't this just our (reasonable) faith in science?

...  Equating what we learn in church and science class actually is kind of offensive to me.

Here is the difference.  We have plenty of evidence that atoms exist.  You can remove the hydrogen from water.  And not like, in a million dollar lab, but at home with beakers and a battery.  We can combine sodium and chlorine to make salt.  You can drop potasium in water and see it burn.  These things depend on atoms reacting as we would expect based on atomic theory.

Looking beyond the do it yourself stuff, atoms are produced in labs.  We can see them with electron microscopes.  We have built bombs based on splitting and fusing atoms.  We make acids based on our knowledge of atoms.

We know atoms exist because they have practical applications.  Batteries, atomic energy, medicine and so on.  It's powering houses right now.  There are islands that have been literally obliterated because of our knowledge of atoms.  These things would not work if our understanding of atoms is wrong.  Pretty much any instance of applied chemistry would not work if our understanding of atoms is completely wrong.

And lastly there are mountains and mountains of literature about atoms that you can look up, that has been verified by a community of scientists.  Anyone who can prove that our knowledge of atoms is wrong would win the nobel prize without a doubt.  You can read countless studies.  If you had the money, you could test the results to see if you can replicate them.


So no, you can't see atoms (well if you're rich or qualified for certain jobs you can), but you can see their effects.  We can see its application, we can read peer reviewed studies, we can see atoms, and we can replicate experiments.  There is such an incredible abundance of evidence that atoms exist that a massive massive conspiracy, which would probably have to involve supernatural forces deceiving us, would be the only way the idea of atoms could be wrong.  We can't get to 100% proof (although some would say we have) but we can get to 99.999999999%.  We can get so close that it is absolutely absurd not to accept it.

Of course there can be people who just say "oh my teacher said so" and don't think beyond that, but those who are interested can easily find the evidence.  With religion, the evidence is not there, no matter how hard you look.  You CAN take science on faith.  You CAN ONLY take religion on faith.