ToraTiger said:
You've anwsered the first two questions to an extent. But let me first say, why didn't man just think of it as athesist do; the World existed by chance, and we are a product of it. How come it's this newly found "science" that makes us doubt God?
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I would like to note that, despite being an atheist, I did not actually argue against religion. Just thought I should say that before anything else.
Anyway, as I said, it was an evolution of thought. Humanity has a tendency to see patterns where there are none (see: pareidolia). Humans also have a strong tendency to personify and humanise things - a captain (in most western countries) refers to a ship as "she", every single god of the Greek religion was human in shape, at least some of the time, etc. And humans also tend not to like not understanding things, and thus seek to find explanations, no matter how unreasonable those explanations might be.
Early humans asked "why does the sun move across the sky?" Not having any means of finding an explanation in the way that we do now, they sought out an explanation by comparing the movement to things that they understood - human movement. The slight wandering path (tendency to rise and set in different places over time) suggested to early humans it was being moved with intent, rather than on its own. And so, needing an explanation that they could comprehend, they came up with the idea that it was either a being itself, or that it was being moved by a being - and thus, the sun deity came to exist. It exists in egyptian, greek, and roman mythology. It exists in most other pagan mythologies. And almost every local mythology in the various other nations also had some variation of the sun god. Some, like in Egyptian mythology, had the sun being pulled through the sky. Others, such as, I think, the Greek, had the sun being the god itself.
Early humans asked "why do plants grow some of the time, but wilt at other times? Why is there a good time to plant, and a time when planting is useless?" The result, in the exact same process, is the "fertility god". They see patterns, such as someone doing something, and then the following planting season being particularly fruitful, and conclude that something actually likes what that person had done. They seek an explanation, and come up with one that they can comprehend given their current level of knowledge of the universe - and that produces the "fertility god". And again, fertility gods appear in most religions, with the obvious exceptions of the monotheistic ones that are relatively new (as far as historical records are concerned).
The exact same process applies to most other instances, too. The rain dance that exists in some cultures arose because, at some point in time, someone did a certain dance, and soon after, it rained. Seeing a pattern where there was none, they concluded that the dance caused the rain. But of course, for the dance to cause the rain, there has to be some reason for it to happen. Not having a better explanation, they conclude that it was a god that caused the rain, and that therefore the dance pleased that god. Of course, once you have that explanation, it becomes easy to sustain it - the reason why the dance didn't work on a particular day was that the god was displeased over something else done, or because the dance was not good enough to satisfy the god.
Monotheistic religions are relatively new in this regard. Judaism, historically, appears in a time when greek intellectuals were making great strides - Pythagoras, Diophantus, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Euclid... you get the idea. The greeks had come up with ideas such as the atom (which is so-named because it "cannot be cut" - "a-" meaning "not" and "tom" referring to cut, as in appendectomy), natural cause and effect, and the stars as something outside of the world. They understood that the sun was some object about which the earth rotated (it was only certain parts of the christian church that believed that the earth was the centre of the world, in the time of Galileo, etc). They understood what the planets were (so-named because they wander through the sky) - Aristotle correctly determined that Mars was further from the Earth than the Moon was. There was no need for a god to explain why the sun moved across the sky. They understood the seasons. They understood evaporation and condensation, and thus rain.
And so, they had no need for a god for each unexplained phenomenon - most of them had at least partial explanations. But it didn't resolve the biggest question of them all - "why are we here? How did we come to exist?" That's where the monotheistic religions come into it.
If one looks closely at the laws found within the monotheistic religions, one can identify certain patterns. When they call something "unclean", it almost always was something that was easily associated with disease. The flesh of a pig is unclean, and touching even the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, too. What this actually means is that pig carcasses had a strong tendency to cause illness, compared with other meats. This issue is, of course, no longer applicable - pig meat is able to be kept as sanitary as any other meat, and there are ways to ensure that bacteria do not make it into the human body due to eating pig. There are many more examples much like that one.
Many people will say "atheism is the default position - a children has to be brought up with a religion, otherwise they'll be an atheist". It's slightly inaccurate, but the basic idea is right. Atheism is the starting position. Children, as they grow up, start asking "Why?" to everything. If left to their own devices, they will invent all sorts of tales of their own to explain it. If you tell them an explanation, they will often believe it... and then ask "Why?" to your explanation. Religion fills some of those questions with answers... but that doesn't make them correct.
Where science comes into it is that it introduces a relatively modern term, "Occam's Razor", also known as lex parsimoniae. An accurate interpretation of it is that it is the principle that the explanation that requires the fewest additional assumptions while explaining all observations is generally the best explanation, until evidence can be found that contradicts it. For instance, one could argue that an apple falls from a tree because some god pulled it down. Alternatively, there's gravity. The assumption of a god making the apple fall requires an assumption of an act for each individual instance of something falling. Gravity is a single, unifying assumption.
Of course, some would go "but God is a single assumption that explains everything"... but the thing is, it doesn't explain god itself. What is god? Why does god do what god does? Where did god come from? More recently, there's questions like "why did god create such an expansive universe, only to populate one tiny planet with humans?" This is where science is gaining ground relative to religion - note that it doesn't invalidate religion, it just challenges its "necessity" for explaining things.
It's also worth noting that neither science nor atheism is a modern thing. It's well-documented in history, too.
Also note that atheism doesn't actually address any questions itself. It doesn't try to explain where the universe came from. For that, you need to look at specific theories. Personally, I'm someone who doesn't understand the need for a "start". Why must the universe have an age at all? Why can't it always have existed? And for anybody out there who is religious and mocks my idea, I'll pose this one for you: why can god have always existed, but not the universe?
For the scientific minds, I've a different point to make, though. Many will go "but the big bang!" or "but entropy!" The law of entropy that states that entropy cannot decrease in a closed system. An infinite universe is, by definition, an open system. Furthermore, it doesn't say it has to increase - there can be local increases and decreases resulting in a net constant entropy, without violating the law. As for the big bang, there are two observations that lead to the idea - motion of the visible universe, and background radiation. The thing is, if light has a half-life (as all other particles do), then it would decay in a manner that would produce the background radiation. Meanwhile, the "expansion of the universe" causes a lot of problems, because the apparent age of the universe by expansion doesn't agree with the apparent age of the universe by background radiation, hence the theory of the accelerating universe.
The decay of light particles, however, also explains the apparent motion. The motion is measured through "redshift". But decay of light particles would be expected to result in exactly the same sort of redshift, proportional to the distance travelled. As a result, objects further from the earth would appear to be moving away faster, when they're just decaying more due to a longer time spent in transit. The other argument against the infinite universe, by the way, is gravity, and that's an example of people not understanding gravity - gravitational potential would be infinite, but gravitational force would not - the gravity due to distant objects would effectively cancel, resulting in the observed local gravitational effects.
Anyway, I realise I've kind of wandered off point now. Probably a good time to end this post.
