Sure, I get the idea: you are actively committing the cardinal crime against Philosophy—bad naming.
Scientists do not have “faith” in Science. They possess the actual intelligence to understand that faith is mere imagination, whereas mathematical modeling validated by empirical experience (i.e., science) constitutes real knowledge.
Please, beg our pardon for real now and apologize for this epistemological crime.
No. You shouldn’t gloss over this distinction. It is simply incorrect to say it is just semantics when talking about the existence of God and the lack of belief in God. It’s a violation of a good philosophical discourse. Surely you can tell the difference. But refuses to.
As others here have already said, the distinction matters absolutely: because what’s at stake in the narrative is the (fair) value of God’s existence and the consequent belief in God if God exists.
I would like God to exist if it’s a benevolent God. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want God to exist. Note that I haven’t mentioned if I believe in the existence of God.
I understand the confusion. I’ve heard people describe faith as illogical. This isn’t the case, as etymology demonstrates (faith = pistis = trustworthy/evidence).
That the rational enterprise must rely on faith in itself is a famous epistemological conundrum. I don’t know why you’re so riled up about that. Perhaps thou hast a solution. I don’t know. 
Yes, I have the solution, but Jamal forbade me from calling you a Jesuit! Is “fucking sophist” allowed?
This solution is perfectly adequate because you artificially create the “conundrum” the exact moment you apply the word “faith” to Science. It is a mere semantic fraud.
Why not go even further, write down “2 = 1 - 1”, and marvel at your new logical “conundrum”? Maybe you think you’ll invent a new kind of complex numbers?
Or, you could simply start doing actual Philosophy by apologizing right now.
An essay I will often quote in this context is Thomas Nagel’s Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. It contains a passage that is often quoted in these contexts, which I will reproduce below. But first a few words about Nagel. He was tenured at New York University from which he retired in 2016. Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. But Nagel has no religious agenda to prosecute, and publicly states that he’s an atheist who lacks any ‘sense of the divine’. His arguments against reductionism are therefore based on reason rather than appeals to revealed truth.
The above-named essay was from one of his books, The Last Word, the abstract of which is ‘If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view–principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct.’
In the essay, he says:
…the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non- teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.
Me, I think I often detect it without having to squint too hard.
Sure. But your handy quote does not demonstrate that evolutionary explanations are wrong or that we ought not use them. All it does is offer a psychological hypothesis about why some people like using them. It commits a genetic fallacy, since attributing a motive is not presenting a counter-argument; it tries illegitimately to shift the burden of responsibility from the theist to the atheist.
It’s a cheap bit of rhetoric, not an argument. It’s a dodge, not a critique. Show us where the reasoning of your opponents fails, not the supposed personal weaknesses of their psychology.
I apologize … on your behalf 
Just kidding.
I’m a bit inconvenienced right now and so pardon me not citing anybody with credentials. Google and Youtube are your go-tos as for now.
It’s a simple argument and there’s something wrong with it. Logic \implies Logic. That’s like I’m MCogito \implies I’m MCogito. I believe you so the problem isn’t me.
As for science, we all know, but often forget, that no matter how many, no matter how grand, the observations are, the credibility of the hypothesis doesn’t budge an iota in a favorable direction.
I’m not sure which ‘opponents’ you mean, it was not directed at an opponent. It’s a general observation about a cultural dynamic that is being illustrated by some of the comments often made in regard to this subject.
All you did was flip one poor argument for it’s inversion; from “Theists only believe in God because they need a cosmic daddy” for “Atheists only believe evolution explains everything because they’re afraid of God”
Both are, philosophically, rubbish.
I agree with @Banno that this isn’t a philosophical attempt to refute scientism or reductionism. But I think we can charitably assume that Nagel knows this. He makes the case elsewhere for why reductionism doesn’t work when it comes to a philosophy of mind. Perhaps it would be worth quoting a few sentences further in that passage from The Last Word:
“One should try to resist the intellectual effects of such a fear (if not the fear itself), for it is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.”
In other words, Nagel thinks it is irrational – not a reason, but an excuse – to allow one’s fear of cosmic authority to influence one’s position. It would in no way justify the position itself, and if such a fear is indeed responsible for much scientism and reductionism, that’s to be regretted.
By the way, I didn’t know this, Bayesian reasoning (the bedrock of modern science and its many hypotheses) is subjective. Carnap wanted to make science objective and came up with his c-function to compute the degree to which a hypothesis was confirmed by evidence and discovered, to his dismay (?), that he couldn’t make the needle move any further from 0 in a way that would vindicate science. So the choices were/are: Be subjective and believe scientific hypotheses/theories are true (Bayes) or be objective and imagine science happy, as happy as it could be with a near-zero credibility (Carnap). This is a personal interpretation though; I could be wrong.
Right. It is one passage from a much longer essay, to which I provided the link.
Ever looked into QBism (Quantum Baynesianism)? It too has a strongly subjective tilt. I have some sources if you’re interested.
The essay is a personal account marking a bias he finds in his own thinking, and not a bad piece of writing. As a contribution to this discussion of the definition of Atheism, it’s mostly irrelevant. So presumably @Wayfarer’s use of it is a rhetorical deflection, away from looking at definitions to twiddling with motivation.
What one cannot do is take atheism on faith, in the way theists may with the “God did it”. “God did it” stops the conversation, while building physical explanations invokes discussion. A research program is preferable to a dogmatism.
Perhaps this is an aside, but as you’ve indicated, the answer ‘God did it’ has no explanatory power. No one can explain why or how God did anything. It’s ineffable. There’s a consistent fall back on the same formulations: morality needs a transcendent foundation, therefore God; everything has a cause, therefore God; there is meaning and value, therefore God; Consciousness is a hard problem, therefore God. Who knows, they may be correct, but I never quite see the connection that makes these conclusions compelling. Don’t they all rely on arguments from ignorance? We cannot explain X without God, therefore God.
I know you have a thread on it. I have a few posts in there. I was a bit skeptical in the beginning but the idea kinda grew on me. Thanks.
There are links in that thread and I checked them out. If you mean to link me to some long articles/papers, do please. I’ll read them when time permits. Thanks
Tosh. Have you read it? It’s an essay on the folly of trying to reduce reason to a product of evolutionary biology.
Have a look at my essay The Timeless Wave which has a section on QBism and some good references.
Calling Bayesian inference “subjective” has a specific meaning. It’s based on the notion that the prior is a reflection of an opinion. The process supposes that regardless of the prior, there will be a move towards the same value over numerous iterations.
So, in the crude terms of objective and subjective, Bayesian calculations move from a subjective prior to an objective agreement.
This is a problem because of the obvious reason that reason is fundamentally teleological and evolution is categorically nonteleological. Apples and oranges.
Took the words right out of my mouth!