Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color

Penn Jillette

I don’t know if this is an original quote from Penn, or just a pithy comment for atheists. Either way, I liked it when I heard Penn say it on his latest Sunday School podcast. Atheism is not a different kind of faith, but is the absence of faith. Faith is believing that the universe works because that’s the way a deity or deities decided. Atheism says the universe works because of specified principles that we can prove through experimentation. Faith says that the future can be divined through cryptic prophecies that are often retrofitted after the events occur. Science actually predicts the existence of phenomena from the sub-atomic to the galactic in size and scope.

Like many atheists, I do not deny that there may be a God(s). I don’t know if there is a deity or not. All I know is that I don’t have any good, reliable, repeatable evidence for the existence of a deity. And that is one of the reasons that I am an atheist.