I obviously didn’t explain myself well for you to comment that atheists, “believe that God doesn’t exist” when many have the position that they “don’t believe that God exists”. These are different positions in so far as one represents a lack of belief in a God, and the other a belief in the non-existence of God. No doubt some atheists believe that God doesn’t exist but it’s by no means a consensus (and certainly not religiously doctrinaire).

Some atheists might also believe in a cosmic explosion or theories of evolution. Not many scientists I know believe in these things, they offer them up as theories to be constantly tested. I once argued with a quantum physicist about some flaws in the theory of the big bang. I know just enough about that particular theory to know I don’t know near enough to accept it as the explanation for the origin of the universe. On the other hand, I do know enough about the theory of evolution to accept that it’s a good fitting model for the way life adapts on earth. Especially as it becomes more refined as a result of new discoveries in the fossil record or new knowledge about historical events that impact on gene frequencies in populations. But this argument about science being a faith is not one I particularly want to discuss in this thread.

The way I understand the world is not the way a secular humanist might understand the world, and is certainly not the way an objectivist understands the world. Apart from some obvious “beliefs” such as that the world is round, that the earth revolves around the sun, that all creatures on earth die and so on, the only position that Marxists, Secular Humanists and Objectivist definitely hold in common is that we don’t believe in a god. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that the existence of a God would change my system of beliefs beyond the fact that I could no longer say “I don’t believe in a god”.

Someone said to me recently that it would be odd to categorize a group based on what they’re not. Lots of animals on earth aren’t mammals, but that doesn’t mean they share anything in common with other non-mammals beyond being animals. The point is there is no unifying belief system that atheists hold. All there is a non-belief in a god