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> In his latest new thread on "The Arts" dhw begins with: "[i]Atheism presupposes that there is nothing beyond the physical world, which is why it puts its faith in science (i.e. the study of the physical world) to explain everything.[/i]" - I&apos;d just like to respond to the implicit presumptions in this statement. I&apos;m an atheist, but that view is a consequence of a considerable chain of thought. I do not start out by taking nonexistence of gods as an axiom. As far as possible I try not "presuppose" anything. I&apos;m an atheist because the evidence for the existence of gods, as I have evaluated it, appears woefully inadequate. - Second dhw defines "science" as "the study of the physical world". Some people do define science in this way, but again this prejudges many issues. I prefer to regard science as the study of everything, i.e. "the world", whether "physical" or not, by whatever means are available and arguable and communicable.  - Finally, to summarise dhw, he is saying "Atheism ... puts its faith in science." No it bloody well doesn&apos;t! This frankly bigoted attitude to atheists is surely something dhw should have got over by now. There are a lot of Theists who put their faith (i.,e. trust) in science, people like Ken Miller or Francis Collins or Polkinghorne for example. They evaluate the evidence differently.  - I would of course argue that their reasoning is flawed, in most cases as a result of the way they have been brought up to believe in religion from a young age. But I wouldn&apos;t say something like: "Theism presupposes that there is something beyond the physical world, which is why it puts its faith in the supernatural to explain everything." !