Why is it difficult for atheists to accept that they have faith in science: that they trust that the scientific method and the scientific community are the best approach to knowledge that we have?

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The reason for this is non-intuitive. Basically the disconnect boils down to the fact that faith has both religious and cultural meanings. People with only a cultural understanding of the word over-focus on the religious content of the word because they don’t really understand it.

You can have faith in many kinds of things. Faith in a company, faith in a person, faith in humanity. It simply means that you trust that the the choices these things make are ultimately going to produce good outcomes.

The religious understanding is that faith in things that aren’t God is really faith in God because nothing is perfect but God and through God all things are possible. Therefore you can have faith in an imperfect person that may actually be malicious at times because you trust that God is going to work through that person and a good outcome will be reached regardless.

It’s this aspect that atheists reject, the idea that God will make things right regardless. From an atheist perspective, the belief they have in science isn’t faith because there’s no God aspect involved, they trust in the ultimate rationality of the process of science to produce good outcomes. Instead of glorifying God for the wonders that technology brings, they glorify rationality.

But to theists, it’s merely the fact that one is expecting benevolent results out of a process that they can’t control that invokes the concept of faith. To a theist, you can’t simply take God out of the equation through lofty concepts like rationality. Any time you operate in the absence of power to control the outcomes as if the outcomes will turn out beneficial regardless, you’re operating out of faith, and since all good things come from God, you’re ultimately having faith in the deity.

And this is dangerous to theists because to expect God to produce good results without giving Him His due is just asking for trouble.

So who is right here? Obviously the atheists! What use does God have for the glory you give him? He has no use for it, the only reason God wants us to glorify Him is because it glorifies us as well!

If you glorify rationality instead of God, well, God has more than given us his answer on how He feels about that. He’s not striking atheists down merely for refusing to glorify God. He made Richard Dawkins rich! Every single atheist who has brought to the world a new approach for non-religious understanding, God has given glory and fame. Rationality is something He wants us to have! And He’s not afraid of us failing to find faith in God because of it. All part of the plan.

And in fact we can lay the blame for atheist refusal to accept God right at the feet of Christian fundamentalism. God gave us technology and Christian fundamentalists decided that technology was anti-God so they abused their children with ever-more draconian means of enforcing dogmatic control over them.

You don’t get a free pass into heaven just for saying great things about God. You get them for treating people well and not as extensions and fulfillments of your base desires. There is heaven, right here on Earth, right under your nose, that you can find if you repair the relationships you have with your children and stop being so hard-nosed about God. He clearly doesn’t need people to believe in Him in order to make His plan work.