"A Theism"

Ron Rosenbaum argues that "it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists" — An Agnostic Manifesto. "Indeed agnostics see atheism as 'a theism'—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety." More:

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of "multiverses" and "vacuums filled with quantum potentialities," none of which strikes me as persuasive.

Tolle, lege. We learn that "the term agnostic was coined in 1869 by one of Darwin's most fervent followers, Thomas Henry Huxley, famously known as 'Darwin's bulldog' for his defense of evolutionary theory." The Galileo Affair by informs us that is the same "Darwin's bulldog" who "had no brief for Catholicism, [and] once examined the case and concluded that 'the Church had the best of it.'"