[Irinya]

I am a staunch atheist, and argue my case regularly.

Even so... I understand, respect, and even sympathize with religious people.

Let me try to explain it this way. At heart, I'm a scientist. Science is based on facts, on empirical evidence, on logic and reason. And those principles I hold closer to my heart than anything. But what is a fact? At some level, all of our facts have to be givens. If we try to break down our facts far enough, we run into the same problem we do when we try to prove the consistency of logic: there's simply no way to do it. (Lewis Carrol's What The Tortoise Said To Achilles is a nice demonstration of this.) I really don't understand those scientific atheists who despise religion because it takes so much on faith.

Science takes, if anything, even more on faith.