"But the cosmos exists! Consider who created it!"
The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.
The difference to me is in being satisfied with an answer that you accept on faith vs one you can prove, though things like many-worlds possibly confound this exploration.
Science provides tentative answers that iteratively home in on the truth: Newton's theory of gravity wasn't wrong, it was incomplete, so it was replaced by Einstein's, which covers all the corner cases we've since learned about.
In science a failure is considered progress. If we can disprove a theory, it increases our understanding of the universe by telling us what isn't true.
Also, a scientific theory must be falsifiable: it must be able to make predictions (which is why string theory despite its name is often not considered an actual theory).
Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements. Since the dawn of man religion has been how we explain things we don't have an answer to: lightning, the tides, the origin of life, what happens after we die and so on.
As our understanding outside of religion has improved some of these answers have become ridiculous enough to make it socially awkward to retain them as dogma (though there are still Christians who will loudly tell you natural disasters are divine punishments).
>Religion on the other hand offers absolute truth statements.
See my other comment here for another perspective on faith and religion[0]
In particular, the what happens after you die issue is applicable as it is one where we may never have conclusive evidence for the answer this side of life.
>The difference is that to be an atheist you must be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer.
As a Christian, my answer is I'm confident in my beliefs, but not 100% certain. I could be wrong as could you.
No, you don't.
To be a strict empiricist, you have to be willing to accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there's other approaches to knowledge which also require that, but, while empiricism (and some of the others) may overlap with atheism, there is no requirement of willingness to accept uncertainty attached to atheism (agnosticism, which by the conventional definition of "atheism" usually used now, is a subset of atheism, certainly requires a willingness to accept "I don't know" on at least one point.)