atheism

Ok so there is *nobody* who doesn't care about science and everyone has beliefs that impact how they think about science and the natural world. But when I talk about humanistic atheism I'm talking about a few trends that determine how these atheists talk about and defend their beliefs.

The big core one is that they are not using scientific results to chip away at god's domain. That's the core thing they are not doing that Dawkins and co very explicitly say they do ["[with evolution,] god was superflous" -dawkins]. Part of this is because you *can't* do that with pre-darwinian science, those arguing for the existence of God used scientific results ALL THE TIME because of how wacky and weird the world is. This then-dominant strand of humanistic atheism also didn't argue for itself using science as a starting point. As I said earlier, moral and political critiques of the effects of religion were very important as were more abstract materialist philosophical positions that while obviously influenced by the still young scientific revolution were not scientific critiques of religion

To really get this across it's worth looking at how even an OG ardent darwinist, Thomas Huxley, the guy who coined the term "agnostic" said "Supposing physical science to be non-existent, would not the agnostic principle, applied by the philologist and the historian, lead to exactly the same results?"

there were atheists in the 19th century who did do something akin to atheism via scientism, namely a couple german ones, but they never really took off. You did start to see it kinda enter the mainstream in the late 19th century but it hadn't taken over and even then was more of an adoption of the "religion of science" language of people like John William Draper(who thought science could prove the existence of the soul) applied to atheism rather than what the New Atheists get up to.