Resolved: All but the nihilist shares an operative form of faith.

Faith is a decision to act as if something were true. Faith accepts its subject's existence as an axiom. Faith holds essential truths to be self-evident. Faith is fiat of the will. The axiom accepted by Christians is that God exists, loves us and has accepted us as part of His exquisite designs. If this is true, faith in humanities' importance logically matters. How we treat each other matters. The difficult part is accepting as axiomatic that a loving God exists. Many atheists call this acceptance delusional. However, faith is not the exclusive province of the religious. I contend that all but the nihilist shares faith. Faith in the value of individual human life and dignity flows from philosophy or is accepted as self-evident. Humanities' common faith may be encrusted with rituals passed down from the time of Mohammad or of Constantine or our faith may be newly born from scientific observations about our place in our universe. Even those who believe morals entirely evolved over four billion years have faith that a serial killer who discards these evolved morals is not admirable. I have spent considerable time posting on the Internet forum of Dr. Richard Dawkins, the world's most admired and reviled atheist. I came away convinced that atheists have a form of faith every bit as operative as the faith of a theist. Atheists make their own broad leaps of faith. Their faith, like the faith of a Christian, is that humanity matters. How we treat our fellows matters and not just those next door or a suffering child brought into our living room by mass media. Increasingly, our faith is that selective empathy for our own "tribe" must become a thing of a past. We shun those who wield the mortar and pestle of genocide: depersonalization and demonization of the "other." Relationships define our universe at every level. Whether faith flows from the fiat of a believer, a chain of largely inaccessible philosophical reasoning or due to simple internal observations over a lifetime of experience, human life, with all its messy intricate connections, matters. None of this keeps us from taking inordinate satisfaction in attacking the method by which others of our species arrive at this core belief. Atheists insist upon evidence. Theists doubt the atheist can truly believe that individual life and liberty have inalienable value unless endowed from a creator. The methodology of our common faith is a matter on which, many believe reasonable minds cannot differ. Most save their deepest disdain for the lukewarm agnostic. Atheists doubt whether there really is such a thing as an agnostic. You probably know what the Bible has to say about the tepid believer. I celebrate humanities' common faith, however derived. We should not constantly focus on the borders of the map of human belief where there be contentious dragons while failing to recognize the vast tracks of humanities' largely uncelebrated intersections of shared faith. Implicit in my argument is that the atheist (wherever he may be on Dawkin's seven point scale) cannot establish the worth of humanity only through reason. I will not give my argument on this point for fear of setting up a straw man. I would first like to hear the negative position.