Whenever I see fundies arguing with atheists I want to smack their heads together.
A book written by weird old guys in the desert thousands of years ago does not have the answers. On the other hand, 'there was nothing and then everything came flying out of it' isn't much of an improvement. What happened to actual philosophy? You know, discussing things in a sensible manner, reasoning out things like good and happiness and shit? Science only defines things, it doesn't really explain them, and religion is impossible to prove.
Religious people don't make sense. Atheists don't make sense in a slightly more technical sort of way. Every arguement between them makes me want to scream.
I feel like you're missing something here, so please excuse me while I try to clumsily explain my thoughts.
First off, atheism is the belief that there are no deities. That's it. You cannot build a set of ethics from a non-belief because the gap between the non-existence of a god and everyday life is too large.
1 You need an entirely separate assumption to build your ethics, at which point you no longer have pure atheism. You have some other -ism hanging out with atheism.
2 Atheism makes perfect sense when talking about the existence of deities. It doesn't make sense when talking about murder or evil, because the non-existence of god doesn't factor into those things.
Secondly philosophy is still around. The only problem with using it to reason out things like goodness/happiness is that a lot of assumptions get used in the reasoning, and those assumptions are based on cultural understandings. So a philosopher from India, Germany, Mexico and Niger would all come up with different views about goodness/happiness, though that might not be true anymore with modern communications/global culture.
3 But that's besides the point. The point is that you need to make a bunch of unscientific assumptions before you can reason about goodness/happiness, and the problem with unscientific assumptions is that they're unscientific. You can't say that one set of assumptions is better than the other, because they're both unproven.
4I understand your frustration though. Theism comes with a lot of baggage that atheism is not equipped to deal with, and the perfect set of ethics is something that people have been chasing for ages now. Probably since the beginning of the human race.
1. Obviously theists can easily make up a set of ethics, because if there is a god, and he does cares about what your everyday actions, then you better do things that make him happy else he'll smite you/eternal damnation etc.
2. Possibly sharing a few beers or whatever -isms do in their free time.
3. Though having a global culture wouldn't help in developing a single set of ethics. Just look at the differences of opinion in western philosophy, or even just German philosophy.
4. If you're thinking to yourself 'Why can we make/find a bunch of scientific/proven assumptions to reason about goodness/happiness?' good luck. We've been trying to do that since the Enlightenment, and look how much progress we've made. Same with eliminating assumptions entirely, or starting off with assumptions that every human being in the world would accept.Science only defines things, it doesn't really explain them.
Science does explain things, but it explains those things using repeatable and consistent observations/measurements. Human morality is very hard to observe and get the consistent measurements needed to apply the scientific method on them. Which is not to say that science isn't tackling those problems, but we're a long ways away from drawing conclusions about goodness/happiness.