Get rid of all religions and superstitions. For thousands of years, humanity has asked the same question: Why are we here? Religion answered early, confidently, and critically without evidence. That confidence became its greatest strength. When answers arrive before questions are fully formed, they harden into tradition, authority, and eventually taboo. From an atheist perspective, religion is not mysterious; it is familiar. It follows well-documented psychological, sociological, and evolutionary patterns. Gods look like people. Moral codes mirror ancient survival needs. Sacred texts reflect the scientific ignorance of their era. This is not an insult it is an observation. If religions were divine revelations, why do they look exactly like human inventions? Religions make the most extreme claims imaginable: An invisible, omniscient being created the universe. This being intervenes in daily life. It listens to prayers. It cares deeply about sexual behaviour and dietary rules. It rewards belief and punishes doubt. Yet not a single one of these claims has been independently verified. Contrast this with science. Science makes modest claims, backed by evidence, revised when wrong. Religion does the opposite: maximal claims, minimal evidence, zero revision. Why is belief without evidence praised in religion but rejected everywhere else? Would you board a plane built on faith? Accept a diagnosis based on prayer? Trust a bridge designed by revelation. If faith is a virtue, why is it never used outside religion? Prayer is often defended as personal, harmless, and comforting. But when evaluated, prayer performs no better than chance. Large-scale studies, including the STEP Project found no measurable benefit of intercessory prayer and in some cases, those who knew they were being prayed for had worse outcomes, due to anxiety or pressure If prayer worked: Hospitals would replace ICUs with chapels. Insurance companies would track prayer frequency. Casinos would ban worshippers. Instead, prayer functions psychologically: it creates the feeling of control in an indifferent universe. Comforting? Yes. True? No. Religions claim ownership of morality, yet moral behaviour predates organized religion by tens of thousands of years. Empathy, cooperation, and fairness are evolutionary traits observed in social animals, primates, elephants, dolphins. Sacred texts routinely endorse slavery, genocide, misogyny, child marriage, collective punishment. Believers now reject these practices not because of scripture but despite it. If morality comes from God, why has moral progress required ignoring holy texts? Gods evolve because humans do. Early gods-controlled weather and fertility because humans could not. As science advanced, gods retreated. Lightning → electricity. Disease → germs Earth’s creation → cosmology. This pattern is called the God of the Gaps. Every gap filled by evidence is a god quietly evicted. Why do gods always explain what humans do not yet understand and never what they do? The defining feature of religion is not belief in gods; it is belief protected from questioning. Doubt is framed as sin. Scepticism as arrogance. Evidence as temptation. Any idea that cannot be questioned is not sacred it is fragile. Why would a true god fear honest inquiry? Atheism: Not a Belief, a Conclusion Atheism is not the claim “there is no god.” It is the conclusion that no god has met its burden of proof. This is the same standard used everywhere else in life. The universe does not owe us meaning. Reality does not bend to comfort. Truth does not care what we wish were true. And yet, despite no divine supervision, humans create meaning, ethics, art, love, and progress. If life has value only because a god grants it, what does that say about human worth? If your religion were false, how would you know? Why does faith require belief before evidence? Why do all religions resemble the cultures that invented them? If a god exists, why is it indistinguishable from a natural universe? Is truth defined by comfort or by reality? Religion was humanity’s first attempt to understand the universe. It was a starting point, not a destination. Clinging to ancient explanations in an age of evidence is not humility, it is fear of uncertainty. Atheism does not offer eternal rewards or cosmic surveillance. It offers something more demanding: responsibility. No gods watching. No divine safety net. Just humans accountable to each other. And that is why the idea is so threatening.

Physics:

• WTF is Dark Matter?
• Where antimatter?

Chemistry/materials:

• Better batteries
• Better solar cells

Biology/medicine:

• What causes aging, and how do we stop it?
• Cure cancer
• More HHV vaccines
• Extinct malaria

Selfishly, as a biologist, I would like to see:

• Reconciliation of rates of evolution that scales from microevolution to macroevolution
• Accurate/reasonable estimation of lineage death rates for macroevolutionary diversification analysis
• (extension of previous) Reasonably estimate fossilization probability for (more) accurate clade age estimates
• Moving beyond phylogenetic trees (phylogenetic networks are a step in the right direction I think)

As a citizen of Earth, I would like to see:

• Actual plastic recycling that dramatically reduces the need for virgin petro-chemicals
• A 3D printer beyond plastics (I think this kind of a thing, but I would like it to scale for consumers and industry)
• A less massive battery that can be used for commercial flight
• Better earthquake detection

As a person who enjoys knee-deep sci-fi, I would like to see:

• FTL travel
• Futurama style heads-in-a-jar
• A Dyson sphere or swarm
• A hyperloop

As a (frustrated) scientist I would like to see:

• Society move beyond “societal utility” of scientific studies/discovery and embrace “science for the sake of science”

I wanna see more on generalized random Fibonacci sequences. Like calculate the Viswanath constant and Embree-Trefethen constant to more digits, examine more of the interesting fractal behaviors you see with some parameters, etc. Not for any real reason, it’s just super neat and not at all intuitive lol.

I want to see tiny batteries that can store a ton of power, or tiny engines that can pull energy from their surroundings. Would lead to soooooo many innovations.

I wanna see the light barrier broken. IE FTL travel. I assume it is being worked on, somewhere in multiple forms probably, but I want to see it actually happen in my life time.

What I would like to see solved:

• The hard problem of consciousness
• Why is there something instead of nothing?

But it’s unlikely within my lifetime.