As a follow-up to the previous post and responses on "Hitchens, wrong, wrong, wrong," Stanley Fish's blog on "Atheism and Evidence" may be of interest.  In discussing Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Fish writes:

"This is a remarkable sequence. A very strong assertion is made we will undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness [and] our modes of conduct but no evidence is offered in support of it; and indeed the absence of evidence becomes a reason for confidence in its eventual emergence. This sounds an awfully lot like faith of the kind Harris and his colleagues deride expectations based only on a first premise (itself asserted rather than proven), which, if true, demands them, and which, if false, makes nonsense of them."

For the entire post, click here.  (This may require a NYTimes subscription)