Evolutionary science, supported by a large body of palentological and genomic evidence and accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists, describes how complex life has developed through a slow process of random mutation and natural selection, and that the human race is merely one species among others, one of many random products of this stochastic process. It is now known that humans share 98% of our genetic code with chimpanzees, 90% with mice, 21% with roundworms, and 7% with the bacterium E. coli.
This humbling perspective is quite different from that of most theistic religions, which give humans a unique and central status; in the Abrahamic religions, for instance, humans are thought to be created "in God's image" and to be a qualitatively different thing from the "beasts of the Earth". Similarly, the facts that Earth's Sun is only one undistinguished star among billions in the Milky Way, which itself is merely one undistinguished galaxy among billions of others, and that modern humans have existed at all for only 0.0015% of the age of the universe, are seen by some atheists as rendering implausible the proposition that this universe was created (by some deity) with mankind in mind.
More fundamentally, western science is based on the assumption that the universe is governed by unchanging natural laws that can be determined by experiments and used as a reliable basis for prediction and engineering, which assumes the absence of divine interference. The success of modern science and engineering would thus arguably imply that deities are either absent or at least take a rather hands-off approach to the world. Many atheists feel that the simplest explanation is that there are no deities.
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