I by my turn would instead say "wide lack of understanding by the general public".
The Church could not accept that God just MAY have made the world differently than they had expected and now some scientists claim that just because the old scriptures don't accord with new scientific findings that there is no God.
First of all, let me point out that you are making here a statement that I flat out doubt to be accurate. Atheism is rarely if ever quite so futile and capricious. Or coming by the other end, it does not need such an odd justification either. Atheists rarely much care about what you call "the old scriptures", and they certainly have no need to justify disbelief with them.
That said, claiming that there is no God can hardly be compared to claiming that there is a God, far as human arrogance goes.
Particularly when you consider that one of those leads towards personal responsibility, while the other may well lead to self-entitlement.
Belief in God can be a powerful enabler of the worst in human nature, unfortunately. It doesn't always happen, but it is not at all rare, and it can be very nasty. It must be challenged, by healthy believers above all, but also by non-believers, of course.
Perhaps the humbler view is that the human intellect should get out of the way of the intuitions of God that we have.
So it has the power to get in the way? How does that work?
Maybe as we learn more about the world and grow up as a species we learn God and God's work better? God isn't unchanging, but human culture is?!
It is possible, I suppose. Personally, I think God is simply not a very safe or constructive concept, and religious misconceptions enabled by it have caused a lot more trouble than the concept itself eased.
But that is of course a generalization. It will vary a lot among individuals, moments in time, and of course along cultures and moments in History.