A while ago I wrote about why I’m not an atheist today I’d like to balance up the ledger with a short post about why I’d like to be an atheist.
1. It's the default position. As much as some Xns say Atheism is as much a leap of faith as belief in God I beg to differ. I think atheism is the default position and it's me who has had the leap of faith to believe in God rather than an atheist.
2. I wouldn't have to hang out / be associated with Xns. Xns do some stupid and embarrassing things in the name of their faith. There wouldn’t be a Xn anywhere who couldn’t find another Xn who has said, done or believes something contrary to their own beliefs.
3. It's clean. There are bits of Xy that are grey and unknowable. I could ignore or at least pay little anything that isn’t provable.
I’m still a Xn but sometimes I think life would be easier if I wasn’t. Narrow path and all that.
1. It's the default position. As much as some Xns say Atheism is as much a leap of faith as belief in God I beg to differ. I think atheism is the default position and it's me who has had the leap of faith to believe in God rather than an atheist.
2. I wouldn't have to hang out / be associated with Xns. Xns do some stupid and embarrassing things in the name of their faith. There wouldn’t be a Xn anywhere who couldn’t find another Xn who has said, done or believes something contrary to their own beliefs.
3. It's clean. There are bits of Xy that are grey and unknowable. I could ignore or at least pay little anything that isn’t provable.
I’m still a Xn but sometimes I think life would be easier if I wasn’t. Narrow path and all that.
6 comments:
1. Actually, our minds' prejudice for causation naturally leads us to belief in some higher power/being/God/gods/ground of being. You don't need to be a physiologist to work this out; just look at the universality of belief in 'God' throughout history. Atheism is borne of a Modernist culture and occasionally neurosis: Oedipal atheists
2. Herd mentality - you are an individual, don't care about being associated with others. To be a Christian is to be a Christian with no regard to what the rest of the world says or does.
3. How does atheism know there is no God? Rather, the best atheism can be is agnosticism, which admits the unknowable and is therefore very respectable.
You need some better reasons, X-t.
A1
Actually, our minds' prejudice for causation naturally leads us to belief in some higher power/being/God/gods/ground of being. You don't need to be a physiologist to work this out; just look at the universality of belief in 'God' throughout history.
Not that there is any reason to think that physiologists have much to say on the matter, the notion a prejudice for causation "naturally" leads to belief in deities is self-refuting. Either one would be "prejudiced" in favour of the belief that the deities are themselves caused (and their causes caused, and so on), or one would arbitrarily halt the chain of causation at the desired deity. In the latter case there would not be a prejudice for causation, but rather for the existence of the deity itself, and you couldn't posit a prejudice for causation in order to get you there (without, as I mentioned above, specially-pleading a halt to the causal chain).
In short: it has not been demonstrated that a prejudice for causation naturally leads to theism.
As for the ubiquity of theism, even Dawkins acknowledges this as a phenomenon that requires explanation. It could be, as the psychologist James Alcock suggests, that magical thinking had a survival value--though this does not mean that the beliefs generated by magical thinking are true.
Atheism is borne of a Modernist culture
Really? So there were no atheists before the modern era? (Bear in mind that openly professing one's lack of belief in a deity was not always a viable proposition in the loving Christian theocracies of the West over the past 2000 years.)
and occasionally neurosis: Oedipal atheists
Is the claim that atheists hate their fathers being made of all atheists, or a subset? If the latter, then the most appropriate response one can give is "meh." There are bound to be some atheists who are atheists for silly reasons.
How does atheism know there is no God?
I know of no atheist who claims such knowledge, though they probably do exist. They belong in the category known as "strong atheists" or "hard atheists." "Weal atheists" a.k.a. "agnostic atheists" a.k.a "default atheists" do not claim to know whether or not deities exist. They simply see no reason to believe in the existence of deities, given the lack of evidence.
As I read him, when Chris argues that atheism is the default position he's not likely to be referring to strong atheism. The big clue is where he says that if he was an atheist he could "ignore or pay little attention to anything that isn't provable."
Hey Anon,
I'll ditto AV's thoughts on your first point.
On the third point I'm an atheist when it comes to the belief that there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, rather than agnostic. I could be convinced other wise but for all intense and purposes I live as if the fairies do not exist, which would be different to being agnostic about that.
My guess is that this is how most atheists think about God which is a different from being just agnostic. Does that make sense.
Thanks
I hate to harp on it--well, I don't hate it that much--but it is worth pointing out that whereas atheism is a single answer to a single question ("Do you believe in God?"), agnosticism is an epistemological position (i.e. a matter of what one can know).
One can be both an agnostic and an atheist, which is simply to say that one can lack belief in a deity without claiming knowledge of the deity's non-existence. I would venture to say that most atheists would fall into this category. Chris is right in saying that these atheists live as if there is no God, because they would see no reason to do otherwise.
Yes, atheism is not based on objective knowledge. I like how you have defined it as an existential position, a relation to God. I would hazard to say that many people who have so-called proofs of God's existence live as though God doesn't exist.
Question: if we defined God as love (and the Bible does in at least one place), would you at sometime in your life be a theist, which would mean being a loving person? I think so.
I think Christendom needs to get away from that idolatrous notion of God as an actually-existing supernatural (scary-natural), spectacular being. I believe talk of God as being was always meant to be metaphorical. Many theologians have recognised this for a long time, but such beliefs are not found within popular, Platonistic Christianity.
A1
Hey thanks for your comments A1,
I've started writing a post about how I tend to live as a practical atheist in many ways. It'd be interesting to get or find a list of possible definitions of God. I can remember Richard Dawkins once describing a God that was almost like the energy that held the universe together, a view some of his scientific colleges held (and in a way that suggested he didn't really have a problem with it describing the believers as much smarter than himself). At the time I can remember thinking that my conception of God was certainly closer to that than the conception he was critiquing.
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