A list of 40 harmful effects of Christianity:
1. The discouragement of rational, critical thought.
2. Vilification of homosexuality, resulting in discrimination, parents disowning their children, murder, and suicide.
3. Women treated like second-class citizens based on religious teachings.
4. Children growing up to hate and fear science and scientists, because
science disproves their parents' religion - leading to appalling
scientific illiteracy.
5. Tens of thousands tortured and killed as witches (a practice which still continues today).
6. People aren't making the most of this life because of their belief in an afterlife.
7. People dying because they believe their faith makes them immune to snake venom, or other lethal aspects of reality.
8. People dying - and letting their children die - because their religion forbids accepting medical help.
9. People choked, starved, poisoned, or beaten to death during exorcisms.
10. Genital mutilation of babies endorsed by religious texts.
11. Psychological and physiological conditions blamed on demons,
preventing believers from seeking medical care for themselves and their
children.
12. People disowning family members for leaving their religion.
13. Friendships and romances severed or never started over religious differences.
14. "Abstinence-only" sex education, resulting in five times the amount
sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies - often leading
to ill-fated "emergency" marriages.
15. Women having septic
abortions—or being forced to have unwanted children they resent—because
religious organizations have gotten laws passed making abortion illegal
or inaccessible.
16. Censorship (often destructive) of speech, art, books, music, films, poetry, songs and, if possible, thought.
17. The demonization of other religions, e.g. Christianity demonizing Pagans ("They're devil-worshipers!")
18. Children spending the period of their lives when the brain is most
receptive to learning new information reading, rereading, and even
memorizing religious texts.
19. People who believe the world is
about to end neglect their education, are not financially responsible,
and in extreme cases take part in mass suicides.
20. Long-term
environmental issues ignored because of beliefs that the
rapture/apocalypse or something will happen soon, so they don't matter.
21. Wives told they will be tortured forever if they leave their abusive husbands (and vice versa).
22. Holy wars - followers of different faiths (or even the same faith)
killing each other in the name of their (benevolent, loving and
merciful) gods.
23. The destruction of great works of art considered to be pornographic/blasphemous, and the persecution of the artists.
24. Slavery condoned by religious texts.
25. Children traumatized by vivid stories of eternal burning and
torture to ensure that they'll be too frightened to even question
religion.
26. Terminal patients in constant agony who would end their lives if they didn't believe it would result in eternal torture.
27. School boards having to spend time and money and resources on the fight to have evolution taught in the schools.
28. Persecution of "heretics"/scientists, like Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake) and Galileo Galilei.
29. Blue laws forcing other businesses to stay closed or limit sales, while churches can generate more revenue.
30. Mayors, senators, and presidents voted into office not because
they're right for the job, but because of their religious beliefs.
31. Abuse of power, authority and trust by religious leaders (for
financial gain or sexual abuse of followers and even children).
32. People accepting visual and auditory hallucinations unquestioningly as divine, sometimes with fatal results.
33. Discrimination against atheists, such as laws stating they may not
hold public office or testify in court, or in half a dozen countries
around the world, laws requiring their execution
34. Missionaries destroying/converting smaller, "heathen" religions and cultures.
35. Hardship compounded by the guilt required to reconcile the idea of a
fair god with reality ("why is God punishing me? What have I done
wrong? Don't I have enough faith?").
36. Human achievements—from
skillful surgery to to emergency landings—attributed to gods instead of
to the people actually responsible.
37. Mother Teresa, prolonging
the agony of terminal patients and denying them pain relief, so she can
offer their suffering as a gift to her god.
38. Tens of billions annually in the US alone spent to build, maintain, and staff houses of worship.
39. Grief and horror caused by the belief that dead friends and family members are tortured as punishment for disbelief.
40. Natural disasters and other tragedies used to claim God is
displeased and present demands to avoid similar events (it's like
terrorism, but without having to plan or do anything).
Thanks to "copycatgod" on Reddit for this list.
What do you think of this? What are some other ways
Christianity has harmed people and societies?
Showing posts with label Existence of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existence of God. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Stop Thanking God, and Thank Yourself!
Hello All
I am here to say that if you accomplish something great, or recover from some disease, or any number of difficult events in your life. Please stop thanking god. You did it all yourself. And you should be proud of yourself. Not God.
May I put it another way. Let's say that you are in a car with your best friend, and some drunk driver slams into you head on. You both go to the hospital, and you turn out okay, but your best friend was injured and is now paralysed from the neck down. Would you thank God? If you do then you are a egomaniac to think that you are better than your friend who will live a dismal life for the rest of his/her days.
Are you better than your friend? What have you done in your life that a God would save you over your friend. Let me say that if you "Thank God" that you were not harmed then you are committing the sin of Vanity. Never thank god for anything. Thank Yourself.
The Bible tells a different story. It almost seems as if the teachings of the bible want you to be a robot, or a mindless lump of flesh. For instance, I will give you one of the seven "Deadly" sins as examples.
Pride (Latin, superbia), or hubris (Greek), is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and the source of the others. It is identified as a desire to be more important or attractive than others, failing to acknowledge the good work of others, and excessive love of self (especially holding self out of proper position toward God). Dante's definition was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor." In Jacob Bidermann's medieval miracle play, Cenodoxus, pride is the deadliest of all the sins and leads directly to the damnation of the titulary famed Parisian doctor. In perhaps the best-known example, the story of Lucifer, pride (his desire to compete with God) was what caused his fall from Heaven, and his resultant transformation into Satan. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the penitents were forced to walk with stone slabs bearing down on their backs to induce feelings of humility.
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The Tower of Babel was viewed as a construct of pride for Dante
Heart Warming! Isn't it?
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Godless Church Services for Atheists Go Global
Congregations
for atheists are springing up all over the planet. There’s already a
schism: celebrate life without a deity, or preach atheism. The
celebration is winning.
Plans
to set up almost 400 “atheist churches” on five continents are underway
after the extraordinary success of one small congregation that began
holding godless services just over a year ago.Word about the religion-free church spread like wildfire after the first Sunday Assembly was held in a deconsecrated church in Highbury, North London, in January 2013. By September, 100 congregations will be holding services from Singapore and South Africa to Sao Paulo and San Diego. A further 274 teams currently are working on plans to launch their own assemblies.
The church’s first General Assembly is being held this weekend with leaders from all over the world gathered in South London. In 150 years of the Anglican Church’s Lambeth Conference, it’s safe to say none has begun quite like this--with a raucous group karaoke rendition of “I’m So Excited,” but then Sunday Assembly is a very different kind of world religion. Their gatherings resemble traditional church services with singing, lessons and the chance to interact with members of the community. The only thing missing is God.
Sanderson Jones, the group’s leader and CEO, and a stand-up comedian by trade, says the young organization is replicating the traditional church structure as it expands. But he says the empire is also attempting to harness the organizational knowhow and social interaction of Grindr and the National Rifle Association.
“This is the first time we’re coming together like this,” he said. “We’ve had such a short time but I think we’re going to build something magnificent, something that’s going to last.”“We’re right on the buckle of the Bible Belt. … A lot of people tell me I’m going to Hell.”
The group’s rapid expansion has caught everyone by surprise. It is currently growing by 26 per cent each month but there is no end to Jones’ ambitions. “There are 1.1 billion non-religious people in the world,” he told The Daily Beast. “We want to have a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.” In other words, as he told the gathering of leaders on the opening day of the conference: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Jones is constantly exploring ways to create an equally efficient network with even bigger growth potential, but this weekend before he got down to all that, it was time to get down. The lyrics of the second track of Saturday’s musical opening, Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” were projected on a big screen.
Clap along if you feel,
Like that’s what you wanna do.
They did. Two women from The Netherlands swayed from side-to-side; an enthusiastic chap from Newcastle, in the northeast of England, danced in front of his seat in the auditorium; and a broad-shouldered man with graying dreadlocks from Tennessee clapped in time with the music.
That man was Landry Butler, 46, a designer from Nashville, who became co-organizer of his local Sunday Assembly back in November. He was raised in a deeply Christian family, who often took him to three different church services every weekend. “I gave it up for Lent,” he said with a deep laugh. “We’re right on the buckle of the Bible Belt. More than 90 percent of people in Nashville are Christian and not everyone approves of what we’re doing. A lot of people tell me I’m going to Hell.”
“My mother didn’t want to talk about it until I appeared in the newspaper, and then she got interested,” said Butler. “She still says she’s praying for me, but that’s okay. We’re not trying to sell atheism - it’s not for me to get involved, no matter what stupid crap people believe.”
While Butler is setting up an atheist bulkhead in a deeply religious area, Jan Willem van der Straten is operating in a totally different environment. The 24-year-old is working to open the first Sunday Assembly in Amsterdam in September. He was brought up in a secular family, and his parents were stunned when he started taking an interest in religion. He still describes himself as a Christian.
“People used to say: ‘Ah, Willem, you can have a good beer with him, but he’s got this funny religion thing.’ For the first time this is a church that my friends might want to come to,” he said. “I don’t have the baggage of religion; I have the baggage of atheism.”
As the assemblies multiply and spread, the disparity between communities has thrown up a series of issues. One of the hot debates to be decided this weekend is whether to continue to use the word “godless.” For those in countries where religion has receded in recent generations it feels more natural to say Sunday Assembly is a "celebration of life." The American chapters argue that everyone would assume it was a religious group if you didn’t explicitly explain otherwise.
The continued prominence of Christian belief in the U.S. also affects the way atheism is seen. The church suffered its first schism earlier this year when New York organizers fell out with the founders over the strength of the anti-religious teaching. “They wanted to do a celebration of atheism not a celebration of life,” said van der Straten, who has been working at the London headquarters for the past three months.
The genius of Sunday Assembly is that it shares far more with an ordinary church service than it differs. There have been scores of atheist groups in the past, but few have attracted such warmth and affection.
“The thing that we’ve got is that we’re the only non-religious service that works. Rationality is part of it, but we also have the emotional connection,” Jones said. “We are speaking to the whole human.”
Sunday Assembly is already talking to an awful lot of humans. Jones wonders if they might manage to start 2015 congregations by 2015. “It might just be a little bit historical if it goes on like this. We could have a profound impact,” he said. “Throughout history there’s been these moments when an idea takes off: the Great Awakenings. We could suddenly create a great moment.”
American Atheist
Embrace of Atheism Put an Indonesian in Prison.
JAKARTA,
Indonesia — Growing up in a conservative Muslim household in rural West
Sumatra, Alexander Aan hid a dark secret beginning at age 9: He did not
believe in God. His feelings only hardened as he got older and he faked
his way through daily prayers, Islamic holidays and the fasting month
of Ramadan.
He
stopped praying in 2008, when he was 26, and he finally told his
parents and three younger siblings that he was an atheist — a rare
revelation in a country like Indonesia, the world’s most populous
Muslim-majority nation. They responded with disappointment and
expressions of hope that he would return to Islam.
But
Mr. Aan neither returned to Islam nor confined his secret to his
family, and he ended up in prison after running afoul of a 2008 law
restricting electronic communications. He had joined an atheist Facebook
group started by Indonesians living in the Netherlands, and in 2011 he
began posting commentaries outlining why he did not think God existed.
“When
I saw, with my own eyes, poor people, people on television caught up in
war, people who were hungry or ill, it made me uncomfortable,” Mr. Aan,
now 32, said in an interview. “What is the meaning of this? As a
Muslim, I had questioned God — what is the meaning of God?” He was
released on parole on Jan. 27 after serving more than 19 months on a
charge of inciting religious hatred.
Indonesia’s state ideology, Pancasila,
enshrines monotheism, and blasphemy is illegal. However, the
Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and speech, and the country
is 16 years into a transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
But
Mr. Aan’s case is one of an increasing number of instances of
persecution connected to freedom of religion in Indonesia in recent
years. Although Indonesia has influential Christian, Hindu and Buddhist
minorities, every year there have been hundreds of episodes, including
violent attacks, targeting religious minorities like Christians and
Shiite and Ahmadiyah Muslims, as well as dozens of arrests over
blasphemy against Islam. Numerous churches have been closed for lacking
proper permits.
According
to human rights organizations and various surveys, religious
intolerance is on the rise in Indonesia, at least partly because of the
growing influence of radical Islamic groups that use street protests and
acts of violence to support their aims. Some of these radical groups
demonstrated in Jakarta, the capital, before Mr. Aan’s trial in West
Sumatra in 2012.
“His
case very much ties in with that whole trend,” said Benedict Rogers,
the East Asia team leader for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human
rights organization founded in Britain. The group released a report
in February warning that religious intolerance in Indonesia was
spreading beyond traditionally conservative Muslim bases like West Java
Province.
“Of
course there would be religious people who would take offense about
someone publicly expressing this view” about atheism, Mr. Rogers said.
“But I think if it weren’t for this growing Islamism and extremism,
Alexander’s case probably wouldn’t have happened.”
Mr.
Aan’s troubles began in January 2012 when a mob in the Dharmasraya
district of West Sumatra showed up looking for him at a government
planning office where he worked as a data analyst.
“They wanted me to stop saying there is no God,” he said. “I told them that it was my right to express my beliefs.”
Police
officers were called to prevent any violence, and they instead escorted
Mr. Aan to the local police station, where he found himself being
interrogated and, within hours, charged with disseminating information
aimed at inciting religious hatred. The next day, he was charged with
blasphemy and inciting others to embrace atheism.
A
court in Padang, the capital of West Sumatra Province, threw out the
blasphemy and atheism charges, but it convicted Mr. Aan in June 2012 of
trying to incite religious hatred under the electronic information law
and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison.
“What I posted was for discussion, not to incite hatred,” he said in the interview.
Mr.
Aan’s case was among several controversial prosecutions over comments
made on the Internet in Indonesia, where Twitter and Facebook are
extremely popular.
A
homemaker was jailed and charged with defamation in 2009 after
complaining about what she said was an incorrect hospital diagnosis in a
private email that found its way online. In February, a Twitter user
was sentenced to a year’s probation for “libelous tweets” against a
former national lawmaker who had been convicted and sent to prison for
corruption.
“It’s
funny — we say we have freedom of expression, but it’s only up to a
certain point,” said Enda Nasution, an Indonesian blogger. “I think we
are absorbing all of these new norms, and with the Internet, we are
experimenting with what we can and can’t do. Atheism is a no-no, it
seems.”
Christian
groups and religious and human rights advocates say that rising
religious intolerance is also linked to the efforts to promote regional
autonomy in Indonesia in 1999 as part of the country’s transition to
democracy after three decades of highly centralized, authoritarian rule
under President Suharto.
More
than half of Indonesia’s 491 provincial districts have enacted various
bylaws inspired by Islamic law, or Shariah, in recent years.
“So
much power was given to local authorities, and in many cases — in
particular in regions where Muslim organizations dominated — there were
violations against religious freedom, and freedom, for example, for
someone to say they are an atheist,” said Theophilus Bela, secretary
general of the Indonesian Conference on Religions for Peace, a
nongovernmental organization focused on interfaith dialogue.
While
serving his prison sentence, Mr. Aan lay low, reading books and playing
chess, and he said that by the end of his time behind bars, he had gone
from being an outcast to having friends among his fellow inmates. Now,
he is preparing to apply to universities to pursue a master’s degree in
physics.
“My
case was a religious issue and a human rights issue, both because
Indonesia is a Muslim country and because it’s a developing country and
new democracy,” he said. “I was just searching for the truth, and
everything I felt, I expressed.”
These days, Mr. Aan said, he is still active on Facebook and Twitter, but he never mentions religion or his criminal case.
Young Atheist's Handbooks sent to secondary schools
Copies of Alom Shaha's 'Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God' donated by the British Humanist Association.
'Schools should be places where pupils are free to encounter the full
range of philosophies' … children at the Thomas Tallis secondary school.
Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian.
After Michael Gove gave copies of the King James Bible to every
school in England, the British Humanist Association is this week sending
out copies of The Young Atheist's Handbook to secondary schools in England and Wales.
Subtitled Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God, the book is by science teacher Alom Shaha and tells of his upbringing in a Bangladeshi Muslim community in south-east London, "how he overcame his inner conflict surrounding his atheism, and the lessons he learnt in leading a good life, full of awe and wonder, based on humanist principles", said the Association.
The BHA raised more than £11,000 to send the book to schools through public donations from "thousands of people" at Justgiving, and hopes the initiative will give young people "access to resources that enable them to come to their own decisions about their values and beliefs".
A spokesperson for the BHA said it had received "loads of lovely responses", but that a couple of Catholic schools had said they would dispose of the book if the Association didn't provide a stamped addressed envelope to return it.
"Which we think is a shame, as we only sent the books to state schools and we think all such schools should want their young people to be exposed to a variety of views and to make their own minds up in a spirit of free inquiry," said Sara Passmore, the BHA's head of education.
The Association points out that the book was "well received" by RE Today – the magazine said that "this book will make you think and it's hard to give a greater compliment than that" – and says it "has been welcomed by RE teachers".
The scheme was suggested to the BHA by the science teacher Ian Horsewell, who got in touch with the Association after it helped launch the title. Horsewell has said that he was "amazed by the evocative prose in [Shaha's] book and the challenges he faced moving from nominal believer to outspoken freethinker".
"It made me realise how fortunate many of us are to be able to take for granted our own freedom to believe, or not, in the faith of our parents. It seemed to me that the very students who needed to read Alom's book would find it hard to buy for themselves, so instead I wondered if we could place a copy in every secondary school library," said Horsewell.
BHA chief executive Andrew Copson added that "in a large number of schools, pupils will have access to a number of religious perspectives on life's bigger questions, but not to what most non-religious people believe and how they find happiness and satisfaction in their daily lives".
"We believe schools should be places where pupils are free to encounter the full range of philosophies and world views available to them in modern Britain," said Copson.
But Trevor Cooling, professor of Christian education at Canterbury Christ Church University, told the Times Educational Supplement that "the humanists seem to be behaving a bit like a persecuted minority. Children should be exposed to many and varied ideas, but this book seems to be an overreaction."
"The evidence suggests that most children's understanding of science is already largely atheistic. The BHA itself says that most children have non-religious beliefs, so why do they feel it is so important to send out this book?" said Cooling. "The status of a handbook written by a science teacher from London cannot be compared with that of a sacred Christian text and it cannot in any way be said to be offering balance."
The Young Atheist's Handbook is published by Biteback Publishing. The BHA said the initiative was not a response to Gove's Bible mailout, which cost £370,000 in private money, rather that Horsewell had felt The Young Atheist's Handbook is "a book that all young people should have access to".
Subtitled Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God, the book is by science teacher Alom Shaha and tells of his upbringing in a Bangladeshi Muslim community in south-east London, "how he overcame his inner conflict surrounding his atheism, and the lessons he learnt in leading a good life, full of awe and wonder, based on humanist principles", said the Association.
The BHA raised more than £11,000 to send the book to schools through public donations from "thousands of people" at Justgiving, and hopes the initiative will give young people "access to resources that enable them to come to their own decisions about their values and beliefs".
A spokesperson for the BHA said it had received "loads of lovely responses", but that a couple of Catholic schools had said they would dispose of the book if the Association didn't provide a stamped addressed envelope to return it.
"Which we think is a shame, as we only sent the books to state schools and we think all such schools should want their young people to be exposed to a variety of views and to make their own minds up in a spirit of free inquiry," said Sara Passmore, the BHA's head of education.
The Association points out that the book was "well received" by RE Today – the magazine said that "this book will make you think and it's hard to give a greater compliment than that" – and says it "has been welcomed by RE teachers".
The scheme was suggested to the BHA by the science teacher Ian Horsewell, who got in touch with the Association after it helped launch the title. Horsewell has said that he was "amazed by the evocative prose in [Shaha's] book and the challenges he faced moving from nominal believer to outspoken freethinker".
"It made me realise how fortunate many of us are to be able to take for granted our own freedom to believe, or not, in the faith of our parents. It seemed to me that the very students who needed to read Alom's book would find it hard to buy for themselves, so instead I wondered if we could place a copy in every secondary school library," said Horsewell.
BHA chief executive Andrew Copson added that "in a large number of schools, pupils will have access to a number of religious perspectives on life's bigger questions, but not to what most non-religious people believe and how they find happiness and satisfaction in their daily lives".
"We believe schools should be places where pupils are free to encounter the full range of philosophies and world views available to them in modern Britain," said Copson.
But Trevor Cooling, professor of Christian education at Canterbury Christ Church University, told the Times Educational Supplement that "the humanists seem to be behaving a bit like a persecuted minority. Children should be exposed to many and varied ideas, but this book seems to be an overreaction."
"The evidence suggests that most children's understanding of science is already largely atheistic. The BHA itself says that most children have non-religious beliefs, so why do they feel it is so important to send out this book?" said Cooling. "The status of a handbook written by a science teacher from London cannot be compared with that of a sacred Christian text and it cannot in any way be said to be offering balance."
The Young Atheist's Handbook is published by Biteback Publishing. The BHA said the initiative was not a response to Gove's Bible mailout, which cost £370,000 in private money, rather that Horsewell had felt The Young Atheist's Handbook is "a book that all young people should have access to".
Ten errors in the bible.
-
The genealogy of Christ. Matthew 1 and Luke 3 give two very different genealogies for Joseph, Mary's husband. In fact, even Luke admits that he isn't sure that Joseph was actually Jesus' father (Luke 3:23, NIV). You would think that someone who was directly inspired by god would know what he's writing.
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Scientific errors. I find it suspect that those who take the Bible literally as a scientific text for the larger, cosmological arguments can simply ignore the number of small scientific mistakes the Bible makes. For example, rabbits don't chew their cud and the bat is not a bird. Those are only two. For more scientific and mathematical mistakes in the Bible, click here.
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The story of Jesus' death and resurrection. Were Jesus' last words “Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit,” “"It is finished,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” followed by a loud cry? Did the rooster crow once or twice? How did Judas die—by suicide or fall?
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God or Gods? In Hebrew, Genesis 1 mentions “Elohim” created the heavens and the earth. Elohim is plural (the rationalization of this is really extraordinary), and Genesis states that God said “Let us make men in our image.” Also, in Jewish literature, Asherah is the female counterpart to Yahweh, though the Bible condemns worshiping her. Nevertheless, she appears in the same Jewish literature the Old Testament is drawn from, but is completely ignored in Christianity.
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Faith or works or belief? Ephesians 2:8-9 says that salvation is not of works, “lest any man should boast.” James 2:24 says man is justified by works and “not by faith alone.” Most justify it by saying it is both, but Paul is very clear that salvation is not of works, and even gives a reason why. Then, to add confusion to the mix, verses such as Acts 16:31 claim that belief alone is sufficient salvation. Not only that, but your entire household will be saved just by one person believing. Other verses show various conglomerations of the three.
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Where is Jesus? In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is quoted as saying that he would return before the end of that generation. There are some interesting theories as to why he has not yet returned, the most common being that there is a gap or a figurative generation, however, it is obvious that the writer's of the text thought he meant that physical generation. I find it hard to believe that a theologian 2,000 years later can better figure out what Jesus meant than the people who were actually there. Some people think it is a mistranslation, and that Jesus actually meant “race,” not “generation.” This probably makes the most sense, but still is dubious and does not explain much.
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Freewill or not? There is almost no greater theological debate bigger than the idea of Calvinism vs. Arminianism, or freewill vs. predestination. Do we humans have any choice whether to believe in God or not? Though most Christians acknowledge the differing viewpoints, somehow the fact that the issue is confusing because the Bible is so contradictory on the subject escapes many.
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Does God ever change? Ezekiel 24:14: "I the LORD have spoken it: it shall come to pass, and I will do it; I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent; according to thy ways, and according to thy doings, shall they judge thee, saith the Lord GOD." (KJV) But God changed his mind about destroying or punishing people several times in the Bible, most notably in Genesis 18:23-33. The Bible also directly contradicts Ezekial 24:14 in Genesis 6:6: “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”
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Are God's laws good? Many verses seem to suggest that God is, indeed good. There are too many to list. But the Bible also says "Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD." Ezekial 20:25-26.
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Should we judge? 1 Corinthians 2:15 says "The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment,” but 1 Corinthians 4:5 says "Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God."
For many Christians, these errors
are minor, simply explained away, or ignored on faith, and they don't
take away from the overall message of the Bible. One site even claims
that the Bible can have no errors, but it does have "difficulties." Not
everything in the above list can fit into the categories the writer
lists to explain away the contradictions, though. Also, an entire book
written to explain religion should at least explain it. It's true that
many contradictions aren't “serious,” but whether or not we have any
choice in whether or not we believe and how to obtain salvation (faith
or works or belief?) are two very important, even critical issues. If
the Bible is clear on anything, it should be how to obtain salvation.
I've heard it explained that the stories and writings sometimes
contradict in small matters merely because the writers have different
perspectives, but for those that rely on the Bible as a science and
historical book, or believe that every word was directly inspired by
God, these errors present more of a problem. Remember, too, that these
errors and contradictions are just the tip of the iceberg. There are
many more that are inferred, such as using pi to find a numerical error,
etc. Add to that debates over other aspects of Biblical correctness
such as who actually wrote what book of the Bible, translation errors,
application problems, etc, and it becomes a dubious prospect to believe
that every word in it is true, and completely ludicrous to believe it is
error-free.
Monday, October 31, 2011
The Definition of Atheism.
It has come to my attention that some atheists on the internet are trying to redefine the words “atheism” and “atheist” to mean anyone who simply lacks a belief in gods. This definition would include babies, agnostics, and people who have not come to a conclusion about the existence of gods.
Some proponents of this definition can be found in the alt.atheism newsgroup and at the following web sites:
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/ath/blathq_atheism101.htm
http://www.alabamaatheist.org/awareness/questions/atheist.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
A “lack of belief” definition is a bad definition for many reasons. It is not commonly used. It is not defined that way in any reputable dictionary. It is too broad because most agnostics and babies don’t consider themselves atheists. And it makes no sense for an “-ism” to be a based on a lack of belief.
These atheists are usually motivated to redefine the word “atheist” because they want to enlarge the definition of “atheist” to include as many people as possible, or because they perceive it to be an advantage in debates with theists. Unfortunately, some of these people have used lies and distortions to support their opinions, and some have made extremely ignorant and grossly incorrect statements that may reflect badly on all atheists. I will correct some of these incorrect statements later in this essay.
But first I will try to illustrate the problem by using three groups of people:
Group A believes that gods do not exist (atheists).
Group B neither believes that at least one god exists nor do they believe that gods do not exist. This would include agnostics, babies, and the undecided.
Group C believes that at least one god exists (theists).
It is generally agreed that the people in group A are atheists and the people in group C are not. The main point of disagreement is whether the people in group B are considered atheists or not. The people who want a “lack of belief” definition would define group B as atheists while most people, and all reputable dictionaries, do not. Many of the people who are pushing a “lack of belief” definition call group A “strong atheists” and call group B “weak atheists.
One of the main problems of a “lack of belief” definition is that it is too broad. If someone told you they were an atheist, you would still not know if they were agnostic, undecided, believed that gods don’t exist, or never thought about it. This makes the word nearly useless
Another problem with a “lack of belief” definition is that it is not accepted by the vast majority of people. I personally don’t know anyone who considers babies atheists because they lack belief in gods. I also don’t know of any people who are agnostic or undecided about the existence of God who call themselves atheists.
The lack of public acceptance for a “lack of belief” definition of “atheism” is reflected in the fact that no reputable dictionary has a “lack of belief” definition for either “atheism” or “atheist”. However, this has not kept a few morons from incorrectly claiming that various dictionary definitions have a “lack of belief” definition. On page three I have posted and examined many reputable dictionary definitions. On page four I have posted excerpts from reputable Encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica.
Some of people who want to redefine the words "atheism" and "atheist" to mean "a lack of belief in the existence of gods" have used some incredibly stupid arguments to support their position. I will list some of these arguments and examine them in detail.
Stupid Argument #1: The etymology of the word "atheism" means "a lack of belief".
A commonly repeated error is that the word "atheism" was derived from the prefix "a-", meaning "without", and the word "theism", meaning a belief in God. Therefore they claim that "atheism" means "without a belief in God". This is incorrect because the etymology of the word "atheism" derives from the Greek word "atheos" meaning "godless". The "-ism" suffix, which can be roughly mean "belief", was added later. The etymology of the word means "godless belief" not "without a belief in gods".
A couple of etymologies from respected dictionaries are shown below:
From Merriam-Webster Online:
Etymology of "atheism": Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.:
Etymology of "atheism": French athéisme, from athée, atheist, from Greek atheos, godless : a-, without; see a–1 + theos, god
Stupid Argument #2: Most Dictionaries Define "Atheism" as a "Lack of Belief".
I see this lie quite often on the internet. The truth of the matter is that no reputable dictionary has a "lack of belief" definition. See page 3 for more on this subject.
Stupid Argument #3: Most Dictionary Definitions of "Atheism" are Wrong Because They are Written by Biased Christians.
This absurd claim is totally unsupported by any facts, much like the gigantic government conspiracy to cover-up UFO landings.
Stupid Argument #4: Only Atheists get to Define What the Word "Atheist" Means.
This argument is absurd for two reasons. First of all, words are defined by common usage, not by the people who fit that definition. For example the word "handicapped" is defined by common usage not just by handicapped people.
Secondly, a "lack of belief" definition for the word "atheist" would include so many agnostics, babies, infants, and the undecided that the self-identified atheists would be a very small minority. Babies and infants would make up a majority of the "lack of belief" atheists and I haven't heard of any of them who could express a coherent definition.
Stupid Argument #5: Most Atheists Want a "Lack of Belief" Definition.
This argument is usually presented as fact without any actual surveys to back it up. The first problem with this is the "babies and infants" problem described above. The second problem is that most scientific surveys of religious beliefs show that only a minority of the non-religious people self-identify as atheists. For example the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) shows that 13.2% of the US population self-identified as "no religion" while 0.4% self-identified as atheists and 0.5% self-identified as agnostics. The 2000 Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year also shows similar numbers.
Stupid Argument #6: The Phrase "Tom does not believe in the existence of God" does not mean "Tom believes that God does not exist."
This idiotic argument is sometimes presented by brain dead morons who don't understand basic English grammar. I really don't expect most people to know that "raising" is the technical name for the location of the negative in the first sentence, or that raising simply shifts the negative from the subordinate clause where it logically belongs to the main clause, especially when the main clause’s verb is suppose, think, believe, seem, or the like. (Here are two links from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English that explain it: Link 1, Link 2)
However, I find it impossible to believe that anyone with half a brain would use this argument. The English language is literally filled with many common examples of raising. I'll post a few for clarity:
A) "I don't believe the mail has arrived" means "I believe the mail has not arrived". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about the mail arriving.
B) "I do not believe we missed the last bus" means "I believe we did not miss the last bus". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about missing the last bus.
C) "I don't think the kicker can make a 55 yard field goal" means "I think that the kicker can not make a 55 yard field goal". It does not mean that I did not think about the kicker making a field goal.
D) "I don't believe in the existence of deities" means "I believe that deities do not exist". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about the existence of deities.
Stupid Argument #7: A "Lack of Belief" Definition is Useful in Debates.
Some people think that a "lack of belief" definition of atheist shifts the burden of proof to the theist and requires them to prove the existence of their god. The truth of the matter is that the theist's claim of a supernatural god with magical powers is an extraordinary claim and requires substantial evidence if it is to be logically believed. The burden of proof is on the theist regardless of the definition of the word "atheist".
As an analogy, if someone claimed that flying pigs existed, then they would have the burden of proof to prove this regardless of whether I told them I "lacked belief" in the existence of flying pigs or if I told them that I believed that flying pigs did not exist.
Stupid Argument #8: All Atheists Lack a Belief in Gods so Anyone who Lacks a Belief in Gods is an Atheist.
This argument is so damn stupid that it is rarely expressed explicitly. Usually it is only vaguely implied by statements such as "the only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in gods"
The logical mistake here should be self-evident to any adult with half a brain, so I won't explain it. But if you are in a child in elementary school, try to figure it out with this analogy: All dogs have fur so anything with fur is a dog.
From Merriam-Webster OnLine
From the Cambridge Dictionary of American English
From the Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Ed. 1989
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000.
From the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
From the MSN Encarta Dictionary
Note: If you click on these entries you should note that the bold type at the the beginning of each definition (i.e. "unbelief in God or deities" and "unbeliever in God or deities") is a "Quick Definition" that is unique to the Microsoft Encarta Dictionaries. Only the full definitions are quoted above.
The following is a quote from the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary:
From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.
atheism: denial of the existence of God or gods and of any supernatural existence, to be distinguished from agnosticism, which holds that the existence cannot be proved. The term atheism has been used as an accusation against all who attack established orthodoxy, as in the trial of Socrates. There were few avowed atheists from classical times until the 19th cent., when popular belief in a conflict between religion and science brought forth preachers of the gospel of atheism, such as Robert G. Ingersoll. There are today many individuals and groups professing atheism. The 20th cent. has seen many individuals and groups professing atheism, including Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murry O’Hair.
agnosticism: form of skepticism that holds that the existence of God cannot be logically proved or disproved. Among prominent agnostics have been Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley (who coined the word agnostic in 1869). Immanuel Kant was an agnostic who argued that belief in divinity can rest only on faith. Agnosticism is not to be confused with atheism, which asserts that there is no God.
From the article "Atheism and Agnosticism" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.
Smart, J. J. C., "Atheism and Agnosticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
From Encyclopedia Britannica. 2004.Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 18 Jan. 2004
Atheism:
in general, the critique and denial of metaphysical beliefs in God or spiritual beings. As such, it is usually distinguished from theism, which affirms the reality of the divine and often seeks to demonstrate its existence. Atheism is also distinguished from agnosticism, which leaves open the question whether there is a god or not, professing to find the questions unanswered or unanswerable.
The dialectic of the argument between forms of belief and unbelief raises questions concerning the most perspicuous delineation, or characterization, of atheism, agnosticism, and theism. It is necessary not only to probe the warrant for atheism but also carefully to consider what is the most adequate definition of atheism. This article will start with what have been some widely accepted, but still in various ways mistaken or misleading, definitions of atheism and move to more adequate formulations that better capture the full range of atheist thought and more clearly separate unbelief from belief and atheism from agnosticism. In the course of this delineation the section also will consider key arguments for and against atheism.
A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these faiths believe that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing and who has absolute sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of course, human beings—who are not only utterly dependent on this creative power but also sinful and who, or so the faithful must believe, can only make adequate sense of their lives by accepting, without question, God's ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs.
Atheism, however, casts a wider net and rejects all belief in “spiritual beings,” and to the extent that belief in spiritual beings is definitive of what it means for a system to be religious, atheism rejects religion. So atheism is not only a rejection of the central conceptions of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, it is, as well, a rejection of the religious beliefs of such African religions as that of the Dinka and the Nuer, of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome, and of the transcendental conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.
It is necessary, however, if a tolerably adequate understanding of atheism is to be achieved, to give a reading to “rejection of religious belief” and to come to realize how the characterization of atheism as the denial of God or the gods is inadequate.
To say that atheism is the denial of God or the gods and that it is the opposite of theism, a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and seeks to demonstrate his existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. First, not all theologians who regard themselves as defenders of the Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam regard themselves as defenders of theism. The influential 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above finite beings. God, for him, is “being-itself,” the ground of being and meaning. The particulars of Tillich's view are in certain ways idiosyncratic, as well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been influential; and his rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, is not eccentric in contemporary theology, though it may very well affront the plain believer.
Second, and more important, it is not the case that all theists seek to demonstrate or even in any way rationally to establish the existence of God. Many theists regard such a demonstration as impossible, and fideistic believers (e.g., Johann Hamann and Søren Kierkegaard) regard such a demonstration, even if it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view it would undermine faith. If it could be proved, or known for certain, that God exists, people would not be in a position to accept him as their sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all the risks that entails. There are theologians who have argued that for genuine faith to be possible God must necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious ultimate reality, whose existence and authority must be accepted simply on faith. This fideistic view has not, of course, gone without challenge from inside the major faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above characterization of atheism inadequate.
Finally, and most important, not all denials of God are denials of his existence. Believers sometimes deny God while not being at all in a state of doubt that God exists. They either willfully reject what they take to be his authority by not acting in accordance with what they take to be his will, or else they simply live their lives as if God did not exist. In this important way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists (unless we wish, misleadingly, to call them “practical atheists”). They are not even agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him in other ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said, atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that God's existence is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
Yet it remains the case that such a characterization of atheism is inadequate in other ways. For one it is too narrow. There are atheists who believe that the very concept of God, at least in developed and less anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is so incoherent that certain central religious claims, such as “God is my creator to whom everything is owed,” are not genuine truth-claims; i.e., the claims could not be either true or false. Believers hold that such religious propositions are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and there are agnostics who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they are true or false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical empiricists.
While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too broad. For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight. They believe in God not because it is probable that he exists—they think it more probable that he does not—but because belief is thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise Pascal or a Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T.H. Huxley or a Leslie Stephen) from an atheist such as Baron d'Holbach or Thomas Paine. All believe that “There is a God” and “God protects humankind,” however emotionally important they may be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of probability. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization of atheism.
It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. There are no ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of God's existence. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God. If the atheist could somehow survive the death of his present body (assuming that such talk makes sense) and come, much to his surprise, to stand in the presence of God, his answer should be, “Oh! Lord, you didn't give me enough evidence!” He would have been mistaken, and realize that he had been mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God (assuming that he could have them), what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. “Knowing with certainty” is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take.
An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is one) is by definition a very recherché reality—a reality that must be (for there to be such a reality) transcendent to the world—the burden of proof is not on the atheist to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of that order. Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence for God's existence; i.e., that there is such a reality. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality. He needs to show that there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the theist that there are in addition to varieties of empirical facts “spiritual facts” or “transcendent facts,” such as it being the case that there is a supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist can assert that such “facts” have not been shown.
It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may bring. There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist.
Reflection on this should lead to a more adequate statement of what atheism is and indeed as well to what an agnostic or religious response to atheism should be. Instead of saying that an atheist is someone who believes that it is false or probably false that there is a God, a more adequate characterization of atheism consists in the more complex claim that to be an atheist is to be someone who rejects belief in God for the following reasons (which reason is stressed depends on how God is being conceived): for an anthropomorphic God, the atheist rejects belief in God because it is false or probably false that there is a God; for a nonanthropomorphic God (the God of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides), he rejects belief in God because the concept of such a God is either meaningless, unintelligible, contradictory, incomprehensible, or incoherent; for the God portrayed by some modern or contemporary theologians or philosophers, he rejects belief in God because the concept of God in question is such that it merely masks an atheistic substance—e.g., “God” is just another name for love, or “God” is simply a symbolic term for moral ideals.
This atheism is a much more complex notion, as are its various reflective rejections. It is clear from what has been said about the concept of God in developed forms of Judeo-Christianity that the more crucial form of atheist rejection is not the assertion that it is false that there is a God but instead the rejection of belief in God because the concept of God is said not to make sense—to be in some important way incoherent or unintelligible.
Such a broader conception of atheism, of course, includes everyone who is an atheist in the narrower sense, but the converse does not obtain. Moreover, this conception of atheism does not have to say that religious claims are meaningless. The more typical and less paradoxical and tendentious claim is that utterances such as “There is an infinite, eternal creator of the universe” are incoherent and that the conception of God reflected in such a claim is unintelligible, and in that important sense the claim is inconceivable and incredible—incapable of being a rational object of belief for a philosophically and scientifically sophisticated person touched by modernity. It is this that is a central belief of many contemporary atheists. There are good empirical grounds for believing that there are no Zeus-like spiritual beings, and as this last, more ramified form of atheism avers, if there are sound grounds for believing that the nonanthropomorphic or at least radically less anthropomorphic conceptions of God are incoherent or unintelligible, the atheist has the strongest grounds for rejecting belief in God.
Atheism is a critique and a denial of the central metaphysical beliefs of systems of salvation involving a belief in God or spiritual beings, but a sophisticated atheist does not simply claim that all such cosmological claims are false but takes it that some are so problematic that, while purporting to be factual, they actually do not succeed in making a coherent factual claim. The claims, in an important sense, do not make sense, and, while believers are under the illusion that there is something intelligible to be believed in, in reality there is not. These seemingly grand cosmological claims are in reality best understood as myths or ideological claims reflecting a confused understanding of their utterers' situation.
It is not a well-taken rejoinder to atheistic critiques to say, as have some contemporary Protestant theologians, that belief in God is the worst form of atheism and idolatry, since the language of Jewish and Christian belief, including such sentences as “God exists” and “God created the world,” is not to be taken literally but symbolically and metaphorically. Christianity, as Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who defends such views, once put it, is “true myth.” The claims of religion are not, on such account, to be understood as metaphysical claims trying to convey extraordinary facts but as metaphorical and analogical claims that are not understandable in any other terms. But if something is a metaphor it must at least in principle be possible to say what it is a metaphor of. Thus metaphors cannot be understandable only in metaphorical terms. There can be no unparaphrasable metaphors or symbolic expressions though, what is something else again, a user of such expressions may not be capable on demand of supplying that paraphrase. Moreover, if the language of religion becomes simply the language of myth and religious beliefs are viewed simply as powerful and often humanly compelling myths, then they are conceptions that in reality have only an atheistic substance. The believer is making no cosmological claim that the atheist is not; it is just that his talk, including his unelucidated talk of “true myths,” is language that for many people has a more powerful emotive force.
Agnosticism has a parallel development to that of atheism. An agnostic, like an atheist, asserts either that he does not know that God exists—or, more typically, that he cannot know or have sound reasons for believing that God exists—but unlike the atheist he does not think that he is justified in saying that God does not exist or, stronger still, that God cannot exist. Similarly, while some contemporary atheists say that the concept of God in developed theism does not make sense and thus that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic beliefs must be rejected, many contemporary agnostics believe that the concept of God is radically problematic. They maintain that they are not in a position to be able to decide whether, on the one hand, the terms and concepts of such religions are so problematic that such religious beliefs do not make sense or whether, on the other, though the talk is indeed radically paradoxical and in many ways incomprehensible, such talk has sufficient coherence to make reasonable a belief in an ultimate mystery. Such an agnostic recognizes that the puzzles about God cut deeper than perplexities concerning whether it is possible to attain adequate evidence for God's existence. Rather, he sees the need to exhibit an adequate nonanthropomorphic, extralinguistic referent for “God.” (This need not commit him to the belief that there are any observations independent of theory.) Believers think that, though God is a mystery, such a referent has been secured, though what it is remains a mystery. Atheists, by contrast, believe that it has not been, and indeed some of them believe that it cannot be, secured. To talk about mystery, they maintain, is just an evasive way of talking about what is not understood. Contemporary agnostics (those agnostics who parallel the atheists characterized above) remain in doubt and are convinced that there is no rational way of resolving the doubt about whether talk in a halting fashion of God just barely secures such reference or whether it, after all, fails and that nothing religiously acceptable is referred to by “God.”
Intense religious commitment, as the history of fideism makes evident, has sometimes gone hand in hand with deep scepticism concerning man's capacity to know God. It is agreed by all parties to the dispute between belief and unbelief that religious claims are paradoxical. Furthermore, criteria for what is meaningless and what is not or for what is intelligible and what is not are deeply contested. It is perhaps fair enough to say that there are no generally accepted criteria.
Keeping these diverse considerations in mind in the arguments between belief, agnosticism, and atheism, it is crucial to ask whether there is any good reason at all to believe that there is a personal creative reality that is beyond the bounds of space and time and transcendent to the world. Is there even a sufficient understanding of such talk so that such a reality can be the object of religious commitment? (One cannot have faith in or take on faith what one does not at all understand. People must at least in some way understand what it is that they are to have faith in to be able to have faith in it. If a person is asked to trust Irglig, he cannot do so no matter how strongly he wants to take something simply on trust.)
It appears to be a brute fact that there just is that indefinitely immense collection of finite and contingent masses or conglomerations of things and processes the phrase “the universe” refers to. People can come to feel wonder, awe, and puzzlement that there is a universe at all. But that fact, or the very fact that there is a world at all, does not license the claim that there is a noncontingent reality on which the world (the sorry collection of things entire) depends. It is not even clear that such a sense of contingency gives an understanding of what such a noncontingent thing could be. Some atheists think that the reference range of “God” is so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic that it is impossible for someone fully aware of that reasonably to believe in God; believers, by contrast, think that, though the reference range of “God” is indeterminate, it is not so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic as to make belief irrational or incoherent. It is known, they claim, that talk of God is problematic, but it is not known, and cannot be known, whether it is so problematic as to be without a religiously appropriate sense. Agnostics, in turn, say that there is no reasonable decision procedure. It is not known and cannot be ascertained whether or not “God” secures a religiously adequate referent. What needs to be kept in mind, in reflecting on this issue, is whether a “contingent thing” is a pleonasm and “infinite reality” is without sense and whether, when people go beyond anthropomorphism (or try to go beyond it), it is possible to have a sufficient understanding of what is referred to by “God” to make faith a coherent possibility.
Finally, it will not do to take a Pascalian or Dostoyevskian turn and claim that, intellectual absurdity or not, religious belief is necessary, since without belief in God morality does not make sense and life is meaningless. That claim is false, for even if there is no purpose to life there are purposes in life—things people care about and want to do—that can remain perfectly intact even in a godless world. God or no God, immortality or no immortality, it is vile to torture people just for the fun of it, and friendship, solidarity, love, and the attainment of self-respect are human goods even in an utterly godless world. There are intellectual puzzles about how people know that these things are good, but that is doubly true for the distinctive claims of a religious ethic. The point is that these things remain desirable and that life can have a point even in the absence of God.
Kai E. Nielsen
http://www.evilbible.com/Definition_of_Atheism_4.htm
Some proponents of this definition can be found in the alt.atheism newsgroup and at the following web sites:
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/ath/blathq_atheism101.htm
http://www.alabamaatheist.org/awareness/questions/atheist.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
A “lack of belief” definition is a bad definition for many reasons. It is not commonly used. It is not defined that way in any reputable dictionary. It is too broad because most agnostics and babies don’t consider themselves atheists. And it makes no sense for an “-ism” to be a based on a lack of belief.
These atheists are usually motivated to redefine the word “atheist” because they want to enlarge the definition of “atheist” to include as many people as possible, or because they perceive it to be an advantage in debates with theists. Unfortunately, some of these people have used lies and distortions to support their opinions, and some have made extremely ignorant and grossly incorrect statements that may reflect badly on all atheists. I will correct some of these incorrect statements later in this essay.
But first I will try to illustrate the problem by using three groups of people:
Group A believes that gods do not exist (atheists).
Group B neither believes that at least one god exists nor do they believe that gods do not exist. This would include agnostics, babies, and the undecided.
Group C believes that at least one god exists (theists).
It is generally agreed that the people in group A are atheists and the people in group C are not. The main point of disagreement is whether the people in group B are considered atheists or not. The people who want a “lack of belief” definition would define group B as atheists while most people, and all reputable dictionaries, do not. Many of the people who are pushing a “lack of belief” definition call group A “strong atheists” and call group B “weak atheists.
One of the main problems of a “lack of belief” definition is that it is too broad. If someone told you they were an atheist, you would still not know if they were agnostic, undecided, believed that gods don’t exist, or never thought about it. This makes the word nearly useless
Another problem with a “lack of belief” definition is that it is not accepted by the vast majority of people. I personally don’t know anyone who considers babies atheists because they lack belief in gods. I also don’t know of any people who are agnostic or undecided about the existence of God who call themselves atheists.
The lack of public acceptance for a “lack of belief” definition of “atheism” is reflected in the fact that no reputable dictionary has a “lack of belief” definition for either “atheism” or “atheist”. However, this has not kept a few morons from incorrectly claiming that various dictionary definitions have a “lack of belief” definition. On page three I have posted and examined many reputable dictionary definitions. On page four I have posted excerpts from reputable Encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica.
Some of people who want to redefine the words "atheism" and "atheist" to mean "a lack of belief in the existence of gods" have used some incredibly stupid arguments to support their position. I will list some of these arguments and examine them in detail.
Stupid Argument #1: The etymology of the word "atheism" means "a lack of belief".
A commonly repeated error is that the word "atheism" was derived from the prefix "a-", meaning "without", and the word "theism", meaning a belief in God. Therefore they claim that "atheism" means "without a belief in God". This is incorrect because the etymology of the word "atheism" derives from the Greek word "atheos" meaning "godless". The "-ism" suffix, which can be roughly mean "belief", was added later. The etymology of the word means "godless belief" not "without a belief in gods".
A couple of etymologies from respected dictionaries are shown below:
From Merriam-Webster Online:
Etymology of "atheism": Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.:
Etymology of "atheism": French athéisme, from athée, atheist, from Greek atheos, godless : a-, without; see a–1 + theos, god
Stupid Argument #2: Most Dictionaries Define "Atheism" as a "Lack of Belief".
I see this lie quite often on the internet. The truth of the matter is that no reputable dictionary has a "lack of belief" definition. See page 3 for more on this subject.
Stupid Argument #3: Most Dictionary Definitions of "Atheism" are Wrong Because They are Written by Biased Christians.
This absurd claim is totally unsupported by any facts, much like the gigantic government conspiracy to cover-up UFO landings.
Stupid Argument #4: Only Atheists get to Define What the Word "Atheist" Means.
This argument is absurd for two reasons. First of all, words are defined by common usage, not by the people who fit that definition. For example the word "handicapped" is defined by common usage not just by handicapped people.
Secondly, a "lack of belief" definition for the word "atheist" would include so many agnostics, babies, infants, and the undecided that the self-identified atheists would be a very small minority. Babies and infants would make up a majority of the "lack of belief" atheists and I haven't heard of any of them who could express a coherent definition.
Stupid Argument #5: Most Atheists Want a "Lack of Belief" Definition.
This argument is usually presented as fact without any actual surveys to back it up. The first problem with this is the "babies and infants" problem described above. The second problem is that most scientific surveys of religious beliefs show that only a minority of the non-religious people self-identify as atheists. For example the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) shows that 13.2% of the US population self-identified as "no religion" while 0.4% self-identified as atheists and 0.5% self-identified as agnostics. The 2000 Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year also shows similar numbers.
Stupid Argument #6: The Phrase "Tom does not believe in the existence of God" does not mean "Tom believes that God does not exist."
This idiotic argument is sometimes presented by brain dead morons who don't understand basic English grammar. I really don't expect most people to know that "raising" is the technical name for the location of the negative in the first sentence, or that raising simply shifts the negative from the subordinate clause where it logically belongs to the main clause, especially when the main clause’s verb is suppose, think, believe, seem, or the like. (Here are two links from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English that explain it: Link 1, Link 2)
However, I find it impossible to believe that anyone with half a brain would use this argument. The English language is literally filled with many common examples of raising. I'll post a few for clarity:
A) "I don't believe the mail has arrived" means "I believe the mail has not arrived". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about the mail arriving.
B) "I do not believe we missed the last bus" means "I believe we did not miss the last bus". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about missing the last bus.
C) "I don't think the kicker can make a 55 yard field goal" means "I think that the kicker can not make a 55 yard field goal". It does not mean that I did not think about the kicker making a field goal.
D) "I don't believe in the existence of deities" means "I believe that deities do not exist". It does not mean that I don't have any beliefs about the existence of deities.
Stupid Argument #7: A "Lack of Belief" Definition is Useful in Debates.
Some people think that a "lack of belief" definition of atheist shifts the burden of proof to the theist and requires them to prove the existence of their god. The truth of the matter is that the theist's claim of a supernatural god with magical powers is an extraordinary claim and requires substantial evidence if it is to be logically believed. The burden of proof is on the theist regardless of the definition of the word "atheist".
As an analogy, if someone claimed that flying pigs existed, then they would have the burden of proof to prove this regardless of whether I told them I "lacked belief" in the existence of flying pigs or if I told them that I believed that flying pigs did not exist.
Stupid Argument #8: All Atheists Lack a Belief in Gods so Anyone who Lacks a Belief in Gods is an Atheist.
This argument is so damn stupid that it is rarely expressed explicitly. Usually it is only vaguely implied by statements such as "the only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in gods"
The logical mistake here should be self-evident to any adult with half a brain, so I won't explain it. But if you are in a child in elementary school, try to figure it out with this analogy: All dogs have fur so anything with fur is a dog.
From Merriam-Webster OnLine
| atheist:one who believes that there is no deity atheism:1 archaic : UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS 2 a : a disbelief in the existence of deity b : the doctrine that there is no deity disbelief: the act of disbelieving : mental rejection of something as untrue disbelieve: transitive senses : to hold not worthy of belief : not believe intransitive senses : to withhold or reject belief agnostic: a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (as God) is unknown and prob. unknowable; broadly : one who is not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god |
From the Cambridge Dictionary of American English
| atheist:someone who believes that God does not exist atheism: the belief that God does not exist |
From the Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Ed. 1989
| Atheist: 1. One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God. 2. One who practically denies the existence of a God by disregard of moral obligation to Him; a godless man. B. attrib. as adj. Atheistic, impious. [Note: The last word usage example for sense #1 is: 1876 GLADSTONE in Contemp. Rev. June 22 By the Atheist I understand the man who not only holds off, like the sceptic, from the affirmative, but who drives himself, or is driven, to the negative assertion in regard to the whole Unseen, or to the existence of God.] Atheism: Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God. Also, Disregard of duty to God, godlessness (practical atheism).Agnostic: A. n. One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing. [Suggested by Prof. Huxley at a party held previous to the formation of the now defunct Metaphysical Society, at Mr. James Knowles's house on Clapham Common, one evening in 1869, in my hearing. He took it from St. Paul's mention of the altar to ‘the Unknown God.’ R. H. HUTTON in letter 13 Mar. 1881.]B. adj. Of or pertaining to agnostics or their theory. Disbelieve: 1. trans. Not to believe or credit; to refuse credence to: a. a statement or (alleged) fact: To reject the truth or reality of. (With simple obj. or obj. clause.) b. a person in making a statement. 2. absol. or intr. 3. intr. with in: Not to believe in; to have no faith in: cf. BELIEVE 1, 3. |
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000.
| atheist:One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.atheism: 1a. Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods. b. The doctrine that there is no God or gods. 2. Godlessness; immorality. ETYMOLOGY: French athéisme, from athée, atheist, from Greek atheos, godless : a-, without; see a–1 + theos, god; see dhs- in Appendix I. disbelief: Refusal or reluctance to believe. denial: 1. A refusal to comply with or satisfy a request. 2a. A refusal to grant the truth of a statement or allegation; a contradiction. b. Law The opposing by a defendant of an allegation of the plaintiff. 3a. A refusal to accept or believe something, such as a doctrine or belief. b. Psychology An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings. 4. The act of disowning or disavowing; repudiation. 5. Abstinence; self-denial. agnostic: NOUN: 1a. One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God. b. One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism. 2. One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something. ADJECTIVE: 1. Relating to or being an agnostic. 2. Doubtful or noncommittal: “Though I am agnostic on what terms to use, I have no doubt that human infants come with an enormous ‘acquisitiveness’ for discovering patterns” (William H. Calvin, New York Times Book Review August 10, 1997). WORD HISTORY: An agnostic does not deny the existence of God and heaven but holds that one cannot know for certain whether or not they exist. The term agnostic was fittingly coined by the 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, who believed that only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge. He made up the word from the prefix a–, meaning “without, not,” as in amoral, and the noun Gnostic. Gnostic is related to the Greek word gnsis, “knowledge,” which was used by early Christian writers to mean “higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things”; hence, Gnostic referred to those with such knowledge. In coining the term agnostic, Huxley was considering as “Gnostics” a group of his fellow intellectuals—“ists,” as he called them—who had eagerly embraced various doctrines or theories that explained the world to their satisfaction. Because he was a “man without a rag of a label to cover himself with,” Huxley coined the term agnostic for himself, its first published use being in 1870. |
From the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
| atheist:1. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. 2. A godless person. [Obs.] Syn. -- Infidel; unbeliever. See Infidel. atheism: 1. The disbelief or denial of the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. 2. Godlessness. disbelief:The act of disbelieving;; a state of the mind in which one is fully persuaded that an opinion, assertion, or doctrine is not true; refusal of assent, credit, or credence; denial of belief. Syn. -- Distrust; unbelief; incredulity; doubt; skepticism. -- Disbelief, Unbelief. Unbelief is a mere failure to admit; disbelief is a positive rejection. One may be an unbeliever in Christianity from ignorance or want of inquiry; a unbeliever has the proofs before him, and incurs the guilt of setting them aside. Unbelief is usually open to conviction; disbelief is already convinced as to the falsity of that which it rejects. Men often tell a story in such a manner that we regard everything they say with unbelief. Familiarity with the worst parts of human nature often leads us into a disbelief in many good qualities which really exist among men. disbelieve: Not to believe; to refuse belief or credence to; to hold not to be true or actual. deny: (transitive verb) 1. To declare not to be true; to gainsay; to contradict; -- opposed to affirm, allow, or admit. &hand; We deny what another says, or we deny the truth of an assertion, the force of it, or the assertion itself. 2. To refuse (to do something or to accept something); to reject; to decline; to renounce. [Obs.] 3. To refuse to grant; to withhold; to refuse to gratify or yield to; as, to deny a request. 4. To disclaim connection with, responsibility for, and the like; to refuse to acknowledge; to disown; to abjure; to disavow. (intransitive verb) To answer in negative; to declare an assertion not to be true. denial: 1. The act of gainsaying, refusing, or disowning; negation; -- the contrary of affirmation. 2. A refusal to admit the truth of a statement, charge, imputation, etc.; assertion of the untruth of a thing stated or maintained; a contradiction. 3. A refusal to grant; rejection of a request. 4. A refusal to acknowledge; disclaimer of connection with; disavowal; -- the contrary of confession; as, the denial of a fault charged on one; a denial of God. Denial of one's self, a declining of some gratification; restraint of one's appetites or propensities; self-denial. agnostic: (noun) One who professes ignorance, or denies that we have any knowledge, save of phenomena; one who supports agnosticism, neither affirming nor denying the existence of a personal Deity, a future life, etc. agnosticism: That doctrine which, professing ignorance, neither asserts nor denies. Specifically: (Theol.) The doctrine that the existence of a personal Deity, an unseen world, etc., can be neither proved nor disproved, because of the necessary limits of the human mind (as sometimes charged upon Hamilton and Mansel), or because of the insufficiency of the evidence furnished by physical and physical data, to warrant a positive conclusion (as taught by the school of Herbert Spencer); -- opposed alike dogmatic skepticism and to dogmatic theism. |
From the MSN Encarta Dictionary
| atheism:disbelief in the existence of God or deities atheist:somebody who does not believe in God or deities disbelief: the feeling of not believing or of not being able to believe somebody or something |
Note: If you click on these entries you should note that the bold type at the the beginning of each definition (i.e. "unbelief in God or deities" and "unbeliever in God or deities") is a "Quick Definition" that is unique to the Microsoft Encarta Dictionaries. Only the full definitions are quoted above.
The following is a quote from the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary:
| Another important point highlighted by our research was that people often find it difficult to find their way through longer dictionary entries. The words in our language often have more than one meaning. A dictionary divides each of these meanings up and defines each one separately. These are called "senses". The word "take", for example, has over 40 senses. To help you find just the right meaning fast, we have included "Quick Definitions" in boldface capitalized type at the start of each sense of a word with more than three meanings. The "Quick Definitions" give the broad meanings. They are followed by the full definitions. This makes these longer entries easier to navigate. |
From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.
atheism: denial of the existence of God or gods and of any supernatural existence, to be distinguished from agnosticism, which holds that the existence cannot be proved. The term atheism has been used as an accusation against all who attack established orthodoxy, as in the trial of Socrates. There were few avowed atheists from classical times until the 19th cent., when popular belief in a conflict between religion and science brought forth preachers of the gospel of atheism, such as Robert G. Ingersoll. There are today many individuals and groups professing atheism. The 20th cent. has seen many individuals and groups professing atheism, including Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murry O’Hair.
agnosticism: form of skepticism that holds that the existence of God cannot be logically proved or disproved. Among prominent agnostics have been Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley (who coined the word agnostic in 1869). Immanuel Kant was an agnostic who argued that belief in divinity can rest only on faith. Agnosticism is not to be confused with atheism, which asserts that there is no God.
From the article "Atheism and Agnosticism" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.
Smart, J. J. C., "Atheism and Agnosticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
From Encyclopedia Britannica. 2004.Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 18 Jan. 2004
Introduction
Atheism:
in general, the critique and denial of metaphysical beliefs in God or spiritual beings. As such, it is usually distinguished from theism, which affirms the reality of the divine and often seeks to demonstrate its existence. Atheism is also distinguished from agnosticism, which leaves open the question whether there is a god or not, professing to find the questions unanswered or unanswerable.
The dialectic of the argument between forms of belief and unbelief raises questions concerning the most perspicuous delineation, or characterization, of atheism, agnosticism, and theism. It is necessary not only to probe the warrant for atheism but also carefully to consider what is the most adequate definition of atheism. This article will start with what have been some widely accepted, but still in various ways mistaken or misleading, definitions of atheism and move to more adequate formulations that better capture the full range of atheist thought and more clearly separate unbelief from belief and atheism from agnosticism. In the course of this delineation the section also will consider key arguments for and against atheism.
Atheism as rejection of religious beliefs
A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these faiths believe that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing and who has absolute sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of course, human beings—who are not only utterly dependent on this creative power but also sinful and who, or so the faithful must believe, can only make adequate sense of their lives by accepting, without question, God's ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs.
Atheism, however, casts a wider net and rejects all belief in “spiritual beings,” and to the extent that belief in spiritual beings is definitive of what it means for a system to be religious, atheism rejects religion. So atheism is not only a rejection of the central conceptions of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, it is, as well, a rejection of the religious beliefs of such African religions as that of the Dinka and the Nuer, of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome, and of the transcendental conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.
It is necessary, however, if a tolerably adequate understanding of atheism is to be achieved, to give a reading to “rejection of religious belief” and to come to realize how the characterization of atheism as the denial of God or the gods is inadequate.
Atheism and theism
To say that atheism is the denial of God or the gods and that it is the opposite of theism, a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and seeks to demonstrate his existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. First, not all theologians who regard themselves as defenders of the Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam regard themselves as defenders of theism. The influential 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above finite beings. God, for him, is “being-itself,” the ground of being and meaning. The particulars of Tillich's view are in certain ways idiosyncratic, as well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been influential; and his rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, is not eccentric in contemporary theology, though it may very well affront the plain believer.
Second, and more important, it is not the case that all theists seek to demonstrate or even in any way rationally to establish the existence of God. Many theists regard such a demonstration as impossible, and fideistic believers (e.g., Johann Hamann and Søren Kierkegaard) regard such a demonstration, even if it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view it would undermine faith. If it could be proved, or known for certain, that God exists, people would not be in a position to accept him as their sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all the risks that entails. There are theologians who have argued that for genuine faith to be possible God must necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious ultimate reality, whose existence and authority must be accepted simply on faith. This fideistic view has not, of course, gone without challenge from inside the major faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above characterization of atheism inadequate.
Finally, and most important, not all denials of God are denials of his existence. Believers sometimes deny God while not being at all in a state of doubt that God exists. They either willfully reject what they take to be his authority by not acting in accordance with what they take to be his will, or else they simply live their lives as if God did not exist. In this important way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists (unless we wish, misleadingly, to call them “practical atheists”). They are not even agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him in other ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said, atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that God's existence is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
Yet it remains the case that such a characterization of atheism is inadequate in other ways. For one it is too narrow. There are atheists who believe that the very concept of God, at least in developed and less anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is so incoherent that certain central religious claims, such as “God is my creator to whom everything is owed,” are not genuine truth-claims; i.e., the claims could not be either true or false. Believers hold that such religious propositions are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and there are agnostics who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they are true or false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical empiricists.
While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too broad. For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight. They believe in God not because it is probable that he exists—they think it more probable that he does not—but because belief is thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise Pascal or a Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T.H. Huxley or a Leslie Stephen) from an atheist such as Baron d'Holbach or Thomas Paine. All believe that “There is a God” and “God protects humankind,” however emotionally important they may be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of probability. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization of atheism.
It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. There are no ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of God's existence. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God. If the atheist could somehow survive the death of his present body (assuming that such talk makes sense) and come, much to his surprise, to stand in the presence of God, his answer should be, “Oh! Lord, you didn't give me enough evidence!” He would have been mistaken, and realize that he had been mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God (assuming that he could have them), what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. “Knowing with certainty” is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take.
An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is one) is by definition a very recherché reality—a reality that must be (for there to be such a reality) transcendent to the world—the burden of proof is not on the atheist to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of that order. Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence for God's existence; i.e., that there is such a reality. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality. He needs to show that there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the theist that there are in addition to varieties of empirical facts “spiritual facts” or “transcendent facts,” such as it being the case that there is a supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist can assert that such “facts” have not been shown.
It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may bring. There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist.
Comprehensive definition of atheism
Reflection on this should lead to a more adequate statement of what atheism is and indeed as well to what an agnostic or religious response to atheism should be. Instead of saying that an atheist is someone who believes that it is false or probably false that there is a God, a more adequate characterization of atheism consists in the more complex claim that to be an atheist is to be someone who rejects belief in God for the following reasons (which reason is stressed depends on how God is being conceived): for an anthropomorphic God, the atheist rejects belief in God because it is false or probably false that there is a God; for a nonanthropomorphic God (the God of Luther and Calvin, Aquinas, and Maimonides), he rejects belief in God because the concept of such a God is either meaningless, unintelligible, contradictory, incomprehensible, or incoherent; for the God portrayed by some modern or contemporary theologians or philosophers, he rejects belief in God because the concept of God in question is such that it merely masks an atheistic substance—e.g., “God” is just another name for love, or “God” is simply a symbolic term for moral ideals.
This atheism is a much more complex notion, as are its various reflective rejections. It is clear from what has been said about the concept of God in developed forms of Judeo-Christianity that the more crucial form of atheist rejection is not the assertion that it is false that there is a God but instead the rejection of belief in God because the concept of God is said not to make sense—to be in some important way incoherent or unintelligible.
Such a broader conception of atheism, of course, includes everyone who is an atheist in the narrower sense, but the converse does not obtain. Moreover, this conception of atheism does not have to say that religious claims are meaningless. The more typical and less paradoxical and tendentious claim is that utterances such as “There is an infinite, eternal creator of the universe” are incoherent and that the conception of God reflected in such a claim is unintelligible, and in that important sense the claim is inconceivable and incredible—incapable of being a rational object of belief for a philosophically and scientifically sophisticated person touched by modernity. It is this that is a central belief of many contemporary atheists. There are good empirical grounds for believing that there are no Zeus-like spiritual beings, and as this last, more ramified form of atheism avers, if there are sound grounds for believing that the nonanthropomorphic or at least radically less anthropomorphic conceptions of God are incoherent or unintelligible, the atheist has the strongest grounds for rejecting belief in God.
Atheism is a critique and a denial of the central metaphysical beliefs of systems of salvation involving a belief in God or spiritual beings, but a sophisticated atheist does not simply claim that all such cosmological claims are false but takes it that some are so problematic that, while purporting to be factual, they actually do not succeed in making a coherent factual claim. The claims, in an important sense, do not make sense, and, while believers are under the illusion that there is something intelligible to be believed in, in reality there is not. These seemingly grand cosmological claims are in reality best understood as myths or ideological claims reflecting a confused understanding of their utterers' situation.
It is not a well-taken rejoinder to atheistic critiques to say, as have some contemporary Protestant theologians, that belief in God is the worst form of atheism and idolatry, since the language of Jewish and Christian belief, including such sentences as “God exists” and “God created the world,” is not to be taken literally but symbolically and metaphorically. Christianity, as Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian who defends such views, once put it, is “true myth.” The claims of religion are not, on such account, to be understood as metaphysical claims trying to convey extraordinary facts but as metaphorical and analogical claims that are not understandable in any other terms. But if something is a metaphor it must at least in principle be possible to say what it is a metaphor of. Thus metaphors cannot be understandable only in metaphorical terms. There can be no unparaphrasable metaphors or symbolic expressions though, what is something else again, a user of such expressions may not be capable on demand of supplying that paraphrase. Moreover, if the language of religion becomes simply the language of myth and religious beliefs are viewed simply as powerful and often humanly compelling myths, then they are conceptions that in reality have only an atheistic substance. The believer is making no cosmological claim that the atheist is not; it is just that his talk, including his unelucidated talk of “true myths,” is language that for many people has a more powerful emotive force.
Agnosticism has a parallel development to that of atheism. An agnostic, like an atheist, asserts either that he does not know that God exists—or, more typically, that he cannot know or have sound reasons for believing that God exists—but unlike the atheist he does not think that he is justified in saying that God does not exist or, stronger still, that God cannot exist. Similarly, while some contemporary atheists say that the concept of God in developed theism does not make sense and thus that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic beliefs must be rejected, many contemporary agnostics believe that the concept of God is radically problematic. They maintain that they are not in a position to be able to decide whether, on the one hand, the terms and concepts of such religions are so problematic that such religious beliefs do not make sense or whether, on the other, though the talk is indeed radically paradoxical and in many ways incomprehensible, such talk has sufficient coherence to make reasonable a belief in an ultimate mystery. Such an agnostic recognizes that the puzzles about God cut deeper than perplexities concerning whether it is possible to attain adequate evidence for God's existence. Rather, he sees the need to exhibit an adequate nonanthropomorphic, extralinguistic referent for “God.” (This need not commit him to the belief that there are any observations independent of theory.) Believers think that, though God is a mystery, such a referent has been secured, though what it is remains a mystery. Atheists, by contrast, believe that it has not been, and indeed some of them believe that it cannot be, secured. To talk about mystery, they maintain, is just an evasive way of talking about what is not understood. Contemporary agnostics (those agnostics who parallel the atheists characterized above) remain in doubt and are convinced that there is no rational way of resolving the doubt about whether talk in a halting fashion of God just barely secures such reference or whether it, after all, fails and that nothing religiously acceptable is referred to by “God.”
Intense religious commitment, as the history of fideism makes evident, has sometimes gone hand in hand with deep scepticism concerning man's capacity to know God. It is agreed by all parties to the dispute between belief and unbelief that religious claims are paradoxical. Furthermore, criteria for what is meaningless and what is not or for what is intelligible and what is not are deeply contested. It is perhaps fair enough to say that there are no generally accepted criteria.
Keeping these diverse considerations in mind in the arguments between belief, agnosticism, and atheism, it is crucial to ask whether there is any good reason at all to believe that there is a personal creative reality that is beyond the bounds of space and time and transcendent to the world. Is there even a sufficient understanding of such talk so that such a reality can be the object of religious commitment? (One cannot have faith in or take on faith what one does not at all understand. People must at least in some way understand what it is that they are to have faith in to be able to have faith in it. If a person is asked to trust Irglig, he cannot do so no matter how strongly he wants to take something simply on trust.)
It appears to be a brute fact that there just is that indefinitely immense collection of finite and contingent masses or conglomerations of things and processes the phrase “the universe” refers to. People can come to feel wonder, awe, and puzzlement that there is a universe at all. But that fact, or the very fact that there is a world at all, does not license the claim that there is a noncontingent reality on which the world (the sorry collection of things entire) depends. It is not even clear that such a sense of contingency gives an understanding of what such a noncontingent thing could be. Some atheists think that the reference range of “God” is so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic that it is impossible for someone fully aware of that reasonably to believe in God; believers, by contrast, think that, though the reference range of “God” is indeterminate, it is not so indeterminate and the concept of God so problematic as to make belief irrational or incoherent. It is known, they claim, that talk of God is problematic, but it is not known, and cannot be known, whether it is so problematic as to be without a religiously appropriate sense. Agnostics, in turn, say that there is no reasonable decision procedure. It is not known and cannot be ascertained whether or not “God” secures a religiously adequate referent. What needs to be kept in mind, in reflecting on this issue, is whether a “contingent thing” is a pleonasm and “infinite reality” is without sense and whether, when people go beyond anthropomorphism (or try to go beyond it), it is possible to have a sufficient understanding of what is referred to by “God” to make faith a coherent possibility.
Finally, it will not do to take a Pascalian or Dostoyevskian turn and claim that, intellectual absurdity or not, religious belief is necessary, since without belief in God morality does not make sense and life is meaningless. That claim is false, for even if there is no purpose to life there are purposes in life—things people care about and want to do—that can remain perfectly intact even in a godless world. God or no God, immortality or no immortality, it is vile to torture people just for the fun of it, and friendship, solidarity, love, and the attainment of self-respect are human goods even in an utterly godless world. There are intellectual puzzles about how people know that these things are good, but that is doubly true for the distinctive claims of a religious ethic. The point is that these things remain desirable and that life can have a point even in the absence of God.
Kai E. Nielsen
http://www.evilbible.com/Definition_of_Atheism_4.htm
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