The Arrogance of Atheism

I think you’re falling into the trap of defining a group by a generalization, which is the same thing most religious individuals complain about (and generally rightfully so). Criticisms levelled at a carefully described belief are valid, but criticisms levelled at a group with the assumption that they all carry the same belief or ideas are not, and you know this. You’ve done both here. You’ve defined the atheistic belief you disagree with (and I don’t question your reasoning, as it’s correct) but you also criticise “atheists”, apparently in general, for holding that belief.

I think you know better than this.

Rumor,

It is interesting that in this post, the atheist is presumed to be a god-awful literalist, incapable of allowing for some unknown numinosity, whereas complaints about the manifold foibles of religion are, we’re told, properly levied only at fringe Bible fundies.

Thus, atheists (without any qualifying words, excepting one reference a “radical” sort — whatever radical not-collecting-stamps might consist of) can be called, in the title, “arrogant,” and in the body, “intellectually disreputable.”

From his arguments here, it seems unlikely that Ian would write a post called the “Arrogance of religious people” that would adjudge them “intellectually disreputable.”

You know, a person can hold strong beliefs and still admit the possibility of being wrong. Such a person may or may not be an atheist. All this seems obvious. Fallibility is a universal human trait. I don’t see how it weakens either belief or nonbelief.

As far as religious faith goes, I can only defer to Carl Sagan: “Faith is belief without evidence, and why would you want to believe something if there’s no evidence for it?”

I read a lot of people who call themselves atheists, and I can’t remember any of them claiming certainty of anything.

Rumor,

I addressed my comment to you because you’d raised the matter of the generalization in the original post re: atheists, which inspired the comment.

I don’t suggest at all that Ian is a fan of religion, merely that it seems (once again) to be easier and safer to make blanket statements about those typical, arrogant, fundie-like atheists we keep hearing about than about religious people in general.

“You cannot know with certainty that there is no god framistan, in the sense of a creator of the universe, for example. It is impossible. You can assert that it is unnecessary, but that is not the same thing as impossible.”

But what’s a framistan? A framistan is transcendant, yet immanent, and unknowable and undefinable within the limits of human cognition. That is exactly why you can’t say that the framistan doesn’t exist.

Hume rolled over this drivel hundreds of years ago.

I think the case for scepticism is very strong, but the case for atheism fails for the reason Ian says, you simply can’t prove that God or some equivalent doesn’t exist.

You can’t prove any of Euclid’s axioms, that is why they are axioms. They are widely believed and proven useful in constructing geometry. So the atheist case is ultimate that religion isn’t useful, its very destructive, so that is why you see atheists go on and on about all the horrible things priests have done. This is why they come across sounding like fundamentalists, you simply can’t reduce something as complex as religion to “good” or “bad”.

There are actually quite a large number of things on society that are taken entirely on faith.

You could spend the rest of your life discussing what it means to “know” something and you still wouldn’t be finished. The vast majority of us, however, never discuss it at all, because very few of us are inclined towards interminable philosophical debate. My attitude towards philosophy is: there are no answers, so get used to it.

We all claim to know things all the time without being prepared to get into the subject of how we know what we know – good thing, too, as far as I’m concerned, because I am generally not in the mood to drop the subject under discussion and go off into the philosophical ether for hours or days.

My idea of discussing the existence or non-existence of god/gods/goddesses is simply to discuss the question itself – what is this entity, what are its characteristics, what are the reasons to believe it exists, etc., in the same way that I would discuss anything else. But it never happens that way; instead, as an atheist I am challenged to answer epistemological questions and to defend my use of the word atheism as it is commonly used. Why is this?

C’mon, Ian, say it. Write it.

“I believe in God”

It doesn’t have to be sincere, it doesn’t even have to contain any meaning. So why won’t you say it? What are you scared of? What are you rebelling against? Is is a personal loss, a violation of your intellectual integrity to utter what might be nonsense? It doesn’t seem a big deal to me. “God is the creator of the universe” and then we go do our cosmological physics or whatver. The statement needn’t get in the way.

You don’t want to be associate with Dobson or Ratzinger? Say it in Islam. “There is no God but God.”

Walter Kauffman discussed the sociology of theism. “I believe in God” is certainly different from “I believe in framistan.” Since they are no costs to saying it, those who won’t profess a mild theism are simply rebelling.

Correction/clarification/admission – I suppose I meant “greek root” and not “latin root.”

I have never met or read, any atheist who claims beyond a doubt, that there is no god.
Atheism is not about declaring that there is no god.
Atheism is a lack of belief in god or active disbelief in god.
Atheists, just as Christians and Agnostics, do not know with any amount of certainty, whether there is a god or not.
Atheists are simply saying that we do not believe that there is a god.
That is not stating that there isn’t a god, it is simply saying that we do not believe in any god(s).
That is a huge difference.

Ian – I knew this one would piss people off

lmao I was wondering 🙂 The only thing as bad as the fervently religious is the religously athiestic 😀 run

I always feel a little weird coming back to comment on a post the day after, like I’ve missed the bus. Anyway!

I wonder if you consider the meaning of “atheism” a settled thing, Ian? I prefer to interpret it more literally as “lack of theism”, but am quite aware that it’s considered by many people, atheists and not, more or less as “belief that gods do not exist”.

I appreciate your point that, essentially, we can never truly know anything with complete certainty, but I don’t find this a realistically compelling argument for or against either theism or atheism. If I may be permitted to channel that odious Donald Rumsfeld for a moment, we know what we know and we know what we don’t know, for the most part. And we know how we know what we know, and by this I mean we have scientific principles.

Simply put, there’s no credible body of evidence for the existence of gods, just as there’s no credible body of evidence for, say, Santa Claus. Both could be real, may one day be observable in a verifiable way, but that can be said of anything at all, not simply religious figures. What I can say I know, in a completely intellectually valid way, is what is scientifically verifiable. I can also say I *know* that things for which there is no credible body of evidence and which would violate what *is* verifiable (say, the laws of physics) do not exist. It’s always implied, at least to *me*, that what I know can change. What I know changes every damn day, after all.

Perhaps the distinction here is between comprehension and belief, between knowledge and faith? That’s always the devil in the details when discussing religious faith, isn’t it? Faith just is. But trouble arises when anyone attempts to justify faith based on human knowledge. Trying to do so, particularly by arguing that faith is valid or, in the converse, lack of faith is invalid, because we can never truly know anything with complete certainty, is the intellectually disreputable argument.

Not being able to have completely certain knowledge about the world does not preclude validly ruling certain things out, at least when predicated on the understanding that our knowledge of the world is actually incomplete. We can only trukly know what we can observe, verify and explain, and it’s sensible to discount ideas that would violate what we have verified, even to say that they don’t exist. Because until they do exist, they don’t.

It would be enough that I lack faith in divinity to use the word “atheist” to describe myself. But I can go further and say that I know gods do not exist. The only caveat is that I may one day not be an atheist, if it so happens that gods turn out to exist. But until they do, they don’t.

The problem you’re getting at, if I may be so presumptuous, is not theism or atheism. It’s faith, and particularly blind faith, of any kind. As for my part, my mind is open and I am atheist. I don’t have a dogma, I just use the word in its descriptive sense.

Obviously, your post wasn’t directed at me but at those who have atheism as a *faith*. That’s fine, I just suggest that when you took your shots you chose words that aim much wider than you intended.

And, what the hell, I like debating these sorts of things and I find your opinion very important.

Patricia writes “Religious people are very self centered.” Well, that’s exactly the sort of generalization that somebody proceeding from the science wouldn’t make, eh?

Again for my part, this isn’t an issue I’m greatly exercised about, except in cases where (say) the Christianists take over the Air Force Academy and get control of our nuclear weapons. If the religious leave me alone, I leave them alone.

And again, I’m proceeding from the basis of science here — the universe is very large and we are very small. It’s the problem of evil (theodicy) that sticks in my craw. I’m more comfortable with the idea that both good and evil have survival value, and hence arose in nature, than I am with the idea that a supposely just God permits evil for inscutable higher purposes (to no doubt drastically summarize vast tomes of apologetics).

Ian, You’ve got it wrong. As far as your argument goes, you are arguing Godel’s theorem. Consider it this way, if everything we experience were a computer simulation (ala the matrix) and ‘god’ or ‘gods’ existed outside of that simulation, Godel’s theorem still applies to those ‘god’ or ‘gods’. In the same way that we can’t prove what exists outside of our system, those ‘god’ or ‘gods’ can’t prove what exists outside of their system, which could be yet another simulation in another matrix, ad infinitum. Therefor those ‘god’ or ‘gods’ can’t know if they are indeed ‘gods’, and any higher ‘god’ or ‘gods’ likewise can not know if they are ‘god’ or ‘gods’. There could be an infinite number of layers of this matrix.

You don’t understand. Being an Atheist means that you don’t believe anything without evidence. There is no evidence of deities or higher matrix levels, nor can their be, so it is useless to speculate about things that have been proven to be unprovable. Even if they did exist, it is impossible to prove they exist, so again pointless. It’s all basically useless philosophical intellectual masturbation.

Erasmus quotes:

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought”.

It’s not clear to me why atheists have to fall into either category (or, for that matter, the religious). Then again, I haven’t encountered any of the “aggressive, chip-on-the-shoulder ones” of whom Erasmus writes so empathetically.

And if you go far enough, even knowing the existence of a self becomes tentative. On a strictly logical basis I tend to agree with your wife, but it’s one of those philosophies which is very hard to live (however, if someone wants to try, certain branches of Buddhism are very close.)

These are all philosophical discussions of an intellectual search for meaning, andI feel I could sit down and talk to each of you. Not so with the rigid believers and unbelievers, who are unable to discuss ambiguities or conflicting views because it might rattle their canons (sic) or imperil their social network.

I was talking to an anthropologist and a Middle East scholar at Columbia last week about ‘rule-based religions’, esp. the ritual cleansing & diet-based ones. Some scholar (no name, alas!) has finally started to analyse Zoroastrian influence on Jewish practices and the origins of monotheism (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html) & the influence of tribal migration/ silk route in dispersal of these ‘rule’ based social groups. It’s all social anthropology – philosophers and dreamers are few and unique in each tribal subset. The rules for dress, food, bathing, worship and the role of women are simply tribal identity markers (e.g. Jewish law against mixing flax and wool is an agricultural/herding intermarriage interdiction. A muslim told me that hijab is a device to save your sisters for your 2nd cousins. etc.) Pondering the existence of ‘god’ is a harmless diversion for middle class philosophes. Like me.

A theist affirms an executive being. Within that there is broad interpretation on how that being relates to creation.

An atheist dismisses notions of “a” being with any executive duties.

My personal view is that all there is has always been in a state of all possibilities. That state of all that is possible is intelligent, self organizing, and mutually intentional. It is, for need of a better term, god-like.

Is that arrogant or elegant?