One of the reasons I wanted to start blogging again is that I’ve increasingly come out publicly as an atheist and explaining that to people is like trying to feed them a gallon of milk all at once. There are a multitudes of reasons I self-identify as “atheist,” and there are an equal number of reasons that I think it’s important that I make that public information.
Now, I don’t think saying, “Here, read this blog,” is going to be a great solution, either. But it’s something.
atheist – n. – a person who has not accepted nor made a claim of an existent god.
That’s how I define atheist. It’s not necessary to say, “There is no god.” For an atheist, “I don’t believe in any of the gods anyone has told me about,” is good enough.
In fact, “There is no god” isn’t a very important or meaningful statement. Surely most of us agree that there is no god if “god” means “a bleu cheese monster from space who created us all in his image.” All of us have a multitude of gods we don’t believe in, it’s just that a number of people have one or more that they do believe in.
believe – v. – to accept a claim as true and factual.
I have never heard a person define a god that I thought was true and factual (and met my requirements for being a god). That is why I’m an atheist.
I slipped “my requirements for being a god” right into that parenthetical statement. It turns out I’m pretty strict about how I define a god.
god (as defined by me) - n. – a being of absolute awareness (a la omniscience) and absolute moral authority with enough personal power to create, destroy and control any other being or object.
Maybe you caught the rub there, and maybe you didn’t. The real killer for a god concept, in my estimation, is the possession of absolute moral authority. To be a god, a being would not only know all the rights and wrongs of any situation, but the being could also change them. He could make right into wrong and wrong into right.
Some of you might be familiar with the dilemma of pious Euthyphro – Socrates asks him, basically, “Do the gods want what is right because it is right, or is it right because the gods want it?”
In the Bible, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, orders war and murder as well as rape. Now, by my estimation, rape is always wrong. It is a violation of basic human rights. But the Bible clearly indicates that Yahweh can make rape into a right action by desiring it.
I just don’t buy into that, metaphysically. Ethics may not be existent entities – they may be imagined and mutable constructs. Still, such constructs are built on years of social and philosophical interaction, experimentation and discovery. A being, no matter how powerful, cannot come along and make right what we believe is wrong. Certainly, anyone can tell me that murder is okay when it’s the wrong kind of Canaanite, but that does not make it a fact.
deity – n. - a being of immense personal power who is capable of acts of will that would be impossible (or nearly so) for a normal human being.
I’ve got a lot to say on the subject of deities and gods and why I think we can use those two words to categorize the various beliefs of religious people. I don’t want to spoil it all right now.
Let it suffice to say that I don’t believe in any gods, and while I might acknowledge certain deities are possible, I don’t see any reason to worship them.
Tags: atheism, Metaphysics
Chuck, I understand your metaphysical frustration with the absolute moral authority bit. But why include it as necessary part of your definition? If there were an omniscient and omnipotent being without this moral authority (that is, a being subject to the first part of Socrates’ disjunctive rather than the second), would you reject it as a god based on these definitional requirements?
@Dan: Awesome question, and I’ll address that in my next post!
I’m often frustrated by the space between lack-of-belief in a god and belief in lack-of-god. It’s even hard to put into words! I am the former (it sounds like you are too) but most people seem to assume that all atheists are the latter.
That’s interesting because when people say they are athiests I assume it to mean they strongly believe that there is nothing ‘spiritual’ in existance, no soul, no possibility of an afterlife, nothing supernatural, etc. The fact that you acknowledge a deity could be possible in any way shape or form would make me consider you an agnostic.
I consider myself an agnostic, leaning towards athiest. But,that sliver of hopeful non-athiest is one that thinks there might be some sort of mass spiritual energy that every other thing contributes to and comes from and returns to but nothing even remotely like the god of the bible. Bible god is just crackers and impossible.
@Mym: Yes, I’m the former, and so are most atheists in my experience. It’s also called “weak atheism,” but that’s a strange choice of terms to me.
I think that one might call us “categorical atheists” because we have a lack of belief in any gods. I think that most “categorical atheists” are skeptics as well.
I’m also an ontological naturalist, which I’ll go into at some point – I believe that “nature” is all that there is, and all truth is in nature itself – i.e. there is no “supernatural.” I mean, there might be strangeness, but I think it can be explained.
People who would assert that there is no god are a strange bunch. By making that assertion, you ask for the burden of proof. You’re essentially saying, “There is no god and I can prove it.” Now, some who call themselves strong atheists might disagree. They might argue that there is no reason to believe in god but there are some reasons to believe there is no god. I might agree, but I have no stake in asserting that there is no god, and I have no interest in defending that position.
I think most atheists agree that the statement, “I believe there is no god,” is untenable. And it does seem that most non-atheists think that is what we believe. But it’s not!
This gets even worse when people say, “I’m not an atheist. I’m an agnostic.” “Well, yes, so am I. But what I believe about absolute knowledge and what I believe about the existence of a god are two different statements entirely. Are you an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist?”
@Liz: Heh, I just addressed that in my previous comment.
To answer each point, I am an atheist, I consider myself spiritual, I don’t believe in a soul separate from the body, I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe in the supernatural, although I believe in natural strangeness. How does all that work together? Stay tuned to find out!
And of course, any time I say, “I don’t believe in…” I mean that I find no reason to believe it as truth, but I’m willing to entertain arguments. “I don’t believe in an afterlife,” is different than, “I believe there is no afterlife.”
I have found that there’s a whole lot of room for spirituality in the life of an atheist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but I’ll get into that another time.
In response to Liz’s comment, I wish that people would stop using “agnostic” to mean “undecided”. We’ve already got a word for that. It’s the word “undecided”. On the other hand, the word agnostic has traditionally meant “one who believes that the existence of a god or gods can neither be proven or disproven by science”. We don’t have another word for that so I’d really prefer to keep this one for that purpose.
[...] a human being had because of their responsibility to God. Of course, I don’t believe in God (see second post), but Kierkegaard is one of the first people to realize that the more freedom man gets, the more [...]