Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn’t an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog:
I want to look at the term and associated meanings of “atheist” and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are possibly atheists. Sagan and Hemingway, maybe. I don’t know much about them; but Jefferson, Franklin, Darwin were all deists; Lincoln a theist (though not an orthodox Christian), and also Clemens (unless that’s Tom Selleck), and Einstein a “Spinozan theist”.
Atheism has a number of conflicting definitions on the web, many from American contexts. There is a “definition” of atheist that I call the American definition: anyone who doesn’t accept orthodox Christianity, Judaism, or Islam is an atheist. Of course this makes Mormons and Hindus atheists, which is just silly.
The problem goes back to the Greeks as well. When Socrates was condemned, one of the charges was atheism, which in the Greek context meant “not accepting the gods as believed by Greeks”. Epicurus was also called an atheist for holding that the gods are real, but that they have no interest in human affairs. In the so-called Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – one is an atheist if one denies the god of that particular religion, and Epicurus and Epicureans were the atheists par excellence (even though they still continued to believe in their distant deities). To call somebody an Epicurean was to assert their atheism, and what is more, that they thought everything depended only on chance (which is a gross mischaracterisation of the Epicurean “swerve“, a chance event that got things going once). Critics of Darwin called his ideas “Epicureanism”.
As I have argued before, atheism wasn’t even possible as a general philosophical claim until the eighteenth century: that is, the claim that there are no gods of any kind anywhere. But widespread atheism began in the nineteenth century, so claiming Franklin or Jefferson as atheists makes as much sense as claiming Newton as a creationist – the terms simply didn’t mean then what they do today, if they meant anything at all.
Let’s look at the term itself. Much is often made of the prefix a-. Many people say something like this: “a-theism” means ‘without gods’ so anyone who lives their life as if there are no gods is an atheist (and this includes agnostics and deists”. But apart from the non sequitur about living one’s life in a particular way (I think there may be a Higgs boson. I don’t think that changes the way I live my life), as if an interventionist god is the defining trait of a deity (again, the American definition in play), there’s a misreading of the prefix. It is what is called the privative a or the alpha privative or worse, a privativum. We’re in technical territory here, so a word about privation.
In Aristotle’s works, he wrote the about privation as the denial of some positive thing (see the Categories here, section 10) and he rejected the idea that privation is a subject for investigation in the Metaphysics (Book IV). What this means in this case is basically this: if you have a class of things, find some positive aspect in that class (say, gods or god-believers) the remainder, or complement as it is called in set theory, is not itself a positive class. So if “belief” is the class, “theism” is a part of that class, “deism” is a part of that class, “Spinozan theism” is a part of that class, and so on. “Atheism” is the rest of that class, with no “positive” property to bind all members together. But Let us suppose there is a positive belief claim being made: that no gods exist anywhere. So now “atheism” is a part of the set “belief”. Agnosticism, being the lack of belief of any kind, is now the privative set.
But if a-theism is the privation of theisms rather than the positive denial of gods, then it, too, has no class, so to speak. So what you count as the positive claims in the set “belief”, as well as the scope of the set “belief” itself, determines what you are going to call “a-theism”. The American definition has it that “theism” only applies to a restricted and historically contingent (in that country no less) set of religions, so that things that do not fall into that set of “permissible religions” is atheism. The new atheists want to claim anyone who fails to fall into a slightly larger set of historical religions is an atheist. Agnostics like me want to claim that atheism is a positive claim, and that the complement of the set once all religions and positive metaphysical claims about gods are excised, and that includes deism, Spinozan theism, pantheism, panentheism, polytheism and animism, what is left is nothing. Agnosticism is not part of the set “belief”, but outside it. Some atheists think that atheism too is outside the set “belief”.
Let’s be clear about one thing – “belief” here doesn’t mean “faith” or “lack of reason”. Reasonable beliefs, like the existence of the real world, are beliefs nonetheless. All knowledge is belief. “Belief” here just means something one wants to claim is true, or warranted, or the best one can think, and so on.
So the outcome of all this? Well I think it is that atheism, properly understood, is a positive belief: that no gods exist. That means that although I think there is no reason to believe in gods, I am not an atheist because I don’t think there’s any reason not to (for suitable deities that make no empirical difference). If atheists want to use a privative conception, however, so as to include all those who do not make a positive declaration of the reality of some deities, this means that “atheism” is not a category as such, but is defined now and forever by what it does not believe, gods. In that case, atheism becomes whatever is not currently considered a mainstream belief, which as I understand it sort of undercuts what most atheists of my acquaintance want to do with their beliefs. They tend to think of it as a positive thing, of being reasonable.
So I think there’s a bit of a conundrum here for atheists. Either they have to make a positive claim and exclude agnostics and soi disant deists, or they have to accept they are defined by the religion du jour. I think they need to separate the positive claims from the mere lack of a belief in deities. Atheism is, in my view (and that of lexicographers and philosophy of religion) a positive belief. It asserts that gods do not exist. Anything else simply isn’t atheism. But that’s my taxonomy…
the fine detail is not important to you, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t prevent others from thinking it’s important (unless you’re the Pope John I of the Church of What is Important). Some of us like to think about and discuss the details of what words mean. If we want to have a meaningful conversation about something, it helps to understand what someone means when they use certain words. In some conversations the details may be less important but in others they could change things significantly.
You’ve made the case that agnosticism is not merely a lack of belief, but instead a positive denial of any possibility that the question can be answered.
Doesn’t “agnostic” (at least sometimes) refer to a positive belief in the (either current of absolute) impossibility of gnosis?
Certainly the quote of Huxley’s (who coined “agnosticism”) I’ve seen where he explains the term is along the lines of “Christians and materialists and so on claim they have reliable knowledge of what’s REALLY go on. I’m quite sure I don’t. I don’t believe any of them do either”
Doesn’t “agnostic” (at least sometimes) refer to a positive belief in the (either current of absolute) impossibility of gnosis?
Certainly the quote of Huxley’s (who coined “agnosticism”) I’ve seen where he explains the term is along the lines of “Christians and materialists and so on claim they have reliable knowledge of what’s REALLY go on. I’m quite sure I don’t. I don’t believe any of them do either”
Doesn’t “agnostic” (at least sometimes) refer to a positive belief in the (either current of absolute) impossibility of gnosis?
Certainly the quote of Huxley’s (who coined “agnosticism”) I’ve seen where he explains the term is along the lines of “Christians and materialists and so on claim they have reliable knowledge of what’s REALLY go on. I’m quite sure I don’t. I don’t believe any of them do either”
Just to be clear — I thought that poster was very weird, in that most of the people on it wouldn’t have identified themselves as atheists at all. I tried to drop a hint in the first comment, and later pointed out that Darwin most definitely was not an atheist, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in.
And people wonder why argument on the internet is a blunt instrument, rather than a subtle exercise in irony…
Just to be clear — I thought that poster was very weird, in that most of the people on it wouldn’t have identified themselves as atheists at all. I tried to drop a hint in the first comment, and later pointed out that Darwin most definitely was not an atheist, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in.
And people wonder why argument on the internet is a blunt instrument, rather than a subtle exercise in irony…
@ Charlie B. : I think you have it just right, and it’s important to explain atheism and agnosticism in epistemic terms. I think that defining atheism and agnosticism by the epistemic claims they make is a good way of seeing where they significantly overlap. If agnosticism is a statement of knowability, and atheism a statement of belief, then (at least for this philosophy student) the distinction is clear.
I think it’s probably better, however, to refer to both groups in the political arena by a common label. Non-believer, despite going a little against what atheists actually assert, seems to fall enough in the middle to provide a good description for people who couldn’t tell epistemology from metaphysics.
@ Charlie B. : I think you have it just right, and it’s important to explain atheism and agnosticism in epistemic terms. I think that defining atheism and agnosticism by the epistemic claims they make is a good way of seeing where they significantly overlap. If agnosticism is a statement of knowability, and atheism a statement of belief, then (at least for this philosophy student) the distinction is clear.
I think it’s probably better, however, to refer to both groups in the political arena by a common label. Non-believer, despite going a little against what atheists actually assert, seems to fall enough in the middle to provide a good description for people who couldn’t tell epistemology from metaphysics.
@ Charlie B. : I think you have it just right, and it’s important to explain atheism and agnosticism in epistemic terms. I think that defining atheism and agnosticism by the epistemic claims they make is a good way of seeing where they significantly overlap. If agnosticism is a statement of knowability, and atheism a statement of belief, then (at least for this philosophy student) the distinction is clear.
I think it’s probably better, however, to refer to both groups in the political arena by a common label. Non-believer, despite going a little against what atheists actually assert, seems to fall enough in the middle to provide a good description for people who couldn’t tell epistemology from metaphysics.
Okay. As an agnostic, I don’t believe or disbelieve in gods that, as John puts it, “make no empirical difference.” Thus, I hold that a god, such as the Christian god described by Ken Miller, who is interventionalist but in ways not empirically detectible, is a live possibility, even though I do not actively belive in him. Do you? If not, there is a difference in our positions that warrants a difference in terminology.
Okay. As an agnostic, I don’t believe or disbelieve in gods that, as John puts it, “make no empirical difference.” Thus, I hold that a god, such as the Christian god described by Ken Miller, who is interventionalist but in ways not empirically detectible, is a live possibility, even though I do not actively belive in him. Do you? If not, there is a difference in our positions that warrants a difference in terminology.
There seems to generally be two ways of looking at the matter – either there are tiny slivers of black and white on opposite ends of the spectrum (absolutist theists & atheists AKA the I KNOW people) with the vast majority of people who are willing to admit they may be wrong (the I BELIEVE people) falling in the grey middle of agnosticism, or there is a more gradiated scale – such as Dawkins’ 7-point scale – where there are varying degrees of each. I favor a gradiated approach.
The definition given by the author seems to favor the black & white angle, which I think just confuses things. I happen to think it is illogical to assert that anything doesn’t exist, since you can’t prove a negative (although I admit that in the case of things like monsters under the bed, making such a statement does have practical purposes). In that case, the definition in this article insists that in order to be an atheist you must be willing to make a logical error.
To say that atheists must assert that there is no god means a lot of people who don’t believe in god can’t claim the title. On the flip side, there would also be a lot of devout, church-going Christians who could not be considered theists unless they assert that God exists (as opposed to just believing he does). You’re left with a massive muddle of agnostics, where the good sense to not to assert that which you cannot prove is the only thing they have in common.
There seems to generally be two ways of looking at the matter – either there are tiny slivers of black and white on opposite ends of the spectrum (absolutist theists & atheists AKA the I KNOW people) with the vast majority of people who are willing to admit they may be wrong (the I BELIEVE people) falling in the grey middle of agnosticism, or there is a more gradiated scale – such as Dawkins’ 7-point scale – where there are varying degrees of each. I favor a gradiated approach.
The definition given by the author seems to favor the black & white angle, which I think just confuses things. I happen to think it is illogical to assert that anything doesn’t exist, since you can’t prove a negative (although I admit that in the case of things like monsters under the bed, making such a statement does have practical purposes). In that case, the definition in this article insists that in order to be an atheist you must be willing to make a logical error.
To say that atheists must assert that there is no god means a lot of people who don’t believe in god can’t claim the title. On the flip side, there would also be a lot of devout, church-going Christians who could not be considered theists unless they assert that God exists (as opposed to just believing he does). You’re left with a massive muddle of agnostics, where the good sense to not to assert that which you cannot prove is the only thing they have in common.
Aren’t we discussing two orthogonal questions, here?
Atheism concerns belief in one or more gods. Don’t you believe one or more gods exist? Then you’re an atheist.
Agnosticism concerns knowledge of one or more gods. Do you claim not to know whether one or more gods exist? Then you’re an agnostic.
So, you can have:
non-agnostic atheists (“I KNOW FOR A FACT that no gods exist!”), i.e. strong atheists;
agnostic atheists (“I don’t know whether any gods exist, but since there’s no evidence for them, I don’t think so”), i.e. weak atheists;
agnostic theists (“God/s is/are unknowable, but I BELIEVE!”);
non-agnostic theists (“I KNOW FOR A FACT that god/s exist/s!).
Every time I see people talking naively of atheism/agnosticism/theism as if it were a monodimensional continuum, it reminds me of the similarly naive “right/left” description of political positions.
I’m not so sure. By making atheism a positive claim, you are inviting the immediate and inevitable rejoinder, “Prove it”. Better the burden of flailing to prove the unprovable remain with the god-botherers.
I’m not so sure. By making atheism a positive claim, you are inviting the immediate and inevitable rejoinder, “Prove it”. Better the burden of flailing to prove the unprovable remain with the god-botherers.
I’m not so sure. By making atheism a positive claim, you are inviting the immediate and inevitable rejoinder, “Prove it”. Better the burden of flailing to prove the unprovable remain with the god-botherers.
I doubt that god exists. I doubt that Peter Pan lives forever. There is a very small possibility that Santa Clause can fly. I consider myself an Atheist, for the sole reason that I have seen more evidence of Santa than Satan.
To be fair, PZ pointed out that these folks were not strictly atheists in the second comment.
Why he did not point it out in the post itself is a puzzlement.
(Maybe they can say: “These folks did not believe Jesus Christ was God” and throw George Washington in there, too.