Expertise not required for entry
Not believing there is a god should be enough (enough for atheism, enough for being an atheist). We shouldn’t have to sign up to more. We don’t have time to figure out all the things that we think don’t exist. We can just not think they exist, and let it go at that – or we can not think they exist and then go on to think they don’t exist, if we want to and have time, but that’s extra. Just not thinking so is the minimum needed for entry, or at least it should be.
There’s no sense in believing things exist for no reason – so we don’t (if we have sense) – and for atheists ‘god’ is one of those things. That’s important. The negative matters more than the affirmative.
The minimal definition matters because it has to do with reasons. We don’t believe because we see no good reason to believe – we know of no evidence that god exists. Believing that god doesn’t exist requires some as it were expertise – and like theism, atheism is a public, non-expert view. You can have more detailed or engaged or ‘expert’ atheism, but that shouldn’t be the main definition, because everyone should be able to Just Say No as easily as everyone is able to say yes.
I agree with this as well. The minimal definition seems to be all that matters for practical purposes. The stronger definition is an interesting thing to debate, philosophically, but it doesn’t really capture the salient point about people who identify as “atheists.”
I’m afraid I’ve gone a bit off the rhetorical rails in the other thread. To this one, I’ll just add a sincere, “Ramen, sister!”
One can also ask the believer on what basis he has rejected religions other than his own.
I fully agree.
Personally I would add that, as an unnecessary variable, we should bother about God as much as we bother about the fairy teeth. The problem, of course, if that militantly religious people are equally hostile to active and passive atheism (I don’t think they see the difference), and they are often ready to take measures against it (or even convert us, which is worse). So, for me, taking a stance as regards the God-issue is more a question of self-defence than a philosophical question: I’m defending my right to live my life without divine interference.
I’ve always found the ‘not believing God exists/believing God doesn’t exist’ distinction a little tricky to grasp. OB’s writing elucidates it a bit more though I still think in some contexts they are more or less identical.
I guess I can understand it in a practical sense, ie in the division between passive ‘religion doesn’t matter to me/I don’t believe in God because nothing has given me reason to’, which is almost (but not quite perhaps) a default ‘I am atheist because I am not a theist’, and the active ‘I believe God doesn’t exist because of xyz evidence he doesn’t’.
I was going to add that it was in a philosophical sense that I struggle with the distinction but now I’ve written the above it actually seems a little clearer. Perhaps to put it another way it is a distinction between an argument against theism – denial of theist reasoning – and a argument for atheism, which is trickier as it often seems to amount to the same thing of repudiating theist arguments. I suppose naturalistic explanations for the world and reasoned humanist ethics would count as positive arguments for atheism that don’t depend (or at least only by default imply) on negating theist arguments. Though the latter case is an argument for an atheistic (or just secular?) system of ethics being better, rather than necessarily correct/true, so is probably an argument for the superiority of secularism rather than the falsehood of religious truth claims.
Really, “there is no good reason to believe” is pretty much it.
I would go just a little further and say that the entire class of “supernatural beings” is a non-starter and there’s no reason to think that assigning more powers and responsibilities to a supernatural being makes it more likely to exist.
G wrote:
“I’m afraid I’ve gone a bit off the rhetorical rails in the other thread. To this one, I’ll just add a sincere, “Ramen, sister!””
G, you do realize, I hope, that you’re required to *sing* that phrase accompanied by a IV-I chord cadence?
Ophelia – off-topic, but didn’t know where else to post it. You’ve got a link to the Age’s story on the NoToPope Coalition’s court victory against the anti-annoyance laws on World Youth Day. Did you notice this:
“In dismissing the other points of the coalition’s claim, Justice French found that parts of the act banning the sale of certain items including stickers, badges and T-shirts did not infringe upon the right to free political communication.”
Um, I don’t know any of the details (any Aussies here who do?), but does that mean what I think it means? That the Parliament can decide to ban outright the sale of any article with a slogan that they don’t like? Or, is there some nuance to this I’m not getting?
Josh S.
Josh, I did notice it, but only in passing. (I was rushing, as is so often the case.) Hmmm…it could be just a matter of licensing (or not) to sell there but not here? Typical grey area for free speech, if so? Except parliaments don’t usually concern themselves with licensing decisions, do they, so maybe not so grey. Well, good question.
Ophelia – I’m reading the court decision, and also the original statute, the World Youth Day Act – to figure out what all this means. I’m finding some very interesting definitions, and I want to write something up explaining this in case anyone is interested. But I don’t want to clog up your comments section with off-topic stuff. Any suggestions?
Josh
Josh – send it to me: maybe I’ll make it a guest post.
Ophelia, that is one of your best notes (posts, whatever you call them) ever. I could elaborate, but you’ve said it so well, it would just be gilding the lily.
I will elaborate. On Freethinker last week there was some debate over the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life.” Many people objected to the word “probably”. But to my mind, it’s fine. There’s probably no God, there’s probably no gods, there’s probably no Flying Spaghetti Monster. There’s no good reason to believe that any of them exist. There’s nothing to see here. move along.
Thanks Mark!
Did people at Freethinker object to ‘probably’ because it’s too much or because it’s not enough?
They (some of them) objected to “There’s probably no God” on the grounds that it is too weak a statement, representing an agnostic position rather than an atheist one.