Pesky pointy-headed pencil-neck geeks
It’s a funny thing, but there are people who think it’s worth pointing out that ‘atheists are no more rational than anybody else.’ Gosh, really? And here I was thinking that just by being an atheist, I automatically and indisputably occupied an Upper Level of humankind where the air is thinner and the rationality flows like wine.
No actually I don’t think anything so stupid, and I never have. I do think something much more limited and carefully phrased than that…but of course that wouldn’t be exciting to contradict, because if you make limited carefully-phrased claims then you’re probably not saying anything as obviously and risibly stupid as ‘atheists are more rational than anybody else.’ What would I say? That atheism as such is more rational than theism as such. That’s about it, really. There are plenty of atheists who aren’t atheists for particularly rational reasons, and there are rational people who are theists, though that one is trickier (because I don’t agree that being theist is itself rational). There are also plenty of atheists who are atheists for rational reasons but who still aren’t demonstrably ‘more rational than anybody else’; there are also atheists who are more rational than most people…but that’s so far away from the invented claim that ‘atheists are more rational than anybody else’ that it’s beside the point.
Maybe such claims don’t mean atheists in general but rather explicit or vocal atheists – ‘New’ atheists, in short. Maybe the jibe is really ‘New atheists are no more rational than anybody else,’ because the idea is that any atheist who is overt about it must be thinking she is more rational than anybody else. Maybe the idea is that being overt about it is the same thing as thinking one is more rational than anybody else. But that isn’t necessarily the case. One can want to be rational, careful, critical, thoughtful, reflective, questioning, skeptical, without thinking one is any of those things, much less that is more so than anybody else.
But it’s otiose to point this out, of course; jeers like ‘atheists are no more rational than anybody else’ are part of the Sarah Palinization of discourse. Nyah nyah, you read too many books; neener neener, you think you’re so smart; you New York latte-drinking elitists think you know everything.
I tend to think that an atheist is a just a person who is unwilling to accept the truth value of any proposition without evidence.
Given that religion is the most egregious generator of propositions that have no evidence to back them up, a person who does not accept unsubstantiated propositions spends a lot of time wearing the atheist hat.
But not by choice.
The role is thrust upon you by those willing to accept the irrational.
All generalizations are false, including this one!
“Atheist” may be getting used in contraposition to “agnostic”, which latter word means “doesn’t know whether God exists” to most people. Therefore these people would think that atheists do know, or do think they know. But the conclusion is unwelcome, so it must be rejected.
I’d just like to point out that I’m not a pencil-necked geek, and if anyone says different, I’ll hit them with my pocket-protector.
I resent the imputation that I have ever drunk a latte in New York. Whether I am an elitist or not, I couldn’t possibly comment.
But coffee with milk in it is an abomination, and must be stamped-out in order to keep our caffeine ideology pure.
I can’t provide you with any evidence for that, you understand. But if the voices in my head tell me it’s true, then it must be.
Stands to reason.
Then again, there’s this–
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/26/liberals.atheists.sex.intelligence/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Higher IQ therefore more often rational? Maybe!
Higher IQ therefore always rational? Definitely not.
Steve: When you say “I tend to think that an atheist is a just a person who is unwilling to accept the truth value of any proposition without evidence”, I think you are giving the definition of a skeptic, not that of an atheist. Definitions that turns the statement “all skeptics are atheists“ into a tautology aren’t very useful. It shuts down an amusing and sometimes interesting debate about that very question.
But of course, your second paragraph provides ample reason to suspect that skeptics tend to be atheists, as well as an argument that they should be.
Jean, according to this article, your IQ is like the brightness of your flashlight, and rationality is the direction in which you point it: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427321.000-clever-fools-why-a-high-iq-doesnt-mean-youre-smart.html
You know, Ophelia, your comments might have much more force were you to say address them to a very specific instance or set of instances. This one above is all a bit vague.
As for jeering, well now, empty jeering’s wrong, I think we can agree on that. But it gets really interesting when we look at who jeers, and how, hmmm?
And whatever you may think, it is not just anti-theist atheists who are vocal. Plenty of atheists of all types and all differing opinions are still vocal atheists who are vocal about their atheism, so a bit less of that big sense of victimhood might well be in order.
Tim Skellet-Gurdur, yes, I know, and I nearly always do address my comments to specific instances, but on this particular occasion I wanted to keep it vague.
Sure, about jeering, and yes I’m aware that I do a lot of jeering myself. But I do try to be accurate about my jeering.
I’m not sure what your last para means. I also object to the label ‘anti-theist atheists’ because I think it should be ‘anti-theism atheists.’ It’s a common strawman accusation against ‘New’ atheists that they hate and bully and are mean to all theists. That’s not true. And atheists who are vocal atheists who are vocal about their atheism are, as far as I know, the very definition of ‘New’ atheists – so I really don’t know what you’re getting at.
I love the word otiose.
Thank you for writing it.
My pleasure dallink.
I used to have an otios but one winter it went asleep and it never woke up.
Sadly there’s no heaven so I won’t see it again.
‘The role is thrust upon you by those willing to accept the irrational.’
Quite. Atheism is defined in oposition to theism. Without theism atheism would lose all meaning.
There is no word for someone who doesn’t believe in unicorns.
: (
I’m sad about the otios!
God I’m suggestible.
Cheer up. You can breed new otios from a set of Bunting, Mooney and Fish columns wrapped around a fish head which has been left in the sun for an hour or so. Just wait a day for hatching and unwrap the outer layers to find clean larvae, and drop them in a can of bran to keep them fresh and happy ready for a wonderful day’s fishing.