Atheism is not a religion but an opinion. Many Christians seem to be keen on claiming that it is in fact a religion. There are so many things wrong with this statement that it’s difficult to know where to start. Nonetheless I shall try, before moving on to the main point of this post.
Firstly, the contrast is often made between either atheism and Christianity or atheism and religion. Neither are opposites. Atheism is properly the opposite of theism. Theists need not be religious and atheists may be. I find it ironic that fundamentalist Christians and certain atheists are in agreement about the nature of the dispute. Both of them take a historical-grammatical approach to Scripture. Both are also realist in their interpretation of scientific discourse. Both of them see religion as centrally involving a belief system. Both see religion as essentially conservative and atheism as essentially liberal. And so on. This isn’t about that, but there is a whole list of things the people I just described as “certain atheists” agree on which could further be described, as they do themselves, as “New Atheists”. These are prominent figures in Western Anglophone atheism, including of course, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Of these, only Dennett is an academic philosopher, and I recently went into why I found his model of consciousness implausible. The others come across to me as good communicators who are popular but who don’t really know what they’re talking about, and moreover don’t even want to know that they don’t know. Then there are their fans, sometimes campaigning fans, who have a more derived version of their belief system, and in their case, as opposed to atheism generally, it really does look like a belief system, though it must be stressed that that’s not the same thing as a religion.
I once gave a talk about philosophical counselling at Leicester Secular Society. I wanted to go in there with the image, or ‘εθος to use the Greek rhetorical term, of being a philosopher because that’s what I am, but was introduced as a herbalist, which I also am. I gave the talk and took questions. One of the questioners, and I don’t think they’re at all representative, became exceedingly focussed on the fact that I practiced herbalism and seemed to project all sorts of things onto that fact from their perspective as an atheist, even to the extent that a short section where I’d been into Stoicism was turned into its opposite and they also denied that Buddhism was a religion because it’s non-theistic. They were oddly focussed on the question of the efficacy of herbalism when this had nothing to do with the topic of the talk. I fully recognise that this was just one individual who shouldn’t be taken as representative of any movement, but it felt very familiar and is of course an example of ad hominem. That said, I have my doubts about that being a genuine fallacy because it amounts to a special case of inductive inference: one witnesses a large number of false statements or invalid arguments emerging from a particular person, or perhaps type of person as one understands the term, and draws the inference that they are reliably unreliable. However, scepticism about induction is also common in philosophical circles, as with Hume, and to that extent ad hominem is indeed fallacious. The problem then is that rejecting that out of inductive scepticism is likely to scupper one’s ability to argue successfully in the majority of discourse, although it wouldn’t always. Tempted to put an emoji here!
A notable claim made by this person was that Buddhism wasn’t a religion. This doesn’t measure up to Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion: ritual, mythos, ethics, hierarchy, material, social and experiential. It is in fact a distinctively Abrahamic and Western way of looking at religion, which doesn’t work, for example, with Spiritism, which is atheistic, or Scientology/Freezone beliefs. It is in fact a straw man.
Atheism is not a religion, to be sure. There are atheist religions, such as the ones just mentioned, and there are atheist adherents to faiths generally regarded as theistic. Theism is, similarly, not a religion. However, leaving aside the fact of these two categories of atheist religious people and atheist religions, there are people who are both atheist and have a number of other beliefs which correlate and relate to atheism. These often seem to be people who consider atheism to be an important issue and may also be anti-theist, and I suspect these people are either themselves survivors of spiritual abuse or influenced by such survivors, because rather than being non-conformist they tend to be anti-conformist, and this is probably one cause of their problematic claims.
Just to paint a stereotypical picture, the minority of atheists I have in mind also tend to be left wing (as am I of course), scientifically realist, metaphysically naturalistic, take the historical-grammatical approach to sacred texts and physicalist with regards to the mind-body problem. It isn’t entirely clear to me what Dennett’s view of consciousness is, but it seems to amount to something like functionalism, behaviourism or physicalism. Maybe he’s just vague. All of these are defensible positions, but I get the impression they haven’t been thought about. I get a similar impression with a couple of other core claims, as opposed to these more peripheral views. These are the claims that:
- atheism is the absence of belief in God or deities (some people tend to say “gods” at this point, but that complicates the issue with sexism), and
- Jesus is not a historical figure.
Neither of these propositions is considered academically respectable. Although there are historians who claim there was no historical Jesus, I don’t think any of them are considered reputable. That’s outside my area of expertise of course – I’m not a historian. However, the first claim is pretty central and not at all sensible. The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, which is a pretty standard reference work, defines atheism as:
The position that affirms the non-existence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief.
This is a respectable work of philosophy and this definition was written by the Purdue professor William L Rowe, who came up with the concept of “friendly atheism”, which is the acceptance that theists may have rational belief in God even though we’re ultimately wrong, and this extends to the principle of charity, which is to interpret arguments rationally. Given my conversation at the Secular Hall, this was not extended to me by that person on that occasion, and this is a substantial part of the problem.
Atheism must be the presence of belief that God does not exist. The claim, for example, that babies are atheists because they lack belief in God is problematic in a couple of ways. One is the obvious idea that a system which has no beliefs can be coöpted into the fellowship of non-believers. It can, of course, but it means that inanimate objects, lacking as they probably do belief in God, are also atheist, and this is intuitively not sensible. The other is that this is in fact a presumption, predicated on the idea that a baby with beliefs would not believe in God if the idea hadn’t been somehow introduced to her. A fetus is in an entirely living world. A baby has left that world but given the common tendency in children’s stories and pretend play to anthropomorphise, it wouldn’t be surprising if babies are hylozoists – believe the world is entirely alive. That belief is pretty close to pantheism, meaning that to my mind babies are unlikely to be atheist from the point where they can be said to have beliefs. Moreover, casting my mind back, I can clearly recall imagining a powerful nebulous person protecting me when I slept alone, and it makes sense that babies would develop a belief in God due to separation anxiety even if they didn’t have it already. That would mean they’d transitioned from atheism to theism, but it’s still an early theism which does not arise from actively being taught that a deity exists. There is no indoctrination here. Babies are not atheists. Nor are people who have never been introduced to the idea of God, such as perhaps people living in officially atheist states or states with a history of official atheism such as Albania, North Korea, China or the former East Germany. If they’ve never thought about whether there’s a God or not, they are not atheist.
The idea of passive atheism is problematic when applied more widely. As well as involving the absurd-sounding claim that inanimate objects are atheist, it also applies the other way round and makes someone who doesn’t know anything about Schanuel’s Conjecture, and that includes me, an “a-Schanuelist” or something. It means every possible active belief one has not yet acquired needs to fall under that description, which is very crowded and messy. This was in fact one of the chief objections to Frege’s view of concepts as outside the mind, which I happen to agree with. Looking at it that way, the beliefs that we have can be thought of as notions with which we have actively established a connection. Atheism, defined passively, is not such a notion for non-atheists. And in fact there are also claims that babies are born theists. This may be equally absurd, but both claims are bald assertions without a clear way of testing their veracity. This claim does not belong in a rational atheist’s inventory.
The other claim is sometimes awkwardly referred to as “Jesus Mythicism”. This is the claim that Jesus, more authentically known as something like Yeshua ben Yosef, is fictional. The motivation for this claim is rather obscure to me. It isn’t necessary to believe anything along the lines of the virgin birth, resurrection or miracles performed by Jesus to believe that he existed, and in fact if it could be established that the historical Jesus did exist and didn’t do all that stuff, it would make many Christians atheist if they were intellectually honest with themselves. There is a problem with finding documentary or material evidence for most people living in the ancient world unless they were royalty or in a position of authority. We can be pretty sure that there were Afrikan governors of Britain and Afrikan Roman emperors because they were in that position, and we can probably assert with confidence that someone like Seneca or Pliny the Elder existed because their writings have survived, but Yeshua ben Yosef was not like that. Most people of his status living at that time and in that place will have been lost to history, and this is the norm in such circumstances. A list has also been produced of people who could be expected to have mentioned him if he had existed. This list is unreliable because it includes people whose surviving written work is very limited, such as a couple of poems. Are we expected to believe that the few lines which have been handed down to us would mention Jesus? If only a couple of these blog posts survived into the next century and happen not to mention Boris Johnson or Justin Welby, would that mean they didn’t exist? Like anyone else, I don’t spend most of my time harping on about famous people.
Another question is, why wouldn’t he exist? Claiming to be the Messiah is a viable career opportunity for a Jewish boy born in particular circumstances, and Jesus is not the only Jewish person ever to make that claim. In a sense, the burden of proof is really on the idea that he didn’t exist rather than that he did. A deeply religious community is under threat from an occupying power and has a myth that a military saviour will arise from its ranks in its time of need, and lo and behold it appears that someone did, name of Yeshua ben Yosef. That’s not a remotely surprising happening. Nor is him being crucified as a result of his actions.
There are also the claims that Jesus is an accretion of pagan myths who was made into a supposèdly real figure. Not only does this not have a bearing on whether there was an actual Jesus, but it’s odd that such a strongly anti-pagan group such as the Jews would allow all that into their religion when even decades later they were still dubious about the idea that Gentiles could become Christian. There absolutely are, in my opinion, similarities between Mithraism and Christianity and between the stories of other figures such as Osiris and Jesus, but that doesn’t mean everything about him is a myth. The gospels also go to some lengths to explain how Jesus could be from Nazareth when the prophecies said he’d be born in Bethelehem, and to explain why Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist when he was supposed to be the sinless son of God. Why introduce these complications if they didn’t actually happen? Why not just come up with a mythical character who fulfils more of the prophecies more straightforwardly? Why would there be anything to explain?
The historians Tacitus and Suetonius refer to Jesus. Although Josephus appears to as well, this reads like an obvious later insertion into the text. More specifically, Tacitus says:
Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt
Unlike the Josephus quote, which I’m not going to bother with, this is in keeping with the flow of the longer passage and repeats details found in the gospels.
It’s also claimed, rather more controversially, that the Talmud refers, disparagingly of course, to Jesus, but the bits I’ve read don’t particularly come across to me as referring to him specifically, just someone called the same name.
It’s important that some arguments offered by anti-theistic atheists succeed. We would all benefit, for example, from a secular society which places equal value on all beliefs, and it’s a no-brainer that sexism and homophobia, both supported by fundamentalists, become things of the past. Churches also have no business exploiting the poor and gullible or acting as bastions of racism. Rejecting evolution and in some cases even claiming we live on a flat Earth is harmful to medical and other scientific progress. All of this needs to be defeated, and in that respect anti-theistic atheists are our allies. For this very reason, it’s important that they argue from a position of credibility and a good reputation that they need to know what they’re talking about. Therefore, adopting a mythos like this – that there was no historical Jesus and that atheism is the default position – harms us all, and harms the more vulnerable people in society such as the uneducated, gay or disabled. Speaking admittèdly as a theist, I would seriously request that atheists of this kind stop making these claims, because they overstep the marks of plausibility and truth which surely we’re all committed to.
A Box Of Chocolates 