Atheism Is Not a Religion
As a person who identifies as an atheist (and pointedly not an agnostic), I found this answer to the question of whether "atheism is just another religion" to be highly satisfactory. Here's the full text, from Quora contributor Chris O'Regan:
There's an old saying in response to the allegation that atheism is a religion: "Then not collecting stamps must be a hobby, or baldness must be a hair colour".
"Religion" is a difficult thing to define, but most useful definitions of the term will include a belief in the supernatural or supernatural elements. An atheist, by contrast, is simply someone who does not hold a belief in god (an "agnostic" is someone who takes the position that it is not possible to "know" whether or not god exists - many believers in gods and many atheists therefore qualify as agnostics). Someone might be an atheist and still have a belief in some supernatural claims, like reincarnation - they may even be a follower of what is normally termed a religion. Some types of Buddhism and Hinduism deny the existence of gods - they are effectively atheist religions.
The definition of "atheist" does not encompass anything more than a non-belief in god. There are no atheist rituals, holidays, worship ceremonies, mantras, prayers, holy books, priests, or anything else that is normally associated with religion (even though not all religions have all these things, atheism as an idea incorporates none of these things).
Atheism is a philosophical position, but on its own does not encompass an entire belief system. Many atheists, but by no means all, are secular humanists. Secular humanism is a belief system, not a religion, because it likewise does not incorporate rituals, ceremonies, priests, a common calendar, or a belief in the supernatural. It's simply a philosophy on the best way to live your life.
Many religious people claim that atheism "is just another religion" to avoid confronting the fact that their own religious beliefs have no empirical grounding in evidence. One does not have to be called an atheist to express scepticism to a given supernatural claim, and whenever somebody offers solid logical counterarguments to the existence of god, whatever name you give them is irrelevant. What's important is answering the argument convincingly
February 19th, 2012 - 22:38
Huh, by that definition I would be considered an agnostic. Which is weird, because I consider myself a strong atheist. I almost think of the chance of a god or gods existing in a similar vein as the Drakes equation, except that the odds are minuscule (like waaay less than .00000000000000001%) considering there is no evidence of the existence of one and we aren’t talking about bacteria-like life living on planets millions of light years away. To me, that is the most logical position: one cannot prove the complete absence of a god because it is not possible, it is just extremely unlikely.
February 19th, 2012 - 23:03
To be honest, I think the complete and absolute claim that a god doesn’t exist is almost as unscientific as claiming the existence of a god (although generally making shit up is a lot worse than just claiming that something made up doesn’t actually exist). But I think that’s where the “atheism is a religion” comes into play.
February 19th, 2012 - 23:36
Jascha is correct. If you require ‘belief’ in your argument, then its logical coherence is disrupted. Atheism requires a belief that there are no gods. In some cases, arguments with evidence are constructed against specific gods, like the Christian God, because there are characteristics to dissect and falsify. But in general, Gods have characteristics that cannot be known, and falsifying attributes that cannot be quantified/qualified is not possible. Jascha has taken a probability argument, speaking of the unlikelihood of a God given empirical evidence. That is a better way of defining atheism, but for most individuals that puts him in the agnostic category. Since belief is necessary in the current popular definition of atheism, it has an attribute of religion – faith – which is not necessary in science, and thus makes it closer to religion than most atheists would feel comfortable with. Of course, we could just change the definition of atheism to include a rational object to the existence of God(s), rather than a belief in its non-existence.
February 20th, 2012 - 00:21
I understand your points of view, but I disagree that atheism requires “faith” or “belief” in any way that we commonly understand it. As I sit in my apartment in New York City typing this comment, I reject the notion that there is an enormous pink elephant standing beside me. I cannot see an elephant, hear it, feel it, smell it, touch it, or in any other way sense its presence. Technically, this does not rule out the possibility that such an elephant exists beyond the power of my sensory perception. But if I were to call myself an “agnostic” on the question of whether there is a pink elephant in my apartment, people would rightfully question my sanity.
Technically, one could sit and come up with an infinite list of things that he does not believe are true. If I were to assert that the Eiffel Tower is in New York, that the Earth is closer to the sun than Mercury, and that the German and Italian languages are identical, you would not be “agnostic” on the question of whether I am correct. You wouldn’t “believe” that I was incorrect. You would “know” it.
Now, you could spin some sort of epistemelogical argument that belief and knowledge are the same, but we as humans differentiate between the two concepts because it is useful to do so. Jascha telling me that he believes the baseball game starts at 7:30 and Jascha telling me knows the game starts at 7:30 are two different things, and I would perceive them differently.
So my question for agnostics is simply this: what else are you agnostic about? In the purest philosophical sense, I understand the argument for agnosticism. But let’s consider the context in which the term “agnostic” came into regular usage. Agnosticism, as presently defined in our society, is the refusal to commit between either the belief in a supernatural power or in recognition of its absence. I would argue that agnosticism creates a false equivalence between irrational religious faith and recognition of its absence, rendering both possibilities as equally valid when in fact they are not.
The only reason that the question of God’s existence receives any special consideration is because so many billions of people around the world have some form of religious faith. If there were, say, temples scattered throughout the world in which people gathered to worship pink elephants that live invisibly among human beings, then I suppose we could have a similar discussion about atheism and agnosticism in respect to them.
Both of you, Jascha and Russell, know much more about science than I do. So I want to ask- in what realm of science does the question of whether something for which there is absolutely zero evidence of any kind- not even any sort of plausible empirical theory- prove as divisive? Is it unscientific to deny the existence of pink elephants (or whatever)? As a lay person, I would say that it pretty clearly isn’t.
February 20th, 2012 - 05:11
You have to be careful of the Tea Pot in the sky argument. Using an argument that insinuates that belief in a pink elephant makes the other party stupid plays more to emotion than reason. It can also easily offend. If you would like a Pink Elephant, you can have Ganesha. I am sure there are plenty of people who would say that he IS nearby. Using an argument that has the following component, “I just can’t believe that..”, “This is ridiculous..” is not sophisticated, it’s trite. Those are the same arguments utilized to fight off evolution. For example, William Paley had his Watchmaker argument: That if we find a watch in the road, we assume that a consciousness was in charge of its complex structure. He could not imagine any other way in which a complex structure could be created. He ‘just’ couldn’t see how. Whether or not your imagination allows for a Pink Elephant is irrelevant, maybe your imagination has a small creative range
. What is important, is the the rigor by which we develop explanations for the universe. Emotional arguments, or common sense arguments are not rigorous, they are simple, lack inclusion of the facts and play on what individuals find to be normal. Atheism assumes knowledge that we cannot verify, so it has a faith component. Whether you want it to have faith or not isn’t the point. Agnosticism is the exclusion of the commitment to a belief. If you would like to reverse the two definitions, there is an etymological precedence. Precision and Accuracy have been reversed in meaning colloquially (USA) as compared to their usage in science. Language is at the beck and call of humanity, so I assume that your usage could very well be the correct one in the following decades or centuries.
February 20th, 2012 - 10:24
You can easily test the hypothesis that there is a pink elephant behind you. You turn around, check to see if there is a pink elephant. If there is no pink elephant, you can reject the hypothesis that there is a pink elephant behind you. We could go into statistic theory about how confident you can be to reject a hypothesis (the magic number is science is arbitrarily p = 0.05), but lets just pretend that in this case simply turning around and not seeing the pink elephant is sufficient.
OK, now do that with proving there is no god type thing anywhere in this world or anywhere else in the universe. Its just simply not a testable hypothesis. Therefore I cannot reject the hypothesis that there is no god.
I completely agree that the only reason the existence of a god gets so much attention is due to our cultural past. It has no bearing as to whether or not there is a god or not or whether or not you can prove the existence of one.
What else am I agnostic about? I like the idea of the Drakes equation, so I guess life on other planets. On the ability of Kurt Suzuki to ever hit 30 home runs. Or Santorum becoming president of the United States.
February 20th, 2012 - 10:26
My point isn’t that a belief in a pink elephant makes the other party stupid, it’s precisely that it makes them irrational. There’s nothing emotional about this argument; I personally don’t care one way or another in what other people believe, so long as it doesn’t infringe on my ability not to believe.
There’s a distinction I’m making between “not believing” and “believing in nothing”. My atheism is the former, while you’re arguing that atheism is better characterized by the latter. That is, an active belief in something that does not exist. I can’t speak for all atheists, but I can assure you that I don’t spend any time actively believing in no God, just as I waste no time thinking about other things that do not exist. Atheism, unlike religion, is not an active faith. It isn’t a faith at all. It is the pure absence of faith, not faith in absence.
So when you write that atheism assumes knowledge that we cannot verify, I disagree. And while absence of proof is not always proof of absence, that’s the way to bet
February 20th, 2012 - 10:27
Also: http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/technology/african-sun-puts-albino-jumbo-at-risk-1.231364
A very improbable event (albino elefant plus sunburn) but now you have a pink elefant. A lot higher probable event than the existence of a god, but still an unlikely event.
February 20th, 2012 - 20:14
Haha! Well, there you go. I thought you’d appreciate the A’s reference.
February 21st, 2012 - 01:35
As a general rule, it is very difficult in science to prove that something doesn’t exist. This is probably less the case in the hard sciences, but in biology, if you look hard enough it seems you can find almost anything (within reason). It is for this reason, textbooks are usually simply wrong because they make absolute claims that are later found to be untrue. For instance, in undergrad I learned that you are born with a certain number of neurons and your body will never create more. That has proven to be false after somebody found neurogenesis, and then many people started finding it all over the place. Another example is scientists never believed that life could be sustained without photosynthesis: it just wasn’t possible because every eco-system ever seen needed photosynthesis to generate energy. Yet, after many years they found chemotrophs hanging out deep in the bottom of the ocean in vents that could use sulfuric compounds for energy instead of light.
February 21st, 2012 - 01:57
You know, this is really weird. According to these definitions I am both an atheist and an agnostic. They are supposed to be mutually exclusive, so I think these are just crappy definitions.
“An atheist, by contrast, is simply someone who does not hold a belief in god”
I satisfy this definition. I don’t hold a belief in god because there is no evidence for one. Its also a very weird thing to exist.
“an “agnostic” is someone who takes the position that it is not possible to “know” whether or not god exists – many believers in gods and many atheists therefore qualify as agnostics”
As previously argued, I satisfy this definition as well. So what the hell?
February 21st, 2012 - 04:41
Jascha, it is as hard in other sciences, if not harder, to verify that something is untrue/not in existence (consider the energies necessary to explain phenomena in higher dimensions; energy we will likely never have access to). At least we are surrounded by living things, and can acquire massive amounts of data from them (Go Biology!).
Matt, saying someone has faith is different than being a part of a faith, which can refer to a religion. I did not argue that atheism is a faith, rather that it utilizes a leap of faith in its core precepts. I am not equating religion with atheism under all guises; I am explaining that to not have faith at all is science, and it is a very hard line to stand by (which many scientist can’t help but cross). As Jascha has tried to explain, your assertion does not have conclusive evidence, but rather a position that has the following construction, “It is irrational to believe in a god because it is unlikely, so I (we) can be SURE that god(s) do not exist.” Jascha and I are stopping at unlikely, you continue on to SURETY. Continuing on to sure is what defines an atheist. It is like a wager. You are willing to say to someone that you’re willing to double down on the hare being faster than the turtle, something we can all agree on, because of a mountain of data that has shown as much. Jascha and I might take the bet under strict limits of time; yes for some finite amount of time, no under an infinite amount. In other words, where you are 100% sure, we are only 99.999999 … %.
Does this distinction matter? Absolutely. Though it may seem trivial to most people, this level of precision is necessary in science to making fewer mistakes. Most tragedies in science and especially its relationship to politics and religion is because of a lack of rigor in argumentation and interpretation of evidence.