Different atheisms

(Okay, that turned into a bit of a blog break. But I’m back. I think I got overwhelmed with all the things I want to write)

What does it mean when I say “I am an atheist”?

Words are funny ol’ things. We throw them around in conversation with the assumption, usually, that we know what we mean, and that others will know what we mean. But it can be tricky, because words vary in their meanings by context. When I say “I am an atheist,” the meaning depends on what, exactly, we’re talking about.

There’s the philosophical position, of course. For me, that position is best summarized by a chapter title from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion:  there almost certainly is no god. It’s a scientific, agnostic sense of atheism — we can shade the probabilities (much like scientists can decide the chances that there’s an ocean on Europa, say), but knowledge is never completely certain. Nonetheless, I think the facts of the universe, as we understand them at this point, almost certainly point to a universe with no creator or intelligent controller.

Then, of course, there’s your God. Yahweh Allah Jehovah God Vishnu Whoever. They don’t exist. At all. Even if there is some kind of creator being out there, for whatever value that “out there” can have, it ain’t them. The religions of humanity are just that — humanity’s. Our creations. My atheism is pretty damn strong here. I don’t see any reason to think those gods are anything but human constructs. There’s a personal experience issue here, too — I’ve never had Jesus whispering to me, or anything that I’ve been able to interpret as something like that. I don’t see the Plan of some deity at work in my life.

I could still be wrong, but I feel pretty comfortable that it’s a bit like the fact that we could be wrong about the Earth going around the Sun — it’s technically possible, but at this point so unlikely that NASA doesn’t lose much sleep over it. (If you’re religious and can’t fathom how I could be so certain that your God doesn’t exist, that your whole religion is nothing more than human-created myth, I will simply say, “Zeus.”)

So there’s the philosophical/scientific question of a creator being, and there’s the specific stance on human myths. How much I care depends, in part, on which we’re talking about. I really don’t have a horse in the race on the philosophical/scientific front — that is, I’m not particularly wedded to the notion that there is no creator being. It’s mostly just an interesting question, including pondering, without the bias of religion, what such a being might be like, if they exist. But if we’re talking your religion, Christianity or whatever, I care very deeply indeed. The existence of the Christian God, for instance, would be such an affront to any decent set of ethics, that I find the idea deeply repugnant. I not only don’t believe he exists — I really don’t want him to! (If you’re religious and don’t understand why, I will simply say, “Huitzilopochtli.”)

A lot of confusion results when we don’t appreciate those different atheisms. Many religious folk, in particular, often confuse what they see as the “arrogant” dismissal of their God/religion (without ever noticing, of course, that they are just as “arrogant” about other gods/religions) as an arrogant, absolutest stance on the issue of creator in general. I also suspect that there are some atheists like that — so caught up in the “reject a specific mythological construction” stage that they haven’t gone on to the messier, more interesting philosophical/scientific level. It’s good for all of us to remember that those are different questions, though.