Greetings Readers,

So, I am an atheist.

There, blog post done: We can all go home now…

All joking aside, whilst I have been an atheist for practically my entire life, I’ve never really sat down to talk, in detail, about what that means to me. One of the reasons for this, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that it is an inherently passive act. To clarify that statement a little, I will admit to being continually surprised that people labour under the common misconception that being an atheist is an active process; must be an active process – It seems quite ironic when you consider, to quote Wikipedia, “Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities” with the word ‘absence’ in particular underscoring the fact that no effort is really expended. Now, I’m not attempting to be disingenuous here, nor am I ignorant of the more proactive elements of atheism (esp. in terms of other atheist commentators) or campaigns to roll back the impact of religion on our day-to-day lives, it’s simply that I am trying to illustrate from the outset that, as a day-to-day fact of life, I do not wake up each morning and engage in a proactive process of rejection.

That being said, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion on various themes inherent to any discussion about atheism – S0 let’s see if we can work our way through some of the more mundane of those, and gain a little clarity along the way. Starting with the elephant in the room…

Religion

Ah religion – Where to begin?

I suppose this really is the big stepping off point for me and where atheists in general really seem to ‘get off the bus’ so to speak.

As far as I’m concerned religion arose as a panacea to the many problems faced by early man. It was a multi-purpose construct serving a range of functions, operating as a tacit tool of governance legitimising those in power, helping to incentivise (by various means) the moral and ethical standards of early human civilisations, providing social cohesion through a set of shared practices and reinforced cultural identity, and filling the vacuum left by the humanity’s limited understanding of the world around it. That being said, I feel I should clarify the statement, “As far as I’m concerned […]” because, again, this standpoint arguably doesn’t require any proactive internal struggle on my part. It’s just an irreducible fact. A simple understanding of human history and human cultures in the past ably demonstrates this. I don’t have to especially reject the ‘truth’ of any one religion, so much as have a basic understanding of human history. I’m not being forced to choose one competing paradigm over another because being an atheist is just the logical end product of that understanding.

It does mean, however, that I do find modern religion at best very strange, and at worst, deeply troubling.

First and foremost, I do find it difficult to reconcile how people can continue to adhere to paradigms and systems of understanding that are predicated on a limited, and often grossly erroneous, understanding of the world, especially when, quite apart from being able to place religion in a historical and social context, in the modern era we have access to a vast array of information, learning, and factual evidence, unavailable to our forebears, that directly contradicts the limited assumptions made by early human civilisations and shows them to be wrong. And not just arguably wrong, but plainly and definitively wrong. Where I find this to become deeply troubling, is when I consider the degree to which rational thought has to be suspended to comfortably accommodate these glaring inconsistencies – It actually frightens me sometimes, that someone who is normally a logical, rational human being with a well-reasoned understanding of the world, can essentially subsume that, to give primacy to archaic or anachronistic beliefs that utterly fly in the face of all those qualities.

Now, I’m by no means suggesting that anyone and everyone subscribing to a belief in the supernatural is a monster-in-waiting, but to me it’s a bit like opening Pandora’s box – If you can suspend clear, rational thought to justify adherence to a system of beliefs that are demonstrably in error or without basis in fact, what else can you use the same suspension of rational thought to justify just as easily?

Which leads nicely into another, related topic.

Morality and Ethics

With the above in mind, I often find it curious that atheism is so often considered at best amoral and at worst immoral as if morality can only exist within a religious framework. There exists an extensive body of research across many fields including (but not limited to), evolutionary theory, behavioural psychology (both human and animal) and game theory, which evidences the fact that, as basic, psychological mechanisms, ethics and morality exist as distinct phenomenon amongst organisms with sufficient thought processes to be considered as having ‘a psychology’, usually predicated on some form of empathy, but existing even if it is just as a process of wider species survival. In humans, this research tends to lead to the conclusion that, unless suffering from some form of psychological problem that impairs this capability, humans have an intrinsic sense of morality and ethics. This being the case, religion again becomes redundant – By being an atheist I’m not choosing to tacitly reject a particular religious paradigm concerning ethics and morality, I just don’t actually require a religious paradigm to have a sense of morality and ethics – It would simply be adding an unnecessary layer to an inherently straightforward process. Again, this is where I’m coming from, when I say atheism (for me at least) is inherently passive.

This also speaks to one of the purposes I think religion serves for many people: They don’t actually require religion to know right from wrong, do good to others, support their local community, or any of the other multitudinous acts that can be used to characterise a healthy moral and ethical outlook, it simply provides the motivation when it would otherwise be lacking or difficult to sustain alone. Many religions feature an obvious carrot and stick dynamic to achieve this (e.g. heaven and hell), but I think it is perhaps over-simplified to focus on this as the best example. To my mind at least, belonging to a religion gives people a ready-made and easily-identifiable framework around which to build (or discuss) their sense of morality and ethics, and/or coalesce as a group to put it into practice.

My problem (if indeed I have one) is that is all it is – It’s not a divine covenant with a supernatural entity that raises a particular person’s moral or ethical framework and the actions they take as a result, above others, it’s just a framework like any other. A mechanism. It is easily and demonstrably interchangeable with other similar frameworks, both religious and secular. It’s the latter point that is particularly pertinent to me as an atheist: You can achieve exactly the same effect by adherence to a secular school of morality and ethics, such as Humanism, or no particular school of morality and ethics, so once again, for me at least, religion becomes superfluous.

As a brief aside, I do, to a certain degree, actually find it quite troubling sometimes that (some) people feel they need that extra motivation to behave in a moral and ethical manner, or that it’s the only thing keeping them and those around them from behaving in an immoral or unethical manner.

Which leads nicely onto science!

Science

I have spoken at great length about reasoned, rational thought, and about arriving at atheism simply as a result of a process of logic. This in-and-of-itself arguably forms a cohesive paradigm and to be honest, I think that paradigm is best summed up under the catch-all term, ‘Science’. However, in debates about atheism versus theism, Science often arises as a point of considerable contention, and there is the argument continually put forward by those who find atheism and atheists to be problematic that ‘Science’ is our religion.

To be honest, I never know quite what to make of it.

What I mean by this, is that Science is the absolute antithesis of religion; science and religion are fundamentally and diametrically opposed paradigms, existing so far towards the ends of any conceivable spectrum that might contain them both, as to be utterly alien to one another. Religions (plural), essentially exist as inflexible, near-rigid bodies of dogma that are highly resistant to amendment or refinement: Frameworks, which at their point of creation, are designed to provide a complete and unalterable worldview that circumscribes the boundaries of human knowledge, dictating not only what is known, but the limit of what can be known, attempting to describe everything, all at once, in totality, invariably with the supernatural filling any potential gaps in the narrative. This contrasts very sharply with Science, which is an ongoing process, inherently flexible and designed to be continually amended and refined as the body of human knowledge expands, where the fitness of the framework is not a given and it is continually tested, changed or even discarded when it is found wanting; where there is always the starting assumption that not everything is known, and even what is known is simply the current ‘best fit’ with the highest probability of certitude.

If I ‘follow’ science, it is only because it is (and again, Wikipedia sums it up beautifully), “[…] a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe […]”. Basically, it provides me with the tools to support rational, logical and well-reasoned conclusions without any especial effort on my part or intellectual sophistry – I simply have to follow a logical, grounded process. It may be that the process is complex, or inherently complicated, but knowing that it is predicated on a replicable, empirical foundation provides greater confidence or ‘faith’ in the end results.

Which brings us neatly to the final phase of this entry…

Vocabulary

It’s a simple fact of life, that religion has had a huge impact on our vocabulary and that many words, phrases, and sayings have religious connotations if not origins, and I do sometimes find this problematic, especially when trying to explain myself.

Take the words ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ as prime examples: The latter in particular is one that I find especially irksome.

Although I am an atheist I still have faith in things: People, processes, etc. However, when I use the word ‘faith’ I am describing a sentiment that is entirely evidence-based and predicated on empirical experience. If I have ‘faith’ in a person, it is because they have demonstrated past reliability and trustworthiness, and I have readily available, direct experiences with them with which to make an informed judgment (or that they come recommended by someone, with whom I have the same). Likewise for a process, if I have ‘faith’ in a process, it’s for very similar reasons; either I have previous, direct experience upon which to judge the utility of the process, it is based upon readily understandable and replicable parameters, or at the very least, I can see that it has been founded upon logical, empirical processes (i.e. scientific method). In this regard, ‘faith’ as a dynamic within atheism doesn’t require me to suspend rational thought or significantly change my day-to-day paradigm to accommodate it, quite the opposite, I can trust or ‘have faith’ because it naturally compliments my normal method of reasoning.

I would add the additional point however that, as with any concept I hold, where (or in whom) I place my faith and what (or who) I choose to believe in, are always entirely subject to change if new evidence becomes available or new experiences dictate otherwise: This isn’t specific to me being an atheist, it’s just common sense.

And thus we arrive at our finale…

God

So we naturally come full circle – Hopefully when I now say, “I don’t believe in God. Gods. Deities. Other supernatural shenanigans. Etc. – I’m an atheist” the reasoning behind that statement is somewhat clearer: I am not rejecting their existence, so much as saying, I find no reason to believe in them. I am not in proactive denial, rather it’s just an end effect of a passive lack of belief: It would take, and does take, far more effort to attempt to explain their existence in the face of the stark vacuum of empirical evidence than to simply write it off because of the same.

That being said, being an atheist doesn’t make me devoid of an imagination and I do, on occasion, find the idea of a god or gods, to be an interesting and engaging intellectual challenge. For example, I sometimes find creationism an inherently fascinating concept: I don’t for one moment believe in its tenets, but discussing the nature of a potential creator god is an interesting thought exercise (For the record, in this example I always come back to the idea of god as a glorified software engineer, a programmer designing a bespoke system for some ineffable purpose). In a similar vein, if life exists on other worlds, I don’t believe it’s outside the realms of possibility that some that life might be comprised of higher order intelligences whose technological and intellectual prowess would put them on a par with the traditional conception of god(s).

But, perhaps disappointingly from a theist’s perspective, none of this really speaks to deities in the supernatural sense – Intelligences greater than our own, entities with a greater breadth of knowledge, all of these I can still countenance as logical extrapolations, but unfortunately a plain, old, supernatural deity is just one step beyond that and requires too many disingenuous mental gymnastics to arrive at: So, I am an atheist. There, blog post done – We can all go home now…