This was recommended by Randolf Richardson over on YouTube during the recent moral realism pooch screw and I thought it would be a fine topic to take on here. Therefore, we’re going to return to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to check out their entry on atheism and agnosticism.

I’d say this ought to be fun but it won’t be.

I’m going to jump through this somewhat quickly because there’s a lot of dry material here and a lot of it simply doesn’t require much of an examination. This article was written by Paul Draper in 2017 and I think it’s important to start off with that because someone pointed out that blaming Stanford for something that someone else wrote, it wasn’t exactly fair and I agree with that. It’s why I wouldn’t blame Wikipedia for the things that other editors come up with. That out of the way though, let’s get started.

They start off with the “definitions of atheism” and I suspect we’ll find a lot of problems there, so let’s take a look. ““Atheism” is typically defined in terms of “theism”.” Realistically, it has to be. Atheism is the lack of the property theism. A = without. Therefore it cannot be logically defined in any other way. If there had never been any such thing as theism, there would be no reason to denote an opposite view. We don’t have a word in common usage for a-greefleeism, because until this very moment, the concept of greefleeism was completely unknown.

“Theism, in turn, is best understood as a proposition—something that is either true or false. It is often defined as “the belief that God exists”, but here “belief” means “something believed”.” Well, just to quibble a bit, it is the belief that A god or SOME gods exist, not that the proper-name God exists. That comes off as someone who is focused on the Christian worldview and it seems rather short-sighted. Granted, Paul Draper is often focused on debating religion and that might explain it, as most of the people that he debates, just like it is for me and most atheists, are Christians. I’ll let it slip by then, as an unintentional oversight.

“If, however, “atheism” is defined in terms of theism and theism is the proposition that God exists and not the psychological condition of believing that there is a God, then it follows that atheism is not the absence of the psychological condition of believing that God exists (more on this below).” Except, as I’ve already pointed out, that’s simply not true. If you actually look up the definition of the prefix a-, it denotes the state of being without, not in opposition to. I am not opposed to theism, I am simply not convinced that the propositions therein are true.

Of course, this is really where we start to have problems and the religious, they often pull this as well. They are attempting to manufacture an “enemy” where one does not actually exist. Language is prescriptive, not descriptive. Words mean exactly what the people who use the words say they mean and nothing more. It’s why dictionaries are in a constant state of flux because as time goes on, language changes. Dictionaries describe how the word is used in common parlance. They don’t tell you what words actually mean.

The problem with this, and I think we’ll see this as we continue forward, is that philosophy has tried to define what a word means without consulting anyone who disagrees. That’s fine if you’re having a conversation between people who all have agreed beforehand that certain words will be used in certain ways, it isn’t if you try to impose your own meaning on others who don’t agree with you. That is something we see far too often in discussions though, people who think they get to impose their own thoughts on others, else everyone else is wrong. That’s not how it works.

“This definition has the added virtue of making atheism a direct answer to one of the most important metaphysical questions in philosophy of religion, namely, “Is there a God?” There are only two possible direct answers to this question: “yes”, which is theism, and “no”, which is atheism. Answers like “I don’t know”, “no one knows”, “I don’t care”, “an affirmative answer has never been established”, or “the question is meaningless” are not direct answers to this question.” Except I don’t think it is a direct answer at all. I recently made a video, it won’t show up for a while on the YouTube channel, but I pointed out that there are, in fact, three answers to consider here. “Yes,” “no” and “I’m not convinced.” The religious, when they try this, they try to sweep away the third option entirely, although sometimes they slip, and that seems to be what the is being attempted here. However, that doesn’t represent the vast majority of atheists that I come into contact with and therefore, it’s a bit disingenuous to pretend that philosophy understands the proper usage of the word.

“While identifying atheism with the metaphysical claim that there is no God (or that there are no gods) is particularly useful for doing philosophy, it is important to recognize that the term “atheism” is polysemous—i.e., it has more than one related meaning—even within philosophy.” That is an important point and one that, sadly, a lot of philosophers seem not to understand. They keep trying to pretend that we’re “doing it wrong” when we use the word in a way that they do not approve of. Yet their approval is irrelevant. Just because the word is “useful in philosophy”, that doesn’t make it so. You don’t get to impose your definition on anyone else. Deal with it.

“Departing even more radically from the norm in philosophy, a few philosophers and quite a few non-philosophers claim that “atheism” shouldn’t be defined as a proposition at all, even if theism is a proposition. Instead, “atheism” should be defined as a psychological state: the state of not believing in the existence of God (or gods).” I can see that. I still think it’s far more useful, although not nearly as precise, to simply say that atheists lack the property theism, for whatever reasons they might happen to think applicable. That might make it difficult to argue for or against generally, but reality is messy. It can’t all be packed into a specific philosophical box.

He goes on to talk about various schools of thought on the idea and mostly, it doesn’t get them any closer to the real world. “The issue for philosophy is which definition is the most useful for scholarly or, more narrowly, philosophical purposes.”  Personally, I don’t give a crap about that. Now it would be fine if the philosophers could understand that the usage within their own hallowed halls is not  going to work outside of it, but far too many simply can’t get that through their heads. It is an imposition of philosophy on others, just like religion often tries to impose their ideas on others, just so they can get to their pre-defined conclusions.

Because that’s really where much of the problem lies in my experience. A lot of arguments about atheism lie primarily in their definition of atheism. Without that definition holding true, the whole thing falls apart, which is why the religious put so much emphasis on atheism being the active disbelief in gods. They’re trying to shift the burden of proof. If they’d just listen to what they were being told, then the burden would fall, as it should, back on their shoulders and they’d be in a lot of  trouble.

“If atheism is usually and best understood in philosophy as the metaphysical claim that God does not exist, then what, one might wonder, should philosophers do with the popular term, “New Atheism”? ” The same thing everyone ought to do with it, ignore it. Atheism isn’t new. The only new element is the ability to speak out openly about it without being forced to recant under force of censure or death. there is nothing new about “New Atheism”. It’s just the matter that we’ll no longer be forced to shut up. He  goes on to discuss the origins of New Atheism but that’s really unimportant to the subject at hand.

“Another subcategory of atheism is “friendly atheism”, which William Rowe (1979) defines as the position that, although God does not exist, some (intellectually sophisticated) people are justified in believing that God exists” I would disagree with that. Just because you are emotionally attached to an idea, that doesn’t make you justified in holding it absent evidence that it is true. Then again, I’m one of the most unfriendly atheists you’ll find. I consider theism in general and organized religion in particular positively stupid. Of course, people are welcome to disagree and make a case, but emotion should never be part of the explanation. “Intellectually sophisticated people”, to go back to Rowe, shouldn’t believe anything without considerable evidence to support it.

Then he goes into Pro-God and Anti-God atheists, which I think is irrelevant to the point. I don’t really care why you believe or don’t believe, only whether  you do or not and, most importantly, what rational reason you can offer for  your position. If it’s just emotions-on-your-sleeve, as Schellenberg seems to be, then I’m simply not impressed. I don’t care what you want to be true. I care only what is actually true.

So we end this first section with the clear conclusion that Draper is talking about utility within philosophical discussions, which as I said, would be fine, so long as said discussions stayed there. Unfortunately, as we all know, far too often they do not. They escape into the real world, where some people, well-intentioned and otherwise, think they get to tell others what they believe and if they don’t toe the philosophical line, they’re just wrong.

Yet they’re not because that’s not how language works. It doesn’t matter how desperately you might wish that it did, it just doesn’t and we’re not changing the rules to make it easier for philosophy.

Anyhow, next time, we’ll take a look at the definition he offers for agnosticism. I figure it’s going to be just as problematic, although, this has been, on the whole, far better than that crap on moral realism. That was just a complete embarrassment.