Just fair warning, but because this is going to be a very long series, I’m going to try to break it up instead of just going straight through. Therefore, you can expect to see one or two parts per week, with at least one intermission, just so nobody gets bored.
Therefore, let’s take a look at part three of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on atheism and agnosticism. This one is titled “Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms” and that might be interesting to see. So… let’s get started.
“Jeanine Diller (2016) points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.” Except most atheists don’t say that god(s) don’t exist, we have simply not been convinced that one does. Other than gods that are logically contradictory, I am not convinced that any gods cannot exist. I just haven’t been presented with sufficient evidence for me to decide that they actually do. This is really where I think there are problems with this approach. Instead of saying “here’s what we’re going to go with for this particular discussion”, a lot of philosophers insist that their definition automatically applies to all conceivable discussions and that’s just not the case. Therefore, while I agree that both theists and atheists can have some very individual, personal definitions by what they mean by these terms, absolutely no one has any business telling any of them that they’re wrong.
“Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are.” That is irrelevant, however, as I am only concerned with the formulations of gods that I have been presented with. I have nothing to say about any others. I can only evaluate those things that I have been presented and so far, at least, none of those arguments have convinced me that they are rationally true. Of course, this is still assuming that atheism is the positive assertion that no gods exist, which is still factually incorrect.
“Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances.” Then I am not aware of any global atheists, period. We keep coming back to the fact that, no matter what philosophers want to demand, it doesn’t seem to match up with the majority of self-professed atheists. You don’t get to tell people that they are wrong about their labels. If anyone is wrong, it’s you.
“Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify (Diller 2016: 11–16). Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.” Cool, then why are we doing this? Why is this the hill that you’ve chosen to die on? If you already agree that most people don’t take that position, then why is this the definition you’ve chosen? It makes no sense.
He then goes into a couple of paragraphs on how global atheists, of which I can’t remember ever meeting any, might justify their position with naturalism, but since I already think that the definition is inherently fallacious, I don’t see the purpose of beleaguering the point. This is all word games and I don’t choose to engage. If you want to talk to that kind of atheist, go right ahead. I’m not one of them.
“If the ambiguity that results from defining “God” in terms of worthiness of worship is virtuous, then one might be tempted to adopt the following account of global atheism and its opposite, “versatile theism”:
global atheism: there are no beings worthy of religious worship.
versatile theism: there exists at least one being that is worthy of some form of religious worship.” I’m really not sure where “worthy” enters into it. The religious believe things for emotional reasons, not rational ones. They haven’t, at least in my experience, gone looking to determine if their god concepts are “worthy”. They do it because it makes them feel good to do it. Personally, I’ve never seen anything that I would consider “worthy of worship” because I don’t find worship to be a useful activity, period. I can’t even conceive of any entity that I would consider “worthy”. Worship is a pointless exercise.
Then he gets to something that Hume wrote: “Similarly, consider this passage at the beginning of Section XI of David Hume’s Natural History of Religion:
If we examine, without prejudice, the ancient heathen mythology, as contained in the poets, we shall not discover in it any such monstrous absurdity, as we may at first be apt to apprehend. Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest? That these creatures may be capricious, revengeful, passionate, voluptuous, is easily conceived; nor is any circumstance more apt, among ourselves, to engender such vices, than the license of absolute authority. And in short, the whole mythological system is so natural, that, in the vast variety of planets and world[s], contained in this universe, it seems more than probable, that, somewhere or other, it is really carried into execution. (Hume [1757] 1956: 53, emphasis added)” I really don’t see where any of that is meaningful. I’m not remotely interested in how people rationalize their gods. I care only if their gods are factually existent. I don’t care how anyone feels about their supposed gods. I care only if they’re really there. That I haven’t seen any shred of evidence for them, that’s why I’m not convinced they exist. I don’t care how poetic you might express the concept, the only thing that matters is if it’s real.
“One possible flaw in the proposed account of global atheism is that it seems to imply overlap between deism and atheism.” The only overlap is between deism and theism though, as deism is just one more version of theism. The same goes for pantheism, panentheism, etc. The belief in any god of any kind, no matter how vague, isn’t atheism. Atheism is the lack of belief in gods, no matter how you construct them. Come on, this can’t be that hard!
This really isn’t going well for the philosophers, is it? Far too many are convinced that they have the only proper definitions and everyone is somehow obligated to follow their proper terms. The one thing they failed to do was ask any non-philosopher atheists. By and large, we are not going to play alone. As I said prior, it’s fine if you and your philosopher buddies get together and collectively agree that everyone in your little group is going to abide by those definitions, but keep your silly game within your close circle of friends.
The rest of us are just going to laugh the second you try to tell us what we believe.