So anyhow, this kind of devolved on Reddit, where there was a thread where someone made some claims that atheists were all the same and you could tell a lot of things about atheists, simply because we all had the same “atheist worldview”.
Because this is a lot of quotes, I’m going to forego any images throughout, otherwise it could get confusing. So, without further ado…
I started off with the statement:
Because atheism is the position of not believing in gods, full stop. That’s all it is. there is no reason to agree on anything else. Atheism isn’t a worldview. It is the answer to a single question.
He responded:
Atheism is a component of a worldview (theology), not a worldview itself.
Except it isn’t. Now I’m not going to go through and quote the whole thing, I’ll link to the discussion if anyone wants to read it in the wild, but atheism is nothing of the sort. As I said, my atheism has zero to do with my “worldview”, and I figure you know how much I hate that word
Atheism is the answer to one and only one question: Do you believe in any gods? My answer is no. That is as far as atheism impacts my life. I do not spend my time thinking about atheism. In fact, if the religious would just go away and leave everyone else alone, then I can’t imagine that many atheists would ever consider their atheism again. It is a response to irrational claims. It isn’t a claim in and of itself.
Of course, he doesn’t like that:
I think some people take atheism to be a worldview because there are other worldview components that atheists commonly share, and it’s this entire set of components that folks refer to as the “atheist worldview.”
Now I can’t say that nobody ever takes atheism as a worldview because I am not qualified to speak for anyone but myself, but since he’s having a conversation with me, only my view matters. If he wants to go argue with them, he can go argue with them. That’s not how rational discourse works. I said so.
No it isn’t. My lack of belief in any gods has zero impact on anything else that I do. I am nothing like most atheists. I am not a secular humanist. I am not a far-left liberal. I am just myself.
However, the religious are firmly convinced that, deep down inside, everyone is just like they are. It’s why they behave the way that they do. They just throw Bible verses at people who don’t accept the Bible, because they think that everyone really does, they’re just lying to themselves. You can’t have an intelligent conversation with anyone who doesn’t understand that everyone in the room isn’t just like they are.
It’s why most conversations go absolutely nowhere.
I don’t really understand what you are disagreeing with.
Are you saying that atheism is not even a component of a worldview?
Typically worldviews are broken down into categories:
Theology
Ethics
Cosmology
History
Etc…
Except atheism isn’t a theology. That comes up in a second and I won’t spoil anything. Again, as I already told him, the religious tend to think that everyone is just like they are and they are simply wrong. In fact, it’s probably hard to come up with a bigger gulf between two groups of people than between atheists and theists when it comes to religion. This is a problem with incoherent expectations and he leaps right into the middle of it.
But note that what people believe about God does drastically affect what else they believe.
For example, given the following scenarios, I could predict many things about what else a person believes.
If a person:
Believes in the Christian God
Believes in the Muslim God
Believes in Buddhism
Believes in no God
For 4, I could bet they reject traditional Christian views on pre-marital sex, for example.
And he fails again. Because, as I pointed out, three of those are positive beliefs and atheism is not. Atheism has no tenets or guiding principles. It’s just the answer to one question. And, of course, I can point out a lot of atheists who are not in favor of people sleeping around willy nilly, myself included. So, he’s wrong. Is anyone surprised? Jumping forward a bit so I don’t repeat myself.
Atheism is a theological stance however you slice it.
When in doubt, just repeat your claim as though it was a fact. He does this several times. Now, if his personal definition of atheism means that, whatever. He’s talking to me. He has to go with my position, not his, unless he wants to have a discussion over meaningful and rational word usages. He does try this later on but it doesn’t get him anywhere, nor should he expect it to. He came to us, we didn’t go to him. He has to play by our rules.
Therefore, I point out why he is wrong.
It just isn’t though. The definition of theology is “the study of the nature of God and religious belief” which is not atheism. Sorry.
Sadly for the religious, words have meanings and while dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, they do describe how most people use these words. He can believe whatever he wants, but then it’s on his shoulders to demonstrate why his usage is somehow valid. I don’t think he could do it.
He tries it anyhow:
Words have multiple uses.
That’d be the definition for a theology course, or something.
Theology in the context of worldview analysis just refers to whatever your stance is towards questions like “Does God exist?” “Do I believe in God?”, etc.
He is desperate to get me to admit that atheism is a worldview and that not believing in gods somehow is a central cornerstone of my view of reality. It’s not. I say:
Nope. Not really. I don’t look at the world and say “because I don’t believe in a god…” It never comes up, except when responding to people who do believe.
He responds:
You don’t have to look at the world and say “because I don’t believe in God…” for that lack of belief to have logical affects on what you do.
This is where he really starts to go wrong. If he wasn’t already in the ideological gutter, he’s climbing up to the high board to dive into it. So let’s watch him completely screw up.
Since you lack belief in the Christian God, for example, it’s safe to assume this affects:
How often you would attend church.
Which organizations you donate to.
Etc., the list goes on
Now obviously, I don’t attend church, but I know atheists that do. There are tons of closeted atheists out there, as well as some that I know that go, just for the social aspects. So that’s wrong.
The second one is laughably wrong. Now maybe he misspoke and I treated it as such. He could make some presumptions about which organizations I DON’T donate to, but he can’t say a thing about who I might give my money to. My atheism has nothing to do with it. The causes I support, they have nothing at all to do with atheism. There is no link whatsoever between the two. So, he’s wrong again and I say so. He doesn’t like it much. He continues with:
I can prove my point just by asking you a simple question:
What truth value do you assign to the proposition, “God exists?”
True, False, or Indeterminate?
Note, “I don’t assign one” or “I withhold judgment” is just to assign Indeterminate.
I have no reason to think that’s true.
Another significant one: you probably don’t believe in anything supernatural and are probably a methodological naturalist. You also probably believe miracles are an adequate explanation for any historical phenomena.
Here, he makes a bunch of wrong assertions, as if that’s a surprise. Do I believe in anything supernatural? I don’t even find the concept coherent. No one has ever defined the term in a way that is logically cohesive. What is the supernatural? Who the hell knows?
Secondly, he says I’m a methodological naturalist. Nope, not true. I am an evidentialist. I go on to explain why science only looks for natural explanations, because nature is the only thing for which we have any evidence that it is real. If someone could produce evidence for the supernatural, whatever the hell that is, then science would start to evaluate that too. The religious think science is faith-based, but it’s not. It’s evidence-based. It goes after the things that seem to actually exist and, at least at the moment, that is nothing beyond nature. So let’s get back to what we were doing before:
And that’s fine. My argument was that I could deduce much about you from your lack of belief in any gods. This includes both what you do and do not do. My argument stands.
Except he’s been wrong every single time. He’s just counting the hits, of which he hasn’t had one yet, and ignoring the misses. I think he’s just assuming that there had to be hits somewhere, he just couldn’t be bothered to find them.
Then, to skip some irrelevant stuff, he tries to insist that I pick from his three options again. I refuse:
You don’t get to change my answer because it doesn’t fit your agenda. This is what happens when you try to present a false dichotomy and try to force people to comply. I’m not playing along. You’re just wrong again.