Why I am an atheist
Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 21:54 You might have noticed that little red ‘A’ over on the right side of the blog lately. It’s from the Richard Dawkins’ ‘outing’ site. It’s time that we non-believers of all stripe stand up and be counted, lest the nitwits think they’ve won by our silence.
I’ve struggled over the years to define my belief system as simply atheism, agnosticism, general cluelessness, drunkeness, non-deist and so on. I’ve finally concluded that for 99% of purposes, I am an atheist in the same way that Bertrand Russell defined his own atheism:
In his 1949 speech, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?”, Russell expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an atheist or an agnostic:
As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
—Bertrand Russell,Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91
Reader Comments (2)
Yep. As Dawkins says, everyone is an atheist about other gods, I just take it one god further. I'm currently reading Charles Templeton's Farewell to God and though the rest of the book is quite good, he didn't score any brownie points with me with his assertion that atheism required as much faith as religion. He prefered to call himself an agnostic, but really for all intents and purposes, he fit Bertrand Russell's definition to a T.
Atheism requires as much faith as religion? Wow. There's a leap.
Templeton sounds a lot like people I've known that rail against the 'man' idea but can't quite step up to the brink and declare themselves.
They usually want to couch this in the warm safety of agnosticism, which is okay. We each get there how we get there. It's the journey that's important.
cheers
maven