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Things atheists get wrong

Atheism, Misconceptions, , , , ,

I used to think atheists were smart. Then I visited an atheist social media community.

People were posting all kinds of unbelieverably stupid things in there, like “Why should I have to disprove the existence of your God when you haven’t proven it in the first place?” Do these people really think that the only time something can be proven false is if it has already been proven true? Or do they not know what the word “disprove” means? Or are they just not putting any thought into what they’re saying?

Anyway, here are some things I wish my fellow atheists would stop getting wrong.

Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain

I kinda hate it when people miss the point of a clever idea or joke, but start repeating it all the time anyway, until other people start getting tired of it, and they’re not even using it in the way that originally made it actually clever or funny.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster was a clever idea when someone demanded that Pastafarianism be given equal time in schools, in order to make a point about creationism being taught in schools. It’s not so clever when you’re just using it as an example of something that would be absurd to believe in, or when you’re just using it as a silly name for God, or when you’re just pretending to be religious for no reason.

“The Israelites made up the story of Lot and his daughters to make their enemies look bad.”

I doubt it. The Bible does claim that the Moabites and Ammonites had an incestuous origin, but it also says the Israelites themselves had incestuous origins. Abraham’s wife was his sister, to name just one example of incest in the history of Israel according to the Bible. Were they trying to make themselves look bad too?

“The Bible has two contradictory versions of the loaves and fishes miracle story.”

The Bible is full of contradictions, but this is not one of them. The two loaves and fishes stories are meant to be about two different events. You can tell because after both of those events happen (in the same gospel), Jesus mentions both of them having happened.

“The Bible is an arbitrary collection of books that were chosen by a vote at the Council of Nicea.“

So says The Da Vinci Code, but that story isn’t known for its historical accuracy. Learn about the real origins of the Bible. The Bible did come to be for a lot of ridiculous bad reasons as a result of mistaken beliefs, obviously flawed methods, and arbitrary decisions, but none of that involved a meeting that decided on the canon all at once.

“The Bible we have now is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., so we don’t really know what the original said.”

It’s true that we don’t really know exactly what the original scriptures said, because the earliest manuscripts we have are not the earliest versions that ever existed. And it’s true that there have been some versions of the Bible that were made by going through at least two iterations of translation. But biblical manuscripts do still exist in the languages they were originally written in, and Bible translations are generally made by translating directly from those.

“The Bible gets the value of pi wrong.”

Not really. The value implied in the Bible isn’t exactly equal to pi, but neither is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.1

How precise do you expect these measurements to be? The Bible doesn’t specify lengths in units shorter than a cubit all that often. If the circumference of a circle is 30 cubits, then the diameter, calculated using the correct value of pi and rounded to the nearest cubit, is 10 cubits. Which is what the Bible says it was. The numbers the Bible gives for this are a perfectly reasonable approximation.

“I don’t believe in things; I accept them, or I understand them.”

Some atheists seem to be averse to the word “believe”. There’s no good reason to be. The concept of “belief” is not limited to supernatural things. And accepting a statement is the same thing as believing it.

A belief is just a person’s mental representation or personal understanding of how things are. No matter what it’s about, and whether it successfully matches reality or not, it’s still a belief. People may be more likely to choose to use the word “believe” when they’re unsure about something,2 but believing something does not mean you’re unsure.3 Everything you know is also something you believe, because knowledge is a type of belief.

There is one good reason you might want to be careful about the “believe in” wording, though: To “believe in” something can mean believing something exists, but it can also sometimes mean having a favorable opinion of it. So if you think someone might plausibly misinterpret you in that way, then you might want to avoid using the words “believe in”.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe; that doesn’t change the facts.”

What you believe does matter, because what you believe influences what you do. If you say it doesn’t matter what you believe, you are saying that it’s okay to have wrong beliefs. That is not a clever way to respond to people who have wrong beliefs.

“Religious beliefs are so obviously absurd, there’s no way anyone actually believes that stuff.”

There are religious people who think the same thing about your views, that there’s no way you can really think there’s no God. You’re both wrong about that. There really are people who don’t think like you.

(Actually, I have seen some interesting arguments for thinking that religious people don’t really believe what they think they believe. But if you’re going to make that claim, you’d better have much better reasons for it than that their beliefs sound absurd to you.)

Plenty of things that sound absurd to some people are honestly believed by a lot of other people. And there are even a lot of things that sound absurd (especially if you don’t know much about them) but are actually true.

“You can’t reason theists out of their belief if they didn’t reason themselves into it in the first place.”

Of course you can. Plenty of people have stopped believing things because of logical arguments, regardless of whether logical arguments were involved in the original formation of their beliefs.4

And if you really don’t think we should be trying to convince people with logical arguments, I’d like to know how you think we should deal with them. Are you saying we should use illogical arguments, and convince people to have beliefs that they won’t have any good reasons for believing? Are you saying we should use psychological manipulation and trick them into changing their views? Are you saying we should give up on reason and use force instead? Are you saying we should just let people keep being wrong?

Stop it. Reason is the best option, and you should not be saying things like this, that discourage people from using it. Stop making excuses for not engaging with people you disagree with. Refusing to debate is not going to help reduce the amount of false beliefs people have. If you find that your arguments are ineffective, maybe you just need to learn how to argue more effectively.

“Most people believe in God for non-rational reasons.”

A poll asking people why they believe in God found that while most people think that other people believe for entirely non-rational reasons, about half or more of respondents said their reason for believing in God was based on some kind of evidence. I’d say their evidence isn’t very good evidence, but they do at least believe for evidence-based reasons, as opposed to something like faith or comfort or upbringing.

And most people do value rationality, even if they may not have successfully applied it to all of their beliefs. I think it’s important not to falsely label people as uninterested in reason. That’s just another lame excuse for not reasoning with them.

“Religion is a mental illness.”

Lots of people have stopped being religious by thinking critically about their religion, learning things they hadn’t been aware of, or considering the evidence and logical arguments. Their religion wasn’t cured by some psychiatric treatment.

Can it really be a mental illness if it’s possible to reason your way out of it, or to have your mind changed just by being exposed to new evidence or information? No, I don’t think that’s consistent with any reasonable definition of mental illness or delusion. To the extent that religious beliefs are persistent, it’s because of the same cognitive flaws that affect everyone, not because they have some mental illness that you don’t have.

Labeling people as mentally ill just because they’re mistaken about something, or just because you disagree with them, is a dangerous path, and we should be very hesitant to go there. Declaring beliefs to be mental illness would imply that we should be looking for ways to change people’s beliefs with medical treatments instead of by reasoning with them, which should be a horrifying idea to any freethinker.

“The claim that God exists is unfalsifiable.”

Some conceptions of God are unfalsifiable,5 but some aren’t. Sure, maybe there are a lot of theists whose real conception of God seems to be an unfalsifiable one, even if they don’t tend to describe or think of him that way except when their belief in God is being challenged. But since a lot of people have been convinced that the God that they used to believe in doesn’t exist, those people must all have had a conception of God that actually was falsifiable. And we can assume that plenty of current theists likewise have falsifiable conceptions of God, since those people are no different from the now-atheists before they changed their minds.

“The story of Jesus is copied from earlier stories about gods like Horus, who were said to have been born of a virgin under a star in the east, been subject to assassination attempts as babies, fasted for 40 days, had 12 disciples, performed the same miracles, been resurrected after three days, etc.”

If you actually read the stories of those gods from sources written before the New Testament, you will not find most of these alleged parallels. The story of Horus’s birth, for example, is that he was born after his mother had sex with her brother who she had reassembled after he was killed and dismembered by another of her brothers. Doesn’t sound anything like the story of Jesus, does it?

“Hitler was a Christian.”

Maybe, but the evidence is pretty unclear. He did sometimes claim to be a Christian. He also sometimes said he wanted to destroy Christianity. He also denied that he was against Christianity. But maybe that was just because openly opposing Christianity would cost him too many supporters. Or maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he believed in an unusual version of Christianity that he recognized should probably not really count as Christianity. Whatever he was, he does seem clearly to have been against atheism, though.

“We are all atheists regarding most gods. Some of us just go one god further.”

We are all nonbelievers in most gods. We are not all atheists. People who believe in one God are monotheists, not atheists.

“When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Not necessarily. Not everyone rejects other religions for the same reasons. Sometimes the reason religious people reject other gods is that their religion tells them there’s only one God. Knowing that is not going to help them understand why you reject theirs.

“Historical dates should be written with the religiously neutral terms BCE and CE, not BC and AD.”

Jesus is the only reason we count years starting from around 2000 years ago. No matter which terms we use for it, we are still using a Christian calendar. So why pretend we’re not? If you’re not going to actually invent a new and improved calendar system with an objectively better starting point and convince everyone to use it, just admit that we are all using a Christian calendar. Dishonestly calling something by a different name doesn’t change what it is.

If we’re not going to insist on renaming the days of the week just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, and renaming the months of the year just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, then we don’t need to change the terms BC and AD just because we don’t believe in the god those are named after. Just use BC and AD. They’re easier to tell apart than BCE and CE.

“Morality can be explained by evolution.”

Not exactly. Evolution may be a good explanation of how we came to have some of the inclinations we have that happen to align with morality, but evolution can’t be what defines morality, for reasons similar to some of the same reasons that God can’t be what defines morality.

Did we evolve to be inclined toward certain behaviors because those behaviors are good? Then goodness is something that exists apart from evolution, and is not fully explained by it. And anyway, that’s not how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t have goals like that.

Or are good behaviors good just because that’s what we evolved to do? No, that would mean that any behavior resulting from evolution would have to be good. But that’s not true. Evolution also produce behaviors that are not morally good. Sometimes it produces behaviors so wildly opposed to morality that it would never occur to humans to do such things. Unless you want to argue that every behavior that occurs in nature is actually good, because it comes from evolution, you shouldn’t be claiming that evolution is where morality comes from.

“Galileo was punished by the anti-science Church for disagreeing with their dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.”

The Church was wrong to censor and punish Galileo for what he said, but this was not a science vs religion thing. The Church was open to new scientific discoveries, and had been for centuries, as long as there was actually strong evidence for them. But as of Galileo’s time, there was nothing particularly scientific about rejecting geocentrism.

The Church was very supportive of Galileo, until he started saying the scriptures should be reinterpreted to conform to his unproven pet hypothesis. They didn’t object to heliocentrism because it was heretical; they objected to it because there wasn’t enough evidence for it yet.6

Heliocentric models predicted that there should be parallax and Coriolis effects that nobody actually observed until decades after Galileo died. Based on the evidence available in Galileo’s time, the heliocentric model wasn’t any more reasonable a conclusion than the geocentric model. The ancient Greeks had not discovered heliocentrism long before; some of them had decided to believe in heliocentrism for wildly unscientific reasons, and happened to be right.

More recently, Copernicus had also proposed a sort of heliocentric model, but his reasons for preferring heliocentrism weren’t particularly rational either. His model didn’t explain the evidence available at the time any better than geocentrism did. And because Copernicus didn’t realize that orbits were elliptical, his model was overly complex, so Occam’s razor says the Copernican model was not to be preferred. And that flawed model is the one Galileo promoted, using arguments already known to be wrong, like saying the tides prove the Earth is moving.

Then Kepler had come up with a model (involving elliptical orbits) that would turn out to be more accurate than Copernicus’s, but there still wasn’t enough evidence available at the time to tell which model was more accurate. Anyway, Galileo completely ignored Kepler’s insight, and dogmatically refused to even consider the possibility that orbits weren’t perfect circles. Galileo’s attitude in this matter was decidedly less scientific than that of the Church.

“When an apologist says you need to be more knowledgeable about theology before you can reasonably argue that God doesn’t exist, that’s like if the emperor’s courtier replied to the assertion that the emperor’s new clothes don’t exist by saying by saying that the child didn’t have enough expertise on invisible fabrics to be qualified to make that judgment. If the thing in question doesn’t even exist, then there’s nothing to study, and any attempt at a sophisticated analysis of the topic would inevitably be meaningless and pointless.”

You may not need to be an expert on something before you can prove that it doesn’t exist, but you do need to at least know enough to know what you’re talking about. Otherwise, for all you know, you’re more like a kid who says the emperor has no clothes… because the kid mistakenly thinks the word “clothes” means “antlers”.

If the version of God you’re disproving is not what believers actually mean by “God”, or if the version of an argument you’re refuting is not an accurate representation of the argument that believers actually make, then you do indeed need to learn more about what they believe before you can say anything that will actually be relevant to their beliefs. You do need to know enough to know what people actually believe, or else you’ll just be attacking a straw man. You can’t meaningfully argue against a claim unless you have an accurate idea of what the claim is.

Imagine a creationist dismissing a defense of evolution as a “courtier’s reply”:

“When I say evolution doesn’t exist, the evolutionist will say I don’t even know what evolution is, that I don’t have enough expertise on biology to be qualified to judge whether evolution makes sense.

“This is like if a courtier replied to the assertion that the emperor’s new clothes don’t exist by saying the skeptic doesn’t have enough expertise on invisible fabrics to be qualified to make that judgment.

“If the thing in question doesn’t even exist, then there’s nothing to study, and any attempt at a sophisticated analysis of the topic would inevitably be meaningless and pointless.”

Do you still think that’s a good argument? It’s not, no matter who’s making it. You can’t dismiss an objection to your argument on the grounds that it doesn’t matter because the thing you’re arguing about doesn’t exist anyway. The nonexistence of God is a possible conclusion we’re trying to evaluate, not a premise that we can start with. You have to resolve all the potential flaws in your disproof of God first. Until you’ve done that, you haven’t actually established that God doesn’t exist, which means you can’t use that as a premise for any further reasoning.

When people say you’re wrong because you’re not an expert, are you sure they’re even saying that’s how you’re wrong? Maybe what they’re saying is not that “because you’re not an expert, it inherently logically follows that you’re automatically wrong”. Maybe they’re saying you’re wrong, and then they’re additionally suggesting that the fact that you’re not an expert could explain what caused you to be wrong. Showing how you’re wrong is something else, that they can do separately. If all you’re refuting is the assertion that you’re not an expert, you’re not actually addressing what they think you’re getting wrong.

By the way, the courtier analogy doesn’t actually fit the situation that it was originally used to describe. The term “courtier’s reply” was first used to refer to theists who said Richard Dawkins should have done more research on theistic beliefs and arguments before writing a book attempting to refute them. Those theists weren’t saying Dawkins needed to be an expert before he personally could disbelieve in God. They were saying he really should have done more research before writing a book trying to convince people that God doesn’t exist.

“If you can’t explain where God came from, God is useless as an explanation for anything else.”

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Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheism

Atheism, Misconceptions, , ,

Agnosticism

What is agnosticism? There are two different things that are called agnosticism, known as strong and weak agnosticism, or positive and negative agnosticism, or hard and soft agnosticism. (All of these alternate terms, “weak”/”negative”/”soft”, seem rather connotationally unfortunate. But I figure “soft” is the least so, so that’s the one I’m gonna choose to use.)

Hard agnosticism

Hard agnosticism is the belief that it’s impossible to know whether there is a God or not. So is hard agnosticism about knowledge, as opposed to mere belief? Sort of, though it is still defined in terms of a mere belief: Whether you’re a hard agnostic is not determined by whether you have a certain piece of knowledge, but by whether you have a certain belief about knowledge.

No position regarding the existence of God, not even hard agnosticism, can be defined as knowing (or not knowing) that some particular answer to the God question is true. That’s because one of the requirements for a belief to count as knowledge is that the belief is true.

So if, say, theism was defined as knowing that there is a God, you wouldn’t be able to talk about theism without implying that you agree with it. Nor would you be able to talk about atheism without implying that you agree with that. So these things need to be defined as believing (or not believing) something. Theism, atheism, and agnosticism are about what you believe or don’t believe, not about what you know or don’t know. Even hard agnosticism is just a belief about what we don’t know.

People might sometimes describe their beliefs as “knowing”, even if they don’t really mean to assert anything stronger than belief. That’s to be expected, because if you believe something is true, then you probably also believe that your belief has all the other requirements to count as knowledge. So that’s how you might talk about what you think, but that doesn’t mean that these things are actually about knowledge as opposed to belief. Not even agnosticism, and certainly not soft agnosticism.

Soft agnosticism

What is soft agnosticism? When I look at online resources that define agnosticism, they mostly seem to focus primarily on hard agnosticism. But they also (usually rather vaguely) define the soft kind as well. And their descriptions of soft agnosticism do seem compatible with it being about belief, and not actually being about a question of knowledge distinct from the question of belief.

A soft agnostic’s answer to the question of whether there is a God is “I don’t know”. But are people really talking about knowledge as opposed to mere belief when they say that? I don’t think they are.

Answering a question with “I don’t know” would normally most likely mean something like “I don’t know which answer I should give to that question”, or “I don’t know what to believe”. I would not expect someone who gave that answer to mean something like “Whatever I might believe about that, my belief is not properly justified and does not count as knowledge”.

Because as I said before, if you believe something, that generally comes with believing that your belief has all the requirements for it to be knowledge. So it would be pretty strange to believe something, but not to consider it to be something that you know.

Unless you’re saying you have faith, but if you had faith, you wouldn’t be an agnostic, would you? Or is everyone who has faith in God an agnostic, because they merely believe but don’t know that God exists (since their belief lacks the kind of justification that would be required for a belief to be knowledge)? No, they’re not. Or at least they’re not soft agnostics, because that’s not what the soft agnostic’s answer “I don’t know” means.

If you ask people whether there’s a God, you’re looking to find out what they believe. You’re not asking about anything to do with knowledge as opposed to mere belief. And people you ask may answer using an expression that happens to contain the word “know”, but that doesn’t mean they’re randomly deciding to answer that question with something irrelevant about knowledge, instead of actually addressing the question of what they believe.

I think people who answer that question with “I don’t know” are not really saying anything about knowledge. All they’re intending to say is simply that they don’t have a belief either way. So a soft agnostic is someone who lacks a belief that there’s a God, and also lacks a belief that there’s no God.

In other words, they have no opinion. They’re undecided. They’re suspending judgment. This is (and should be) the default state for the relation between any person and any claim, until the person comes to have a sufficiently good reason to either accept or reject the claim.

Soft agnosticism is a middle ground between believing that there’s a God and believing that there’s no God. Not to be confused with a middle ground between believing there’s a God and not believing there’s a God. There is no middle ground between those things; you have to do one or the other. But you don’t have to either believe there’s a God or believe there’s no God. It’s possible to have neither of those beliefs, which is what soft agnosticism is.

The principle of agnosticism

So those are the two main meanings that “agnosticism” has today, but the word actually had a different meaning originally. When Thomas Huxley coined the word “Agnosticism”, he didn’t intend it to mean either of the things that people use it to mean now.

What Huxley called agnosticism was the general principle that you should not act like you’re certain about something unless you have good evidence to support your opinion. (This was in response to the principle of faith, which claims that there are things you should believe with complete certainty regardless of the evidence or lack thereof.)

Neither the hard nor the soft modern senses of the word “agnostic” really seem to have much to do with its original meaning. But if I had to pick one, I’d say the soft meaning is closer to the original intent of the word. Because soft agnosticism and the principle of agnosticism are both fairly closely related to the principle of initially suspending judgment by default (which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago). I don’t know where people got the idea that agnosticism meant that knowledge about God’s existence is impossible.

Atheism

What is atheism? There are two different things that some people consider to both be forms of atheism, known as strong and weak atheism, or positive and negative atheism, or hard and soft atheism. (Again, I’m gonna go with hard and soft.) Hard atheism is the belief that there is no God, and soft atheism is a lack of belief that there is a God.

Hard atheism was originally the only thing that the term “atheism” meant. It’s what most people understand that word to mean. It’s how dictionaries say the word is used. And it’s what most philosophers use it to mean.7 But a lot of atheists now consider the broader category that they call “soft atheism” to be a form of atheism too. Some of them even say the soft version is the correct way to define atheism. Where did they get the idea that atheism is a lack of belief? Does it make sense to define atheism this way?

Some people have been trying to redefine atheism as soft atheism since Antony Flew in the 1970s: “Whereas nowadays the usual meaning of ‘atheist’ in English is ‘someone who asserts that there is no such being as God’, I want the word to be understood not positively but negatively.” (At least he acknowledged that his definition was not the standard definition of atheism.)

Some atheist activist groups are pushing this redefinition of atheism, not because it makes more sense, but mainly for practical agenda-driven purposes like inflating their demographic numbers by including soft agnostics as atheists. Are there any good reasons to define atheism as soft atheism? Are there any good reasons not to?

The atheist website EvilBible.com argues against the idea that “soft atheists” should be called atheists at all. That website lists several mostly good reasons to reject the “lack of belief” definition of atheism, and it also gives one particularly bad reason. (Which is the one that it asserts the most vehemently.) The bad reason is that English speakers commonly use “I don’t believe X” to mean “I believe X is false”. That’s not a good reason because:

  • The fact that people commonly use language in illogical ways is no reason to accept those illogical uses of language. Normally, when the majority of people think or do a certain thing, intelligent people don’t take that as indisputable proof that the thing must be right. But for some reason, some people seem to think that the popular consensus can never be wrong when it comes to language.
  • The fact that some people fail to make a distinction between two different things doesn’t mean there isn’t a distinction there to be made. And it doesn’t mean the distinction should not be made.
  • And what are they even trying to prove with this argument? If this common usage argument was valid, what would the conclusion be? That everyone who says they “don’t believe” in God is an atheist? That’s basically the opposite of the point that EvilBible is trying to make! Their argument #6 seems to directly contradict their argument #8, or to make the same stupid error that their argument #8 calls out. Why are they arguing against their own position??

“Soft atheism” is not atheism

I think some of EvilBible’s other arguments for limiting the term “atheism” to hard atheism are pretty good, though:

  • Some atheists say it doesn’t matter how most people use the word, because only atheists should get to define atheism.
    • EvilBible points out that that is not how words get their meanings. The word “baby”, for instance, means what it means because that’s how we all use that word, not because babies decided that that was what it would mean.
    • I’d like to also point out (though EvilBible doesn’t mention this) that this principle of exclusive self-definition can’t work, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you would know who gets to define it.
  • When people argue that atheism shouldn’t be defined as only hard atheism because it should be defined by atheists, they are assuming that most atheists want it to be defined as soft atheism.
    • EvilBible notes that no evidence is being provided for this idea. (EvilBible then tries to further counter it with some statistics about people who report having “no religion”. But that could mean unaffiliated theists, so those stats are irrelevant and don’t really tell us anything.)
    • Anyway, like I said, you can’t solely use what atheists think as the basis for defining atheism, because you would have to already know what an atheist is before you could know who to ask and who to ignore.
  • Some atheists think it gives them a debating advantage if they can say they don’t have a belief or are not making a claim, and therefore have no burden of proof.8
    • EvilBible responds that the people making the extraordinary claim that there is a God already have a massive burden of proof, so shifting the burden of proof onto them really isn’t necessary.
    • Another response I’ve seen (not from EvilBible) is that if atheists want to be rational and to be seen as rational, they shouldn’t be trying to avoid the burden of proof just to try to make things easier on themselves.
    • Especially if we’re talking about people who do actually have a belief that there’s no God. Why pretend you don’t? Trying to avoid the burden of proof just gives the impression that you’re unable to justify your position. You do have good reasons to think there’s no God, don’t you? I do. I don’t see why atheists would have a problem with having a burden of proof.
    • If you really don’t have a belief that there’s no God, then you may legitimately have the debating advantage of having no burden of proof, because then your position really is the default position, which is soft agnosticism. But then why insist on calling it atheism? And why would you be debating the existence of God, and care about whether you have an “advantage”, if you don’t have an opinion on the matter?
  • Etymology doesn’t necessarily tell you how a word should be used today, but for what it’s worth, the origin of the word “atheism” involved combining “atheos” with “-ism” (godless + belief), not combining “a-” with “theism” (without + belief in God).
  • The EvilBible article on defining atheism concludes by extensively quoting several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias. None of them define atheism as a lack of belief. All of them basically define atheism as either the belief that there is no God, or the “disbelief” in or “denial” of the existence of God.
    • And they define denial as declaring something not to be true. And they note that denying the existence of God is something agnostics don’t do,9 unlike atheists.
    • The dictionaries similarly define disbelief as rejecting something as untrue, or being persuaded that an assertion is not true. One of the dictionaries contrasts unbelief (merely tentatively not accepting that something is true) with disbelief (being convinced that something is false).
    • The quoted dictionaries only define disbelief this way half the time, though. And a few of them do include a definition of disbelief as “not believing”. But I’ll note that since people do often (illogically) use that to mean believing that something is false, it’s possible that those dictionary writers didn’t really mean to say that disbelief means “not believing”. Especially since one of the dictionaries that says that is the same one that repeatedly makes the point that to disbelieve something is to believe it’s false.

Here’s another problem (in addition to the ones listed on EvilBible.com) with labeling people who merely lack belief as atheists. I believe this argument was first made by atheist philosopher Graham Oppy:

If not believing that there’s a God is a form of atheism, then by the same logic, not believing that there’s no God must be a form of theism. And if you lack both beliefs (the belief in a God and the belief in no God), then it makes exactly as much sense to say you’re a soft theist as to say you’re an soft atheist.

If it’s wrong to call such a person a theist, then it’s equally wrong to call that person an atheist. Because calling yourself an atheist when you merely lack a belief that there’s a God makes as much sense as calling yourself a theist when you merely lack a belief that there’s no God. If you call “soft atheists” atheists, then you have to accept that a soft agnostic (someone who is neither a hard theist nor a hard atheist) would be both a theist and an atheist.

But you can’t be both of those things at the same time, can you? This absurd conclusion, that someone can simultaneously be both a theist and an atheist, shows that there must have been a wrong assumption somewhere, that should be rejected. And that wrong assumption is that mere lack of belief in God is atheism. It’s not. Lack of belief in God is called non-theism. And when combined with a lack of belief that there’s no God, it’s soft agnosticism.

It’s called non-theism

  • Everyone is either a theist or a non-theist.
  • Everyone is either an atheist or a non-atheist.
  • Everyone is either an agnostic or a non-agnostic.
  • All non-theists are either atheists or agnostics.
  • All non-atheists are either theists or agnostics.
  • All non-agnostics are either theists or atheists.
  • No one is both a theist and an atheist.
  • No one is both a theist and an agnostic.
  • No one is both an atheist and an agnostic.
  • Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-atheist is an agnostic.
  • Anyone who is both a non-theist and a non-agnostic is an atheist.
  • Anyone who is both a non-atheist and a non-agnostic is a theist.

(By “agnostic” here, I mean a soft agnostic. Hard agnosticism is a separate variable, and it’s logically possible to combine that with soft agnosticism, theism, or atheism.)

Agnostic atheism?

Can someone be both an agnostic and an atheist? It depends on what you mean by “agnostic” and “atheist”…

Continue reading Defining agnosticism, atheism, and agnostic atheism →
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Literal vs liberal interpretation

Flawed concepts, ,

I was raised to believe that everything the Bible says is literally true, and as a nonbeliever I still tend to interpret the Bible pretty literally. Here’s why:

Literalism is the natural form of religion that results from reading the scriptures.10 When people read the Bible with no preconceived ideas about what it should say, they will tend to assume it means exactly what it says. Why would it even occur to anyone that the Bible might not simply mean what it says (unless somebody else told them to think that)? I think the main reason is that some people can’t accept what they’re reading because they already have other, more strongly-held beliefs that are incompatible with the Bible.

Non-literalist religion is a self-deceptive phenomenon that results when people consider themselves religious, but also have beliefs and values that conflict with the scriptures. If they don’t want to outright reject the Bible or admit that their values don’t come from their religion, they have to make up metaphorical interpretations of the Bible that agree with what they already believe, and ignore what the Bible actually says.11

In a lot of cases, what the Bible says was meant completely literally, and was originally interpreted literally, and no one saw a problem with that. But as humanity’s knowledge of the world and standards of morality have improved over time, it has become increasingly clear to most people that what the Bible says literally is absurdly wrong. So those who can’t admit that the Bible is wrong have had to increasingly reinterpret it figuratively.12 Some take it so far that they’re basically atheists in denial.

Even literalists are now so used to thinking of certain concepts and expressions used in the Bible as figurative that it might not even occur to them that those things might have once been meant literally. But compared to what the writers intended, literalists aren’t literal enough! Like most people in ancient times, the writers of the Bible actually believed that people literally thought with their hearts. And their kidneys.13

Continue reading Literal vs liberal interpretation →
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Good deeds for bad reasons

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The Bible describes and encourages a lot more evil behavior than you would expect from a “good book”. Not all of it is like that, of course. But even when the Bible discusses and promotes good behavior, the reasons it gives for behaving that way are usually all wrong.

There’s a Bible verse that addresses the issue of doing things for the wrong reasons. Paul says as long as you’re doing the right thing, it doesn’t really matter why you’re doing it. But that’s not entirely true. Reasons are important. Your reasons for doing things influence which things you choose to do. If you’re not doing things for the right reasons, you’re probably not going to consistently do the right things.

What would be a good reason for, say, showing hospitality? Why should you provide people with lodging and food? In the past, one good reason was that it took a long time to travel, and there weren’t a lot of commercial hotels around. So the only way travelers could get shelter at night was to rely on strangers to offer them a place to stay.

The Bible’s justification for promoting hospitality, on the other hand, doesn’t even have anything to do with helping people! Instead, the Bible says you should let people stay in your home because your guests might actually be angels. That’s a dumb reason, isn’t it? How is it in any way better to provide for angels, who don’t need your help, than to provide for humans, who do?

Continue reading Good deeds for bad reasons →
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Faith is not reasonable

Atheism, Flawed concepts, The bad book, , , , , ,

Faith is commonly regarded as a virtue. But is it really a good thing? What exactly is faith, anyway? Let’s look as some definitions.

Faith: Complete trust or confidence in something. Believing something without question. Firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Faith can also mean an obligation of loyalty, and if we’re still talking about beliefs, that would mean being devoted to sticking to a particular belief (which goes along with believing something firmly and without question).

“Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.” —Bill Maher

So then, faith means you decide to believe a particular idea even though there’s no evidence for it, and then you completely refuse to ever question it or consider changing your mind about it, disregarding all evidence to the contrary. Faith means being gullible regarding some ideas, and closed-minded to others. Faith means abandoning reason, willfully ignoring the evidence, breaking the connection between your beliefs and reality.

“There is no virtue in accepting something on faith, since it may very well be false, and it is clearly not virtuous to believe the false.” —Charlotte Schnook

Clearly this is an unbelievably bad way to form your beliefs. Considering what faith actually is, I don’t see how anyone could possibly think it was a good thing. There’s absolutely nothing good or reasonable about it. Having faith is just like having a delusion, except you’re doing it on purpose. If you want to have true beliefs and avoid having false beliefs, having faith is probably the most counterproductive thing you could possibly do.

Unlike reason and evidence, faith provides no way to determine which things you should believe. Any belief can be “justified” by faith just as well as any other. If you have faith in one religion, why not have faith in another religion? Why not believe that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan? Why not accept on faith that you should give me all your money right now?

You can probably think of some reasons not to accept those things, but why do you suddenly think you need to have reasons for what you believe? If I tell you that Ahura Mazda is the real God, or that you are a six-legged zebra from the planet Japan, or that you need to give me all your money, why do you question it? You don’t need a reason to believe; you just need to have faith, right?

“If something can be used as a justification for everything, then it shouldn’t be used as a justification for anything.” —Matt Dillahunty

When the inherent irrationality of faith is pointed out, religious people will sometimes protest that their faith is based on evidence. Well, if you’re trying to base your beliefs on reason and evidence, that’s great. You’re more reasonable than some religious people. But letting evidence shape your beliefs is not what faith is, and it’s not what the Bible tells you to do. The unreasonable way of thinking I described above is exactly the kind of thinking that the Bible encourages, and describes as faith.

The Bible on faith

The Bible says faith means confidently believing in something you hope is true, but that you don’t actually see any evidence for. To live by faith is to live blindly.

Continue reading Faith is not reasonable →
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