But I think it has to, because atheism is an act of faith. Let me try to explain. Faith is a firm conviction held without evidential support.
You are no doubt aware that there are several definitions of 'atheist', confusingly similar-yet-distinct. One commonly used definition considers an atheist to be somebody who has a firm conviction that there is no god, and anyone less certain than that falls under 'agnostic'; it is presumably this one which you're referring to above.
Another much wider definition, seen in academic literature, considers 'atheism' to merely mean 'absence of theism', and classifies anyone without a positive belief in a god as an atheist – so that 'agnostic' is a subclass of 'atheist' under this definition.
Personally I feel that both these definitions are lacking something (though I haven't always taken this view). My own position, and as I understand it that of quite a few other people, is not quite certainty: I agree that, in your words, 'the realm of the spiritual is essentially unknowable', but my day-to-day decisions have to be based on some implicit assumption about it (simply to justify, for example, continuing to go to work every day and not doing something totally different like becoming a monk), and the natural default assumption which does in fact seem very likely to me is that – unless and until proved otherwise – all religions were made up by humans. I don't deny that some kind of god might in principle turn out to exist; I just don't give it any extra Bayesian weight over any of the other things I could make up on the spot that might turn out to be true merely because a lot of humans shout about this particular one.
All of which causes me to behave indistinguishably from an atheist of the 'firm conviction' type except that I say a different set of things in theological debate; in all other circumstances the distinction between 'almost sure' and 'sure with a firm conviction constituting faith in itself' is of no moment. And my feeling is that the most useful way to define 'atheist' is somewhere in between the two extremes I describe above, so that it embraces not only the firm-conviction brigade but also the people like me who behave basically like them, but doesn't extend so far as to include people who think, for instance, that God and no God are roughly equally probable options.
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Date: 2013-05-21 09:55 am (UTC)You are no doubt aware that there are several definitions of 'atheist', confusingly similar-yet-distinct. One commonly used definition considers an atheist to be somebody who has a firm conviction that there is no god, and anyone less certain than that falls under 'agnostic'; it is presumably this one which you're referring to above.
Another much wider definition, seen in academic literature, considers 'atheism' to merely mean 'absence of theism', and classifies anyone without a positive belief in a god as an atheist – so that 'agnostic' is a subclass of 'atheist' under this definition.
Personally I feel that both these definitions are lacking something (though I haven't always taken this view). My own position, and as I understand it that of quite a few other people, is not quite certainty: I agree that, in your words, 'the realm of the spiritual is essentially unknowable', but my day-to-day decisions have to be based on some implicit assumption about it (simply to justify, for example, continuing to go to work every day and not doing something totally different like becoming a monk), and the natural default assumption which does in fact seem very likely to me is that – unless and until proved otherwise – all religions were made up by humans. I don't deny that some kind of god might in principle turn out to exist; I just don't give it any extra Bayesian weight over any of the other things I could make up on the spot that might turn out to be true merely because a lot of humans shout about this particular one.
All of which causes me to behave indistinguishably from an atheist of the 'firm conviction' type except that I say a different set of things in theological debate; in all other circumstances the distinction between 'almost sure' and 'sure with a firm conviction constituting faith in itself' is of no moment. And my feeling is that the most useful way to define 'atheist' is somewhere in between the two extremes I describe above, so that it embraces not only the firm-conviction brigade but also the people like me who behave basically like them, but doesn't extend so far as to include people who think, for instance, that God and no God are roughly equally probable options.