How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [167]
The philosopher George Smith’s book, Atheism, is widely read and highly touted among atheists. In it he claims that atheism is nothing more than “the absence of theistic belief,” yet he admits that “atheism is sometimes defined as ‘the belief that there is no God of any kind, or the claim that a god cannot exist’.” He goes on to explain that “an atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist; rather, he does not believe in the existence of a god.” If theism is “belief-in-god,” says Smith, atheism is simply “no-belief-in-god.” Yet he admits that the word has more than one meaning, and the subtitle of his book would seem to gainsay this disclaimer: The Case Against God. Shouldn’t this read The Case Against Belief in God?
Smith also confirms the pejorative use of the word: “Atheism is probably the least popular—and least understood—philosophical position in America today. It is often approached with fear and mistrust, as if one were about to investigate a doctrine that advocates a wide assortment of evils—from immortality, pessimism and communism to outright nihilism.” Smith cites the influential twentieth-century philosopher, A. E. Taylor, who, in his 1947 book, Does God Exist?, blames atheism for the two World Wars: “The world has directly to thank [atheism] for the worst evils of ‘modern war’.” With atheists never amounting to more than a couple of percentage points of any population, it is hard to imagine who had instigated and fought those wars. In my opinion Smith’s book on atheism is the best available, yet reading it only reinforced my conviction that the agnostic/nontheist position defended in Chapter 1 is the most reasonable one with our present understanding of the universe and our current social conditions.
Michael Martin, who has probably thought and written about atheism as much as anyone in history, in his 1990 magnum opus, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, agrees with Smith that “atheists have been attacked for flaws in their moral character: it has often been alleged that they cannot be honest and truthful. For example, in 1724 Richard Bentley, an English Christian apologist, maintained that ‘no atheist as such can be a true friend, an affectionate relation, or a loyal subject’.” Martin also cites the Evidence Amendment Act of 1869, where “atheists in England were considered incompetent to give evidence in a court of law,” and a case in America in 1856 where “one Ira Aldrich was disqualified as a witness in an Illinois case after he testified that he did not believe in a God that ‘punishes people for perjury, either in this world or any other’.” Martin’s purpose is not to convert theists to atheists (at least not directly), but to “provide good reasons for being an atheist.” In doing so he distinguishes between several types of atheists, including positive atheists who “disbelieve in god or gods” and negative atheists who “have no belief in a god or gods.” Martin further classifies negative atheists into “the broad sense of negative atheism,” where there is “an absence of belief in any god or gods,” and the “narrow sense of negative atheism, according to which an atheist is without a belief in a personal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely good and who created heaven and earth.” The reason for this latter classification is to distinguish between deists, pantheists, and polytheists who believe in an impersonal god or gods (small g) and theists who believe in a personal God who is all knowing, all powerful, all good, and created the universe. He does not stop there, further classifying positive atheists: “A positive atheist in the broad sense is a person who disbelieves that there is any god or gods and a positive atheist in the narrow sense is a person who disbelieves that there is a personal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely good and who created heaven and earth.”
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It depends on how you define