There has been much confusion on what an atheist is: many straw men that have taken part in sophist arguments, and an overall bad public relations job. In fact, atheists are the most distrusted minority in all of America. A study done by the University of Minnesota revealed that out of Muslims, homosexuals, Jews, and other minority groups, atheists were deemed to not agree at all with the applicant’s vision of an American society by 39.6 percent of all applicants. The same study showed that atheists scored 47.6 percent when asked if they would disapprove if their child wanted to marry a member of this group, which the choices included homosexuals and blacks. Persecution is not exactly alien to the atheist experience in America: people have often lost their jobs or have become publicly ostracized after revealing that they are atheists. It’s practically unimaginable for a politician to be an atheist here.
Atheism sets its roots from the pre-Socratics. The etymology of atheist can be traced to Ancient Greek from the word atheos meaning without (a-) god (theos). Around late antiquity when monotheistic religions began to flourish, the word sort of acquired the connotation of “denying the gods” or “ungodly”. This is probably the source of the negative connotation that is associated with atheist. Considering the fact that religion and the state were entwined, if one is going to be hostile to the beliefs of the state, the connotation of “traitor” “lawlessness” “radical” would presumably be part of official discourse. In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it was considered an insult, much like the word communism was during the McCarthy era.
What is the modern definition of atheism? Well for some reason there has been a great deal of misconception that atheism means the opposite of theist. Mainly, as theists are certain God exists, atheists are certain that God does not exist and so the implication is that atheism is just another religion. This is a straw man and greatly misrepresents what atheism means. Atheist simply means one who does not believe that God exists. This of course says nothing about the certainty or knowledge that God exists. Some atheists would say that they know God does not exist but the greater whole of atheists would probably be hesitant to say this, simply because the word knowledge is a bit ambiguous when it comes to theists. Most atheists would not go so far as to say, with the same level of certainty that religious people claim, that God does not exist and it is somewhat scientifically indefensible to say with that level of certainty, since there may be a God in the far corners of the universe, just like there may be a unicorn or leprechaun or flying spaghetti monster. Yet we tend to use the word “know” a little more loosely, in the sense that since we do not have any evidence or justification for a claim, we reject it. We do not have any evidence for the existence of unicorns or Zeus but we all tend to be a-unicornists or a-Zeusists.
Agnosticism is actually a somewhat intellectually dishonest response, since it seems to place some special epistemic standard when it comes to theological questions. It would seem silly for a person to say, “since there is still a possibility that Zeus could exist, my stance is that I do not know that Zeus exists.” So the agnostic has the burden of explaining why non-evidential theological beliefs have different epistemic standards than non-evidential Zeus beliefs or non-evidential unicorn beliefs. In fact agnosticism is in a completely different category in of itself because one could be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist: one who does not know that God exists but believes that He does or one who does not know that God exists but believes that He doesn’t. “Agnostic” has sort of taken on the connotation that someone really has no preference one way or another, but of course this says nothing about one’s metaphysical stance and is a nice way of saying, “I don’t really care about theology,” which I am sympathetic towards but I just do not think that most agnostics mean this. Actually, I think a lot of Christians are really agnostics since they really don’t care if God exists because most of their arguments come from the pragmatic benefits of belief, not really the evidential kind.
Atheists have sort of taken a strange connotation, especially with fundamentalist groups, synonymous with communist, feminist, immorality and abortionist. Of course, atheist merely means one who does not believe God exists. There is a little clarification though because although technically Buddhists are atheist in that definition, the modern definition sort of means one who does not believe in the supernatural. Many modern atheists identify with skeptics, humanists, naturalists, rationalists, and other schools of thought. I identify myself as an antitheist, a school of thought that argues that not only does God not exist but also religion is extremely destructive and dangerous and something that should be resisted. This should preface my responses to my later articles.
In any case, I want to make sure that people realize it is incorrect to say that atheists are dogmatic, ideological or religious. Dogmatism, ideology and religion all have a faith component towards it, or belief without evidence. To claim that atheism is any of these is to argue that atheists believe that God does not exist without evidence for his non-existence. This of course makes no sense because you cannot have evidence for a universal negative. I can never have evidence that definitively proves that Big Foot does not exist, since I would have to observe every square inch of the Earth for every moment in time.
Ken Ueda a senior math, physics, and philosophy major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
