Ignosticism 101: The Negative Space forms an Elephant or A Conversation with Rockhound570 theist

I am having a conversation with a person who goes by the name Rockhound570 theist about ignosticism and the implications of it as it relates to God. 

He brought up a point that many people, in my experience, often seem to be confused about. It seems there is an ongoing debate in theology as to whether or not we can fully comprehend God, should such a being exist. Or, as some contend, God is so far beyond our understanding that we cannot grasp him.

Before moving on, let’s not forget that the first question relating to ignosticism asks, “What do you mean by God?”

This is a fair question, and a good starting place I might add, since human experience tells us that humans have invented a wide range of religious customs and beliefs, have erected competing religious ideologies, and have subscribe belief to a seemingly endless supply of supernatural deities and gods. 

So, as you can see, “What do you mean by God?” is a very good question to ask before getting too deep into theological discussions.

Now here’s the thing. Ignosticism says it should be relatively easy to find an agreeable definition for God and what the term “God” actually means. Ignosticism holds that if God is real then all we need do is look at the referent (the thing itself) and simply describe it. If everyone’s answer matched, then we’d all have a working definition for God. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. 

So, naturally, theists like Rockhound (or Rocky for short) suppose that God simply isn’t comprehensible. We just cannot understand or perceive God fully enough to explain in any greater detail. As such, we can only perceive God dimly, or as St. Thomas Aquinas suggested, we can only recognize him why what he is not — sort of like feeling out the empty space in a room and determining that it is the ever illusive elephant in the room.

But I have a different suggestion. My suggestion holds that, if ignosticism is correct in its assessment, the reason nobody can agree as to what they mean when they talk about “God” is *not because they haven’t fully comprehended God but because there are different competing definitions for supposedly the same thing.

In response to my article on Ignosticism being the best argument against God, Rocky stated that

I don’t care about human definitions of God. I care about whether or not God exists as a reality independent from the capability of humans to adjudicate. That is a more fundamental question than any you have asked. That requires clarification from you before you can logically proceed.

Earlier, I suggested that all definitions of God are conceptually derived. In my book titled Ignosticism, I explain that we have two ways in which we ultimately settle on definitions. There is the first method, in which definitions are pragmatically derived — that is, we observe a referent (i.e., the thing itself),  like an apple, and then we test and examine it thereby supplying the information we all need to recognize and reasonably describe what an apple is. 

As such, “apple” is merely the name we assign to the referent (the thing itself), and the description of its features or characteristics supply us with a working definition for it. In this case, we have a crunchy, juicy, greenish / or redish / or yellowish fruit with a delectable sweetness or sourness and an easily recognizable fragrance, which all people can agree upon whenever they stumble upon the thing in person, and can say quite emphatically that it is an apple.

I have mentioned that other cultures, and other languages, will name the referent (the thing itself) differently. This is to be expected. Thus, in Japanese, an apple is called “ringo.” But the fact remains, the description of an apple, whether you are American, Japanese, or Russian, will always match everyone else’s description since we are all reliant on the same referent (the thing itself) that we must derive our description from. 

Hence, we have pragmatically derived a proper definition from the referent (the thing itself) by observing, testing, and examining it.

Now, there is another kind of definition which is derived, not from any object, but from an idea or concept. 

These sorts of definitions are not explaining anything in the real world but, rather, these definitions are the combination of ideas and concepts which, together, form a conceptual framework in which we can better understand said ideas or concepts. 

An example of this would be the concept of a Democracy. Democracy isn’t a thing unto itself that has any referent in the real world. Instead it is a political ideology regarding how we ought to organize societies and what rights citizens ought to be allowed in such societies. The democracies that exist today do not supply us with the definition of what constitutes a democracy, rather, the definition of a Democracy gives us the ability to descern and recognize what constitutes working democracies.

What this means is that the concept of a Democracy is a collection of specific, yet recognizable, political philosophies and ideologies collected together to form a conceptual framework for what we mean by the term “Democracy.” Therefore, whenever we see a system of government that contains these specific political philosophies or ideologies, we will call it a Democracy.

This is what I call a conceptually derived definition, since we lack a referent to describe but we have, in essence, a well established or elucidated concept or idea. 

During our conversation, it seems that Rocky took umbrage at my suggestion that the term “God” was conceptually derived, although I don’t see how it could be otherwise. Allow me to explain.

All definitions of God, if derived from a referent (the thing itself) would presumably match — that is, they would be in agreement with one another about the thing they were seeking to describe — just as we saw was the case with apples. But this we do not find.

Rather, definitions of “God” tend to vary drastically, since people are using religious templates to create their ideal God based on subjective experience, usually through the lens of their culture and/or religion, of what they feel or believe God to be. In my mind, God is clearly a conceptually derived idea.

We know this precisely because we can ask anyone what it is they mean by “God” and what it is any particular definition of God seeks to describe? If there was actually a referent (the thing itself) which people could experience first hand, as with apples, then whatever they might call God, whether it be Yahweh or Allah or Vishnu, at least they would be explaining a tangible referent (the thing itself) and their definitions would align. But this we do not find. Which, I feel, is a big indicator that we are absent a referent and are in all likelihood dealing with competing conceptualizations.

Rocky went on to add that

You say that I must supply a third party referent. That implies that the human psyche can fully and adequately grasp the concept of God so clearly that all humans will agree upon it. How do you know this is so? 

Naturally, my suggestion that a third party should be capable of describing a referent (the thing itself) in virtually the exact same way was to point out that regardless of culture or background, everyone knows how to describe an apple to someone else of a different culture or background — and that between the two of them they can agree on what apples are. 

But when it comes to God, this kind of semantic agreement is virtually lacking. Why? Because there is no centralized source to derive a common definition from. Rather, it seems to be the case that all definitions of “God” are conceptually derived, thus lending to a divergence in opinion on what “God” is or what attributes he (or she) has. What this means from the point of view of the ignostic is that God is a semantically confused term.

Continuing in our conversation, Rocky goes on to say:

That just leads me back to what I asked before. How do YOU know that such a definition is even possibly attainable? Why is such a definition needed if the real project is to try and decide if a transcendent reality that gave rise to all that exists is possibly there. By implication, it must be, or God is just an individual concept. OK. Well and good. That is a truth implication that you must clarify before we can proceed. If you cannot, your thesis is founded upon a non-provable supposition and it fails. I am quite certain that I can supply more challenges than this first simple one that comes to mind. If just really seems that you are trying to evade the deeper question of God’s existence simply by citing the cloud of confusion of defining something that may not be fully available to limited human perception.

To which I replied:

**We know, at least, that humans can recognize other intelligent minds. If God is not an intelligent mind, of a sort, then what is it you claim to be experiencing — when by your own admission it is not comprehensible? 

If it’s incomprehensible to you, and you cannot makes sense of it, then how do you know it’s God? If it is truly incomprehensible, then I have to say ignosticism is justified by the very fact that what is incomprehensible cannot also be coherent, since the prior nullifies the latter.

In other words, you cannot have a logical and consistent argument for that which is incomprehensible except to say that it is incomprehensible, and you’ve gotten nowhere. Are you saying God is incomprehensible? If so, the problem seems obvious. There can be no suitable definition for God, since any experience we may have of him would be meaningless since it is incomprehensible to us.

If, on the other hand, God is comprehensible, then my prior claims with how to approach this information still holds. If God is comprehensible, then we should expect, at the very least, to be able to come to agreement of that which we have comprehended. Otherwise, the problem of dissimilarity arises all over again, and we just come back to God being incomprehensible, and thus irrelevant to human experience.*

Please keep in mind that ignosticism doesn’t disprove the existence of God, per se. Rather, it simply observes that there is an undeniable semantic confusion, and that in all likelihood this confusion is caused by God being conceptually derived rather than pragmatically derived. 

One possibility is that all anyone has are their individual conceptualizations, in which case, God is a figment of human imagination, a mere fancy. On the other hand, there is a real possibility that God exists but there is simply no way to know him,  that the referent (the thing itself) is out there but simply beyond our perception or understanding, in which case the ignostic’s claim would revert back to the theological noncognitivist’s position that it is meaningless to talk about something which cannot be talked about meaningfully. 

I think that addresses the theist’s confusion as to whether or not God is comprehensible. If the theist is to believe in any God that is a Personal being or a Perfect being, then God has to, by his very nature, be discernible to us. Otherwise we could not know him and he would be rendered irrelevant to human experience. Similarly, anything said about such a God, such as him being a God of love, or him being a transcendent being, would all be lies. Unable to know anything about God, we wouldn’t know anything about his basic attributes except to say he was supremely illusive. And such a God cannot be anything but irrelevant to us.

I rather think the simpler explanation, however, is that God is a type of conceptualization — and people simply have conceived of different, often competing, ideas and concepts for what they feel God is and what the term “God” means to them personally.

Mocking Atheism

Ever since Randal Rauser kicked me off his blog three years ago, I have rarely gone back. This year my book The Swedish Fish, Deflating the Scuba Diver and Working the Rabbit’s Foot, a response to Rauser’s The Swedish Atheist, The Scuba Diver and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails was released. Soon after, I was directed to a post on his website in which a reader asked if he’d respond to my critique of his book.

Needless to say Randal acted as I have come to expect from him, childish, overly defensive and not very professional. He went on to disparage me by slinging not one, not two, not three, not even four, but FIVE ad hominems against my character for the initial comments that got me banned three years ago.

Even so, I couldn’t help but venture over to Randal’s blog again when an interesting April 9, 2015 blog post came up in my Disqus news feed simply titled “Mocking Atheism.”

I read Randal’s comments, in which he basically sets out to defend atheists from mockery and ridicule by believers. A very noble thing for a Christian apologist to do, if you think about it!

This is one of the things that initially attracted me to Randal’s blog three years ago. He seemed like a breath of fresh air in that he was, to his credit, so unlike any of the other Christian apologists I knew. Randal does have a knack for boldly engaging with subject matter that would make most apologists uncomfortable, to say the least.

But here was this interesting blog post where Randal appeared to treat atheists with a modicum of respect and come to their defense against some nasty Christians who were mocking atheists, and that instantly set off red flags. After all, darn near every experience I have had with the guy informs me that he actually doesn’t care one iota about atheists, he certainly isn’t against calling them names, and he will straw-man atheists and what they may believe every chance he gets while banning every single atheist who tries to engage with him on his blog in honest discussion but proves to be persistent enough in their beliefs to pester Randal with differing points of view that he cannot easily dismiss.

So was Randal really being open minded and considerate, or was something else going on here?

In the post “Mocking Atheism,” Randal asks, “So is it ever appropriate to treat an atheist with ridicule, contempt and/or derision?”

Personally, I think it sort of depends on why you are ridiculing them in the first place. Randal seems to agree, when he says, “This prompts the question: to what end?”

After giving an example where a Christian mocks an atheist and then Randal goes to show that the Christian was acting immature by mocking the atheist simply because he disagreed with the atheist’s position, Randal concludes that

If you have the need to mock other people then you do nothing more than reveal your own emotional immaturity (as mom said, you can’t build yourself up by tearing others down) and your inability to grapple seriously with the ideas of other people. Mockery is little more than a warning flag for insecurity, xenophobia and provincialism.

Suffice to say, I feel there are more than a few things I need to say here with respect to mockery and ridicule, and I am going to preface this by saying I don’t just think Randal is plain ole wrong here – I thinks he’s being dangerously wrong and simultaneously completely naïve.

It seems that Randal has a hidden agenda. He wants to ban mockery and ridicule NOT to protect hapless atheists, mind you, but to safeguard himself and his beliefs – to protect his religion from criticism and scorn. 

Ah, and here lies the rub. The apologetic trick Randal employs here is the ole bait and switcharoo. You see, if you agree with him about not wanting these poor atheists to be mocked and ridiculed, then surely you must agree with him when he says religion must not be mocked or ridiculed too.

First, let’s go back to the example Randal gave in the post about a Christian theist ridiculing the atheist simply for thinking differently. Randal was right to call that behavior offensive and condescending, because such ridicule isn’t meant to draw attention to any greater point. It’s merely a bit of grandstanding meant to make yourself look superior while making the other side feel bad about themselves. And that’s clearly wrong. I agree.

In fact, I find such behavior bothersome and I’ve been known to call out conceited theologians who call their readers nasty names and who act condescending to their commenters because they have a superiority complex, and I won’t be nice about it. I might even mock or ridicule them. Ah-ha! But you see the difference, right?

Obviously, I have to part ways with Randal where he puts a full stop after saying that all mockery and ridicule is offensive and wrong, and promotes xenophobia and provincialism. Unlike Randal, I firmly believe that mockery and ridicule have a place. Meanwhile, it may or may not denote a kind of underlying insecurity – it really sort of depends on the context.

Whether anyone cares to admit it or not, there are other reasons to mock or ridicule someone, or something, than just to be mean. It seems that Randal goes out of his way to ignore such a possibility because he is attempting to do what all apologists do, build up his faith and protect it from exacting criticism, derision and ridicule.

But, in my view, mockery and ridicule are necessary because without these tools we could not have satire. As the literary critic Dustin Griffin reminds us in his book Satire: A Critical Reintroduction, “Some satires are of course more topical then others. At one extreme is the lampooning attack on an individual, and the other a ‘satire on mankind.’” (Griffin, p.121) So it seems that ridicule, another term for lampooning, is built into the very fabric of satire.

Randal says that mockery and ridicule of people are wrong, period. But then there are other uses for mockery and ridicule too, as is evidenced by their heavy use in satire.

In the opening paragraph of his blog, Randal defines what “mockery” means, but he neglects to give the full definition. As the Oxford Dictionary of English says, mockery can also be an absurd misrepresentation or imitation of something.This falls into the category of humor, of satire, and polemics.

The French satirist Voltaire, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment (along with other notable figures such as Descartes, Locke, Newton, Kant, Goethe, Rousseau, and Adam Smith) was infamous for the mockery and ridicule of others. But we might wonder how could such a person ever write something as morally profound as “‘Quoi que vous fassiez, écrasez l’infâme, et aimez qui vous aime,’” or, in English, “Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.” 

Was Voltaire just a mean bully who sponsored xenophobia, provincialism, and all the terrible things Randal thinks comes out of the practice of mockery and ridicule? I think not.

Quite to the contrary, Voltaire was drastically opposed to such things, which is why he satirized them and used his fair share of mockery and ridicule when lampooning them.

Furthermore, as the author and intellectual Salman Rushdie has said, “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”

He’s not wrong.

After all, Rushdie is quite familiar what the end result of cultures which have become too overly sensitive, too insecure, and too thin-skinned that any trifling disagreement might just be enough for the oppressive authoritarians and conformists to call for your death. Taken to its logical conclusion, the desire to ban criticism and ridicule is the same desire that compels one to want to ban the opinions of others, calling it a blasphemy, while simultaneously attempting to turn one’s own opinions into sacred objects that must never be ridiculed.

In such a culture, a silly or irreverent satirical cartoon drawing could spark outrage and end in embassies get burned to the ground and countless innocent people being murdered. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the cartoon wasn’t offensive, it very well may have been, but perhaps it was drawn offensively to do as Voltaire said, crush the infamous thing.

I’m sorry, I have to strongly and emphatically disagree with Randal. Mockery and ridicule are powerful tools which keep the sacred in check by balancing it with the profane. For we have all seen what happens when those who honor the sacred try to criminalize the profane, who try to make blasphemy illegal, and who try to shield themselves from any form of criticism at any cost, they grow to despise the simple threat of other ideas and opinions different from their own, so much so that they are willing to kill others out of the simple fear of hearing words they may not appreciate or find offensive, hurtful, or irreverent.

I don’t know about you, but I personally find that killing people for their opinions is a far worse crime than mockery or ridicule used to stress a valid criticism or point. Now, if you’re mockery and ridicule is malicious, and simply meant to tear others down for the sake of tearing them down, like an evil stepmother constantly nagging the stepdaughter and making her feel worthless, then yeah, I feel this makes you an asshole, but it’s not worth killing somebody over.

The bottom line is this…

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.

Actually, this is a quote from the film V for Vendetta. But you can see why I chose it.

If we allow such censorship, then we lose more than just our freedom to object, to think and speak as we see fit, to go uncensored and unpunished for expressing ourselves as we wish – we lose our very vitality as human beings, we lose our ability to deliberate, argue, and confide and worse than all of this … we lose the ability to discern the truth from fiction.

Xenophobia, provincialism, censorship, and making the opinions of others unlawful, that is what comes from saying all mockery and ridicule is wrong and that all opinions, as well as the people who utter them, should be immune from criticism, derisive or otherwise. Again, as Salman Rushdie said, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

All this to say, I think Randal is entirely wrong on the matter – mockery and ridicule should not be banished from the ongoing discourse, rather they should be embraced precisely because they are necessary tools for fighting xenophobia, provincialism, and totalitarian and tyrannical censorship. Contrary to what Randal may believe, the very things he so despises, things like xenophobia and provincialism, are not the end result of mockery and ridicule. Rather, the fact is, mockery and ridicule are the immunization against things like xenophobia and provincialism!

So, returning to the question at hand, is mocking atheists okay? As I said, it depends on what your goal is. Is it simply to be mean or is it meant to raise a bigger point? Perhaps the more important question we all should be asking is: Am I, an atheist, deserving of your mockery and ridicule?

I sure hope not, but if I’ve earned it—take your best shot!

As someone who needs his ego deflated on a regular basis, I can assure you, when someone mocks or ridicules me in a way that points out my character flaws, after the initial sting of it, I find that I come to appreciate the underlying message (not always, but a lot of the time).

Needless to say, if I ever get too big for my britches I’d hope someone points it out in such a way that we can all laugh about it later. No hard feelings. After all, the only people who stay perpetually butt-hurt after receiving exacting criticism are those who can’t seem to admit that they might have flaws and, if it wasn’t obvious by now, those who simply cannot take a joke.

Finally, I wish to share with you an extended quote by the little known but influential Freethinker G.W. Foote from his essay “On Riddicule.”  

Goldsmith said there are two classes of people who dread ridicule—priests and fools. They cry out that it is no argument, but they know it is. It has been found the most potent form of argument. Euclid used it in his immortal Geometry; for what else is the reductio ad absurdum which he sometimes employs? Elijah used it against the priests of Baal. The Christian fathers found it effective against the Pagan superstitions, and in turn it was adopted as the best weapon of attack on themby Lucian and Celsus. Ridicule has been used by Bruno, Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire, by nearly all the great emancipators of the human mind.

 All these men used it for a serious purpose. They were not comedians who amused the public for pence. They wielded ridicule as a keen rapier, more swift and fatal than the heaviest battle-axe. Terrible as was the levin-brand of their denunciation, it was less dreaded than the Greek fire of their sarcasm. I repeat that they were men of serious aims, and indeed how could they have been otherwise? All true and lasting wit is founded on a basis of seriousness; or else, as Heine said, it is nothing but a sneeze of the reason. Hood felt the same thing when he proposed for his epitaph: “Here lies one who made more puns, and spat more blood, than any other man of his time.”

Buckle well says, in his fine vindication of Voltaire, that he “used ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of folly.” And he adds:

His irony, his wit, his pungent and telling sarcasms, produced more effect than the gravest arguments could have done; and there can be no doubt that he was fully justified in using those great resources with which nature had endowed him, since by their aid he advanced the interests of truth, and relieved men from some of their most inveterate prejudices.

 Victor Hugo puts it much better in his grandiose way, when he says of Voltaire that “he was irony incarnate for the salvation of mankind.”

Voltaire’s opponents, as Buckle points out, had a foolish reverence for antiquity, and they were impervious to reason. To compare great things with small, our opponents are of the same character. Grave argument is lost upon them; it runs off them like water from a duck. When we approach the mysteries of their faith in a spirit of reverence, we yield them half the battle. We must concede them nothing. What they call reverence is only conventional prejudice. It must be stripped away from the subject, and if argument will not remove the veil, ridicule will. (Seasons of Freethought, p. 260-61)

–Sincerely,

The Advocatus Atheist

Atheism X Agnosticism X Ignosticism

According to The Oxford Dictionary of English (2005):


Agnosticism – n. a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God. [from a- ‘not’ + gnostic.]


Atheism – mn. the theory or belief that God does not exist.  [from Greek atheos, from a- ‘without’ + theos ‘god’.]


The question we often hear is can an atheist be an agnostic? The answer is yes. An atheist can freely lack a belief in a specific god such as Vishnu, Thor, or Yahwey yet still be open to the possibility that a Deistic entity may or mayn’t exist.


The reason for this is two fold.


First, with personal gods come personal attributes. Believers usually define their chosen [G]od’s attributes in terms which are testable, meaning, the claims they make about the nature of their god are either verifiable or falsifiable. When looking for the evidence of these claims, one can either rule or belief or form belief based on the reliability of these claims. If the claims are weak claims, then one may disregard the belief in the god on the basis that the claims do not have adequate support and are not likely to be true.


Second, atheism deals with belief, or the lack thereof, predicated on whether or not the belief can be established. Gnosticism deals with the question of knowledge. What do we know about the god in question, and do we know enough to formulate something more than a philosophical construct? Usually the answer is no, but in cases where there just isn’t enough evidence to rule out the god, then belief does not automatically follow.


When you don’t have enough information to make an affirmative claim, the default position is simply not knowing.


Typically theists will make the mistake of making a Kirgardian leap of faith, taking them from the default position of agnosticism into belief. Meanwhile, atheists simply make the proposition that since none of the claims have been met, then it appears as if there is no god and therefore no reason to believe is justified.


As a proposition atheism does fall into the belief category. But it’s not a positive claim because it only arises as a response to theism. If there was no theism then there would be no atheism, as atheism would be the default position. It would simply be called reality.


Although I call myself a firm atheist, and I am agnostic with regard to the general question of the possibility of god, I actually would consider myself Ignostic.


Ignosticism is the theological position that every other theological position assumes too much about the concept of God.


Ignosticism holds two interrelated views about God. They are as follows:

• 1) The view that a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of god can be meaningfully discussed.

• 2) If the definition provide is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God is meaningless.

In other words, a) a definition which is incoherent can’t be about anything, and b) a definition which isn’t about anything cannot be said to be meaningful.


Additionally, Ignosticism is not merely concerned with definitions by themselves, but rather, is concerned with competing definitions which are all attempting to define the same referent.


Referent: Definitions refer to things. A thing in the world that words and phrases are about is called a referent.

Was America Founded As a Christian Nation: Part 1 The Founding Fathers

It is often preached from the pulpit that America was founded as a “Christian Nation.” Perhaps worse than the blatant fallacy behind this is that so many people buy into it. However, to anyone who has spent a little time investigating the matter, the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation is unequivocally false.

It is not really a claim which needs to be refuted since, the simple fact of the matter is, America was the first country founded on the principle that all religions deserved equal respect and none deserved unrequited favor. The Christian doctrine of exclusivity was, to the minds of the founding fathers, incompatible with their loftier principles of a united republic, a United States. The vision they had was one of an autonomous nation where your religion was just one part of what defined you–but at the end of the day–each and every citizen, man or woman, could proudly call themselves free–they could call themselves–Americans.

In the minds of Christians, however, many tend to make-believe an alternative history where America was founded as a Christian nation and the term American is just a synonym for Christian. This could no more be further from the truth than if I were to claim that a centimeter was just a synonym for an inch. Yet such falsehoods are often preached as a matter of fact within the folds of the Christian faith. Sadly, the insistence of these falsehoods as truths has persuaded many to believe it and perpetuated the myth that America is a Christian nation.

In the first part of this series I will investigate a few of the founding fathers in order to follow up on the question whether or not all of the founding fathers were Christian. It stems to reason that if America was truly founded as a “Christian Nation” then all of the founding fathers would ubiquitously subscribe to the religious and moral ideals of Christianity. If we should find exception to this rule, then it would be safe to assume that, contrary to popular opinion, the United States was not founded as a Christian nation, let alone on Christian principles. The claim would hence be refuted. 

The freethinker Thomas Paine was one of the primary voices of reason in the early United States. His letters urging Thomas Jefferson to emancipate the slaves in lieu of the booming sugar trade, as well as his writing calling for equal rights for man, something Paine believed to be common sense, would greatly affect the thinking of the founding fathers. Paine’s personal calls for the abolition of slavery also greatly impacted Abraham Lincoln who wrote a defense of Paine in 1835 (Lincoln by the way was, as far as anyone knows, a nonbeliever–at least after the death of his son–and claimed he did not belong to any Christian denomination and had to face charges of impious infidelity). 


Spending most of the 1790’s in France, Paine was deeply involved in the French Revolution. Upon being arrested and imprisoned, Paine suspected he would be executed as a revolutionary radical, and so was motivated to write his scathing attack on the Christian religion, his last hurrah so to speak. This infamous book is better known as The Age of Reason. In this influential work Paine calls for “free rational inquiry” into all subjects. Paine was a self professed Deist.

Here we shall look at some of Paine’s most recognizable quotes and see whether or not he adhered to Christian principles to help us discover whether this founding father was of the mind of someone who would help forge a nation in the name of Christianity.

When asked by Dr. Manley, “Do you believe, or do you wish to believe, that Jesus Christ is the son of God?”

Thomas Paine succinctly replied, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.” (As quoted by Robert G. Ingersoll in A Vindication of Thomas Paine, 1891) 

Paine once stated that Christianity was merely “atheism dressed up as mannism.” This scathing remark was followed by his comment that, “The christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.”

As for the Holy Scripture, the religious text all Christians revere as divinely inspired truth, Paine had this to say:

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.” (A Letter: Being an Answer to a Friend, on the publication of The Age of Reason. The Age of Reason. Boston: Josiah L. Mendum. 1797-05-12. p. 205)

These (above) quotes are telling for several reasons. It proves that Paine did not believe in Jesus Christ as anything other than a mere mortal and that he despised the teaching of the Bible, renouncing it as contemptible, cruel, and vile.

Many of Paine’s quotes echo the sentiments of modern day atheist and religious critics. It should come as no surprise, for the shared belief among all freethinkers of any age has been that of free and rational inquiry, which has always, in every age, rubber religion the wrong way.

Paine once prophetically quipped:

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics.” (The Age of Reason, Chapter III: Conclusion)

So clearly Paine was nothing like the Christian theists of today. In many instances Thomas Paine sounds more like the atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics of today.

The question becomes–was Thomas Paine likely to have sponsored, let alone allowed, for the United States to be founded as a “Christian Nation” knowing his sheer repugnance toward Christianity? It doesn’t seem likely. With respect to Christianity, Paine was an atheist. He did not believe in its god or its message.

Before we proceed with our investigation of the founding fathers, and what they purportedly believed, I wish to share two of my favorite Thomas Paine quotes:

“It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.” (The Age of Reason Part 1, 1793)

“The study of theology as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.” 
(The Age of Reason, Chapter III: Conclusion)

[Note: Clearly Paine believed [G]od could be discovered by the tools of science. A deist, in the proper sense, but one who was highly critical of Christianity none-the-less.]

If Thomas Paine, “a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination,” was our archetypal religious critic, then Thomas Jefferson was our archetypal freethinker. What was Jefferson’s mind when it came to Christianity?

Jefferson writes in his correspondence that his greatest success was in drafting the the Virginia statute, the article which would go on to provide the basis for America’s Constitutional division between Church and State. This separation of Church and State is commonly referred to as: “The Wall of Separation between Church and State.”

Jefferson, one of the original drafters of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, believed all Religion deserved equal respect, and that to favor one over another was one of the worst forms of bigotry. Needless to say, such an opinion is incompatible with traditional Christian orthodox thinking. 

Additionally, like Paine, Jefferson was also critical of Christianity. Like Paine, he felt that Theology had no place in the University, stating in his 1814 letter to Thomas Cooper about establishing the University of Virginia that “Theology should have no place in our institution.” 


It is no secret that Jefferson placed a higher importance on the difference of opinion than on the orthodox conformity to a dogmatically conditioned like-mindedness.

“Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?” (From Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII)

Still, I have been privileged, if you could call it that, to meet several Christians who have told me to my face that Thomas Jefferson was a Theist in tune with Christian morals and thought. Many people have often used the following quote to prove Jefferson was a Christian:

“I am a Christian, in the only sense he [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.” (Letter to Benjamin Rush, 12 April, 1803)

[Note: technically speaking, by his admission that Jesus was merely human and not divine, Jefferson would be deemed a “Gnostic,” which by orthodox Christian standards is viewed as heretical.]

Apparently modern Christians weren’t the only one who made the mistake of thinking Thomas Jefferson to be a Christian though. A reporter made the same mistake, to which Jefferson wrote a letter to set the record straight, informing, “Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was “I say nothing of my religion.” (Letter to John Adams, 11 January, 1817)

In his letter to Ezra Stile Ely, Jefferson stressed the point, “You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” (25 June 1819)

Those familiar with Jefferson’s original writing will be keen to note that in his original writings Jefferson never capitalized the term god. It is always written in the lowercase. Only later did editors correct for this obvious “error” to put the proper reverence back into the term, and so too Jefferson’s own writings, once again, wrongly assuming he believed in their concept of god. He did not. Luckily, the original writing, in his own hand, has survived for posterity so as to allow us this invaluable lesson.

Even so, the question becomes, to what is this self proclaimed sect to which Jefferson subscribed? 

Perhaps we find clues in an unsuspecting letter of encouragement to his nephew, Peter Carr, about the young man’s investigation into religious faith and of his beliefs. Jefferson writes:

“Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.” (10 August 1787)

In not so many words, Jefferson tells his very own nephew, whom he loved, that it was perfectly alright to become an atheist! This should shed some light on perhaps what Jefferson meant by this unmentioned sect he was so guarded about.

Would any decent God fearing Christian instruct their very own flesh and blood that it was perfectly acceptable to become an atheist? No. This line of reasoning is wholly at odds with the teachings and doctrines of Christianity. 

Like Tom Paine, it seems that Thomas Jefferson would not have been  likely to have sponsored, let alone allowed, for the United States to be founded as a “Christian Nation.” Although less critical of Christianity than Paine, it is clear that Jefferson’s thinking was in tune with modern religious critics and modern day atheists. Jefferson even went as far as to instruct his own nephew that it would be perfectly acceptable, even virtuous, to find a belief in no god at all–i.e., atheism.

After having given it fair consideration, I am inclined to think Jefferson was not a Christian, since he frequently denied the virgin birth, Jesus’s divinity, and all the miracles of the Bible. On top of this, he instructed his nephew that atheism was a perfectly virtuous conclusion, not even a Unitarian would have said this!

As for the public claims that he was a practicing Christian, he denied them all, and simply kept his religious beliefs a closely guarded secret. As I quoted earlier, Jefferson denies being a Christian whenever that assumption was made of him. 

For his denial of the miracles of the Bible, many are found in his his letters to John Adams. Additionally, he addresses the issue in his introduction to his defense of editing the Bible and writing The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

We know that Jefferson was against the idea of immaterial and transcendent beings: 

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise … without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, August 15, 1820)

Moreover, Jefferson found the idea of a virgin birth archaic and little more than fable and mythology.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823)

If this wasn’t enough to disprove Jefferson was in any way a Christian, Jefferson also denied the Christian notion of the Holy Trinity for logical reasons, equating the dogma of the Trinity with polytheism and calling it more unintelligible than paganism.
 

The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere relapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible. The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly, gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged. (In his letter to Rev Jared Sparks; November 4, 1820)

Another instance where Jefferson denies Christian theology, comparing it to an absurd myth and calling it “hocus-pocus,” is in a bold letter to James Smith.

The hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Smith, December 8, 1822)

By Jefferson’s own words we learn his exact level of disillusionment with Christianity. Although he may have found a strong sense of Platonism in the many teachings of Jesus, it is clear that Jefferson felt the majority of Christianity was founded upon absurdities and myths.

Conclusion

After closer inspection, we find that not all of the founding fathers subscribed to the religious and moral ideals of Christianity. In fact, we find two prime examples of two founding fathers being vehemently against Christianity, and therefore could not presumably have been part of any agenda to sponsor, let alone create, a “Christian Nation.” 

Undercover Atheist

A friend of mine who I know from my Evangelical Christian days, and who I worked with at a leading Christian Bible camp no less, has been struggling with her recent change of heart and subsequent switch over to atheism. She has started a new blog Undercover Atheist in the Bible Belt to vent her frustrations anonymously.

You see, she’s not free to express her true beliefs, because religion has encased her in a community of highly volatile irrationality. She cannot openly be atheist. If she comes out of the closet, she will likely lose her job, her friends, and possibly even her husband.

She lives in the Bible Belt–a literal hell for those who don’t share the Christian faith–because as she reminds us on her blog–you are expected to go to Church. She tells us the harsh truth of the matter and the relentless Churchianity she endures, stating, “if you’re not invested in the community… you’re a bad person.”

In other words, if you don’t make a show of your Christianity and appear in Church, like a good little disciple, you will be viewed as a bad person. This is the harsh reality that closet atheists under the oppressiveness of religion face everywhere.

She’s happily married, but she’s married to a Christian. Nothing wrong with that… but it does raise some obstacles. Trust and acceptance can become hot topic issues when the person shares a dissenting view or opinion. Like I tell others, in my house we don’t talk religion or politics–period. The only thing we fight about in the home is what television channel to watch. Luckily, both my wife and I are currently addicted to the American version of The X-Factor. 


Wanting to test her husband’s reaction to atheism, to see what his acceptance of her new found belief system would be should she one day choose to come out of the closet, she told him she had a dream that she had become one of those rationally minded… what do you call them… oh yeah… atheists. She wanted his thoughts.

In her words:

I explained that I had a dream that I became an atheist and was wondering what he thought. He said “what would be the point in having children if we aren’t raising them as Christians?” He even carried resentment and anger towards me for even asking the question in the first place.

What a let down. When I read this I was literally beside myself–picking my jaw up off the floor–and downing some Tylenol to numb the headache such religious retarded reasoning inevitably brings me.

Let me briefly explain why this form of reasoning is not only painful but intolerant and so hurtful.

What if were were to reverse the roles. What if she was the Christian hiding in the closet and her husband was the mainstream atheist? Would his reaction, upon her telling him that she had come to believe in Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior be, “what would be the point of having children is we aren’t raising them as atheists?”

*Gasp–Christian children?! God forbid! I mean… no… cuz god isn’t real. Uh… wait… thinking hurts my thoughts!

[Never mind that all children start out as atheists anyway! Religion is something acquired. You don’t come out of the womb quoting scripture with preconceived theological considerations already fully advanced. No. First your parents teach it to you–acquisition–then they take you to Church–indoctrination–and then you get it reamed into you again and again every single week–inculcation. Eventually you come to believe it–most probably because you live in the Bible Belt where everyone thinks the same and have no one to challenge your beliefs–and God knows you certainly won’t be doing it. Ignorance is bliss–but it’s still ignorance.]

Okay, so her husband’s reasoning is… well… nonexistent. There is absolutely no good reason to give up hope because someone else has a difference of opinion.

From my perspective, her husband is simply having an emotional reaction–and he probably doesn’t even realize how insensitive of an emotional outburst it really is. He, in not so many words, said he wouldn’t want to have children with her if she didn’t think exactly like him. It’s insensitive. Cruel even. 


But it’s not her husband’s fault–he’s just not thinking–he was raised in the Bible Belt, after all. But the despair of having to be “unequally yolked” with a non-believer (as the Bible says) is exactly what I went through when I was still a raging Christian. It was the catalyst to my deconversion.

Still, I can’t imagine getting the response my friend did and still feel like there is enough love between myself and my significant other to feel comfortable “coming out” and letting the world see the real me. I know why she has to be sneaky about it–she doesn’t really have any other alternatives. 


Maybe she needs to invite a hardcore atheist like me over to dinner sometime so I can “soften” her husband up a bit. Hit him over the head with, oh… I don’t know… a ton of rationality maybe? I just hope she keeps blogging–and keeps sharing her views and opinions–because unlike those zealots living in the echo chambers of their trumped up faith–in the civilized world we try not to reject and ostracize people for holding different worldviews.

The Many Faces of Atheism

As I have gone from theist to atheist the one thing that keeps coming up in discussions about what atheism is and how to better define it is whether or not there is such a thing as a strong or weak atheist, or a militant atheist, a naturalistic atheist, a Christian atheist, and so on and so forth.

Some people add descriptors to their atheism, to help define what they believe, or which worldview they lean toward. While others claim the description of atheism depends on which form of theism your are responding to. Both camps may turn out to be right.

On its surface, atheism is like a chameleon, it adapts to its surroundings, the situation, indeed, to the god it states it is rejecting or the theistic claim it is denying. But as many atheists have observed, at its most basic, atheism is just theism without.

Interestingly enough, however, I find that this revelation makes atheism all the more appealing to me–because it means we have here a highly adaptive belief (yes, believe it or not atheism is a form of belief) which contributes to a greater understanding of the world around us. But unlike religion, it doesn’t claim to be a divinely revealed truth. In fact, atheism would happily confess its grand mistake if a supreme deity ever did come out with it and reveal “himself” to us. However, it is because atheism doesn’t claim to be a revealed truth that it is in no danger of having to prove itself according to the claims it makes. Briefly, let me explain what I mean by this.

Monotheism, like the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all teach that there is one (and only one) God. Now, how do they know? Well, this is the revealed part of religion. A voice from the heavens supposedly came down to them, and said, “I am.”

They responded, “Who?”

“I the Lord,” the voice declared.

“Who are you Lord?” the multitudes inquired.

“I am who I am,” said the Lord.

Nobody ever thought to ask the obvious follow-up question, which would have been, “Oh, Lord, pray tell, art though a smart ass or just a dessert wrought hallucination?”

Instead, these few desert dwelling folk, amid their bouts of heat stroke and fending off dehydration, clustered together in sun scorched caravans far from any recognizable oasis, and cowered in the dirt and worshiped. Nobody knows why for sure, or whether the God which appeared to them was real or just a figment of their sun baked imaginations, but regardless, they erected entire religions based on some very dubious accounts of what constitutes evidence. Indeed, to the modern educated man, these accounts all look like ridiculous myths, and rightly classifies them as such.

Even so, some forms of religion are resilient to skeptical inquiry and doubt. Not because they are true–but because they have become so good at adapting themselves that they have evolved into religions which can survive the environment around them. If the cultural environment becomes enlightened and free thinking, the religion becomes theologically sophisticated and liberal. If the environment consists of mainly uneducated women living under the patriarchy of uneducated and highly conservative men, then their religion reflects this too.

But no matter how much religion adapts itself… it will always be limited by the tenets and articles of faith which help to define it.

Monotheism, for example, must maintain a strict definition of what it means to believe in God. You can’t believe in many gods, because that would be polytheism. You can’t believe that god is everywhere and everything, because that would be pantheism. What this means, I think, should be clear enough. Religion is always defined by the sort of God (or gods) it presumes to be real. Whether or not these deities exist or not is besides the point–because the believer believes it without question–and in turn their beliefs are dictated by the type of God they imagine to be real.

It is for this very reason that belief in God so often interferes with the truth. If God is said to be a Creator being, and said to have created it all, then when science postulates creation happen perhaps another way, then the religious grow weary of science–not faith. Subsequently, superstition overrides common sense and metaphysical assumptions trump knowledge. The reason, I think, is obvious. If the religious questioned their faith every time they had a doubt, then their belief in God would likely prove meaningless. Not because their concept of God is no longer seemingly compatible with the view of reality they are asked to consider, but rather, because to question the type of God you believe in in the first place is to question the very thing which, as a believer, defines who you are and how you see the world.

Religion is highly adaptive, perhaps for this very reason, because when faced with contradictions or dilemmas, and sometimes even hard evidence which complicates or compromises the believer’s faith–they set about attempting to rationalize ways to harmonize the current information with the information they hold to be sacred, revealed, truth. Truth is truth, after all.

This explains how religious defenses truly work. If God created it all, but then science postulates the “Big Bang” singularity spontaneously caused the universe to pop into existence from a previous state of nothingness–these conflicting theories lead to the harmonization that–through no fault of the believer (who pleads ignorance in the face of understanding something as magnificent as God)–it was God who sparked the big bang into existence. Thus faith is salvaged and science, which directly conflicted with their premise, has now become fully compatible. So much so that many believers are quick to use it as support for claiming things like “God is all powerful, beyond understanding, and transcendent, he is immutable, existing beyond the boundaries of space and time.” The only problem is, there is no real way to argue against such claims, accept to point out that it seems awfully suspect that the religious, and religion in general, has to continually keep making them.

But somewhere in all this apologetics which try to save the truth from itself, is the crux of the matter. Because eventually you start to see the pattern in what religion can and cannot be. Then one day, you stop to realize that if the God which is claimed to be real was at all real, then the religion would not be limited in such a way. In other words, religion is bound to the limits of human understanding and imagination. Typically speaking, of course, the more primitive the human minds behind religion, the more primitive the religion. On the other hand, atheism is free to be anything–well–anything except for theism that is.

As such, atheism is not bound to human understanding or imagination the same way religion is. In fact, it seems to me to be the opposite. Understanding directly feeds atheism–whereas the lack of understanding, and the ignorance it generates, is what feeds religion.

Atheism, is for the lack of a better word, undefinable–it’s unlimited. This makes it difficult to define, perhaps even futile (which is why I don’t see the point in adding descriptors to the type of atheist you happen to be–but that’s just me) yet at the same time, atheism makes is rather expansive in what it can be–or what it can become. Is there militant atheism? Sure there is. Is there naturalistic atheism? You bet. Christian atheism? I personally know few people who consider themselves Christian atheists. But to me, all of these facets of atheism merely represent different faces of the same thing (another reason I don’t specifically feel the need to classify each category or variation of atheism). I think it’s time we start to grow comfortable with the idea that there are many faces to atheism.

As atheism grows, matures, and adapts I am sure we will see many more varieties of atheism. I for one, see this as a good thing, because atheism offers more for less, and once people start realizing this more fully–well then, religion will really have to start to compete. Robert G. Ingersoll once sated, “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

I think this description rings true. I’ve never once heard of a group of brilliant scientists holding a summit and then everyone walking out of it with a firm belief in some kind of deity. But you hear of primitive tribes, shamans, and occasionally uneducated charlatans concocting religions all of the time. All this goes to show that understanding is when we know enough to admit we really don’t know that much at all,  while religion is pretending to know more than we really can. Conversely, if there was enough evidence to establish the existence of a deity, of God, beyond an inkling of doubt, then atheism would never come to be. The very fact that atheism arises in the first place is a very strong indicator that God probably does not exist.

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Billboard Wars = Hilarity

This one is just too funny, so I had to blog about it. It appears that McElroy Road Church of Christ, in Ohio, was fed up with all the atheist billboard campaigns being put up, and they decided to combat the “godless” messages with one of their own. Wait… what?

No kidding, this is what the sign actually says.

Now if your religious, you might not find the bald faced irony which is on display here, but apparently a lot of people did, because the Mid Ohio Atheist group had to make a statement that they were not responsible for the advertisement in any way. According to their official comment: 

While we certainly do agree with the sentiment expressed on the billboard- that there is no god, and that people should not believe everything they hear, we want to clarify that this is not our billboard.  It was not paid for by us in part or in the whole.  Nether were we involved in the design of the billboard.

Being the good sports they are, the Mid Ohio Atheists didn’t forget to thank the McElroy Road Church of Christ for expressing their sentiments exactly.

Still, I find it hilarious that a Church would spend so much time and money, go through so much planning, to basically shoot themselves in the foot. I guess it just goes to show that many religious groups still don’t actually know what it is atheists are arguing for.

Which I find both sad and funny. Sad for them, but funny for us atheists. 

But none-the-less, most atheists agree, if you want to be a good critical thinker, it is wise advice, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” 


It’s the same as saying, question everything, and that’s the heart of skepticism. 

At the same time, atheists fully agree that “There is no God.” 

Which, when you think about it, it basically the same as stating God does not exist.

Great Christian advertising. I hope it stays up!

Is Atheism a Belief System?

I usually say that Atheism is not a belief system. That is, there is no positive claim within atheism which could lend to any particular system of belief. However, atheists need to be careful, especially those who say atheism is not a *belief (singular). In the past I too made the mistake of claiming atheism is not a “belief” in an of itself, but I have come to see that this reasoning is wrong. Atheism is, in fact, the belief that there are no gods.


Before you jump down my throat and try to explain Strong (Positive) atheism and Weak (Negative) atheism to me, let me inform you that I am not arguing about the definition of atheism, but rather, testing whether or not it fits the definition of what a Formal belief is. 


If we find that atheism does fit the definition of a Formal belief, then we must be willing to admit that it has the properties of a belief. As such, it is important to make the distinction based on what analytic philosophers have defined as a Formal belief.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a “propositional attitude”. Propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express (see the entry on propositions). For example, if two sentences mean the same thing (e.g., “snow is white” in English, “Schneeist weiss” in German), they express the same proposition, and if two sentences differ in meaning, they express different propositions. (Here we are setting aside some complications about that might arise in connection with indexicals; see the entry on indexicals.)

A propositional attitude, then, is the mental state of having some attitude, stance, take, or opinion about a proposition or about the potential state of affairs in which that proposition is true—a mental state of the sort canonically expressible in the form “S A that P”, where S picks out the individual possessing the mental state, A picks out the attitude, and P is a sentence expressing a proposition.

As such, Atheism appears to be a belief in the non-existence of God, the rejection of theism, and the proposition that God does not exist.



This complicates matters when trying to define what atheism is, because having concluded that it is, in point of fact, a Formal belief, we can’t claim atheism isn’t a belief. In actuality, it is.

Can Atheism Be “A Lack of Belief” in Something? 

Lacking a proper belief in something means you are ignorant as to the properties of what it is you are supposed to believe. Many nonbelievers, and secular Free Thinkers, lack the belief in a god or gods specifically because they have never heard anything about them. I am willing to bet that almost everyone is an atheist with regard to other culture’s gods and godesses. This doesn’t mean they don’t know what the concept of god is, but they may be completely in the dark as to the quality or nature of any particular specified god concept (e.g., the Christian God, the Hindu Pantheon, or the gods and goddesses of the Australian aborigines, and so on). 

Not knowing something, then, cannot properly inform us as to anything which would constitute a belief. The simple matter is, if we don’t know anything about said god then we can’t have a belief in it–we would lack the belief in that thing. 


As such, if I were to ask you whether or not you believed in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you would probably respond, “No.” 

“Why not?”

“Because there is no evidence for it.”

“Well,” I’d say, “That doesn’t prove the FSM doesn’t exist!”

“No, it doesn’t. But zero knowledge amounts to zero belief–I can’t honestly believe in something I know absolutely nothing about. Even if it did exist, my belief in it would be unfounded.”

“So you admit the FSM could exist!”

“It’s a possibility, but in order for me to believe in the reality that it exists, I would need to examine and test real evidence first. Something to prove the referent is real and not just imagined. Until then, the odds are equal to none that it’s imaginary.”

“You’re wrong! You just have to have faith!”

“I thought we were talking about facts. After all, you can’t believe in something that is imaginary, other than to believe it’s not real. In which case, you’d be an atheist just like me.”

We must be careful here not to confuse the lack of belief with agnosticism. Agnosticism is based on the quality of knowledge available, and whether it is convincing enough to make a decision either way. Lack of belief, as we are to understand it, means there is zero knowledge to be had. If you know nothing of god, then you cannot claim to believe in god. 

This is why most professions of faith are logically unsound. People are claiming to believe in something they cannot possibly believe in because they have no knowledge of the thing they supposedly believe in. They have no valid reference for god. And no, Holy books such as the Bible and Koran do not count as evidence for God. What they are, mainly, are stories about god. The same goes for spiritual experiences, which when tested, universally fail to stand up to scrutiny. The so-called testimony of believers doesn’t amount to anything when we are considering the empirical facts, sorry to say.

Additionally, because atheism does not require a referent, it is not a belief in an existing thing, rather, it’s simply the rejection of the belief of said thing–hence the belief that said thing does not exist. 

The Burden of Proof 

The burden of proof is on the Believer to establish a referent in order to qualify the Belief as an actual belief in something real. What theists are referring to when they state “I believe in God” is the concept of God. The concept here is the referent, not actually God, since there is no defensible evidence for the existence of God. In other words, when the theist claims to believe in God they are technically stating they believe in the idea of God, and more often than not, they confuse this with the belief in an actual God (even as they fail to establish the referent to any actual God). The Philosopher Dan Dennett calls this the “belief of the belief in God.”

This brings us back to Formal Beliefs. Proper beliefs usually depend on something being true, or having true properties, in order to be believed as true.  For example, we cannot say we believe in delicious Smapples, because, to our knowledge, there is no such thing as a Smapple, hence no referent. Therefore we have no way to detect the truth properties of Smapples, delicious or not. The burden of proof would be on the person who thinks a Smapple is a real thing. They would need to produce one, so that their truth claim about the delectable quality of Smapples could be validated, or else, disproved.

Without providing a Smapple, however, we are only left with–well–nothing. No belief in the flavor of Smapples can be made based on nothing, and unable to imagine what a Smapple ought to taste like, it is impossible to claim we believe them, let alone believe them to be delicious. 

In such instances, we can use intuition and experience to determine whether or not it is possible, and therefore likely, for mysterious fruit nobody has ever heard of to spontaneously pop into existence. But since our intuition and experience tells us this is never the case, we can safely formulate the belief that Smapples don’t exist.

Same goes for God. Atheism is simply the rational response to not being able to find any referent in reality which would qualify as God, and consequently formulating the belief that God does not exist. 

Consequently, theists still have the burden to provide a tangible referent, or their belief erodes to a delusion rather quickly–hence the burden of proof isn’t just necessary in proving the belief in the existence of God, it becomes an imperative for the person of faith. Believers must establish a justifiable means to properly believe there is a referent, usually in the form of trustworthy evidence, or admit they have failed to do so. They can’t have it both ways.

Atheist Heroes Part 1

As some of you know, some atheists find the idea of esteeming other atheists something detestable, because for them it is equal to veneration–and idol worship. Perhaps these sorts of atheists are either insecure, or else, still fearful of making the same mistakes as religion, I don’t know. But personally, I think there is nothing wrong with atheists esteeming other atheists–and even having atheist heroes.


Richard Dawkins has described atheists as stray cats, we all tend to go our own way, and agreement among atheists is usually because of shared interests, not shared dogmas. Yet atheists are by and large still human, and thus social animals, and one of the things we as a species cannot avoid doing is interact with each other. 


Needless to say, there will always be people we run into who move us and have influence over us, who inspire us, and who we admire, and at the same time, there will be those we will detest. 


Even so, I don’t believe that having role models, or admiring certain figures (living or dead), is a danger to atheism. In fact, I think having personal heroes is even necessary for our sanity–it is where we can hang hope on aspirations of something (or someone) better than ourselves.


As such, I figures I would start a series of posts on my favorite atheist heroes, both real and fictional.

My first pick is Hugh Laurie and his character Dr. Gregory House, and the writers and producers of the hit Fox medical drama House, M.D.


Some might find it odd that I select a fictional character from a television series as my first Atheist Hero, but there is a good reason for this. Television usually shies away from serious atheist characters because the major networks don’t want to offend any religious viewers, since the majority of the television viewers are devoutly religious. It’s just a statistical issue–there are more religious people in American than nonbelievers, and networks don’t want to risk disenfranchising the majority of their viewership over controversial issues, such as characters or stories attacking religion, because that would be bad for their ratings/shows. 


None-the-less, there are a handful of extremely likable atheist figures in television worth mentioning.


House is a character which deeply fascinates me. He may be low on human empathy, but high on human moral values, rationality, and humor. I can’t think of any other television or literary character that has been as bold in his atheism yet remained so virtuous. 


Of course, House isn’t the only kid on the block, as there are other such atheistic characters in television that I admire, including: Bender from Futurama, James T. Kirk from Star Trek, Perry Cox from Scrubs, Sheldon Cooper from the The Big Bang Theory, and not to forget Brian from The Family Guy. The list goes on. 

I pick Gregory House as my first Atheist Hero because he is one of the only atheist role models on television that also happens to be a heroic figure. Sure the character has his flaws, such as being a drug addict, but it’s his passion to save people, no matter the cost, which lingers in ones mind. Even when he denies wanting to heal the patients and just solve the medical puzzle, he ends up bonding and getting emotionally attached with many of his patients–and he beats himself up horribly when he fails. If he only cared about solving puzzles, he wouldn’t agonize over every loss.


In this visual information age, where everyone has a smart phone, Internet access twenty-four seven, it’s sometimes refreshing to know that the good old boob-tube still can offer stories and characters which can move us, motivate us to be better, and give us something worth believing in–that isn’t God. 

I hadn’t seen an episode of House until just this past month, in which I became addicted, and burned through all seven seasons in just over a month. I was staying up until 2 AM and going to work sleep deprived, but it was worth it. 

I could talk about the show House, M.D. endlessly, but it would be better if you just watch it for your self. It’s Sherlock Holmes meets 21st century medicine, with an engaging cast, and even more engaging characters and plots. In my opinion, there are few shows which ever reach the level of quality writing and performances you’ll find in House. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.

So who, or what, is your favorite television atheist?

Barlin’s Atheism Part 2

Intro:

Many Christians have, over the course of their ministry, made it a point to bring up the fact that they were once atheists—but have now since found Jesus. Yet if you look into their life as a so-called atheist, you will often find that it was, more or less, liberal Christianity. Granted, even liberal Christianity seems pretty atheistic in dense pockets of Evangelical and Fundamentalist belief, but even the famed C.S. Lewis wasn’t a true blood atheist. He grew up in the Church of England, had a brief stint in college where he questioned his beliefs, and in this period of his life, for his own reasons, he didn’t feel he believed perhaps as much as a devoted parishioner should, and on this ground declared himself an atheist.

This is what I consider to be a type of pseudo-atheism. It is when the believer is critical minded enough to recognize their own doubts, but it isn’t skeptical enough to actually renounce their spiritual beliefs altogether. Even C.S. Lewis held on to his Christianity through his brief flirtation with “atheism,” although I hesitate to use that term for him. For Lewis, and many like him, it wasn’t really nonbelief so much as unbelief they grappled with—and there is an important distinction. Nonbelief is to atheism as unbelief is to agnosticism. Having studied C.S. Lewis thoroughly, I would not call his form of atheism the type of atheist I view myself as. Rather, Lewis was, by my account, a strong agnostic who questioned his beliefs—a healthy thing for anyone to do.

After a short time questioning the existence of God, C.S. Lewis found logical ways to justify the lingering Christian beliefs which he clung to, and filled with the righteousness of a deeply spiritual man, C.S. Lewis had a revival as one of Christianities greatest apologists. 

Indeed, C.S. Lewis often had a way of simplifying complex theological and philosophical questions in such a way, as was his fashion, to make the layman positively delight in the simplicity of the choices (but I would caution Lewis, a trained reductionist (as are all men of literature), was often guilty of oversimplifying). C.S. Lewis once affirmed that “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

I would be remiss, however, if I did not correct Lewis’s assumption, for it is mistaken. When he claims that the most probable explanation is that of another world, I call fallacy. Can we honestly assume Lewis experienced all the desires, and all the corresponding experiences therein, that this world has to offer? Because this is what Lewis is tacitly admitting, that he has experienced everything there is worth experiencing in order to quench the thirst for some unexplainable thing. Although, it is a little dishonest of Lewis, as learned as he was, to suggest he experienced all the desires and experiences worth experiencing. But before he could begin on a proper journey searching for the answers, he quickly settled back into the Christianity of his youth. Lewis was of the same mind as the Christian poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, who affirmed, “There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?”

Christians all ultimately profess they feel being drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing. For them, they call this thing God, or a “personal” relationship with God. For as Trahern also informs, “Being made alone, O my soul, thou wouldst be in thy body like God in the World, an invisible mystery, too great to be comprehended by all creatures.”

There you have it—God is both to great to be comprehended and invisible. The difference of opinion here should be obvious—Christians believe this means God is Transcendent—whereas atheist interpret this as nonexistent. The question is, what would it take to convince a skeptic that something which is both impossible to comprehend and invisible to our senses actually exists? And the answer is: evidence—real tested and proved—and tested again—evidence. Without any empirical evidence, all theists have is an incomprehensible invisible nothing which they call God. Can you blame atheists for not believing in such a thing?

Barlin’s Atheism Part 2

Empiricism is the philosophical principle that all knowledge, and by extension our beliefs, are founded upon our real world experiences. Every cause has and effect, and vise versa, and in reality, these causes are testable—and thus science involves the methodology of finding ways to test these experiences and see whether or not they constitute an actual tangible part of our reality—or whether we our mistaken about the nature of these naturalistic causes and effects that we experience.

This brings us to Barlin’s second objection to atheism. Barlin claims that despite the empiricists goal of discovering objective explanations for things, it just doesn’t go far enough, as the way in which the evidence is interpreted must always be done subjectively.

But this is exactly why we have checks and balances via deduction and induction, and the ability to test, and repeat the tests, and double check our findings, and with a little bit of reason we can, albeit in a strictly subjective sort of process, come to a well reasoned and objective result(s). What Barlin seems to be doing here is offering the old canard of atheists can’t be objective because they can only think subjectively about the evidence—but this ignore the empirical methods devised to rationally come to terms with the evidence. As such, his objection is wanting. But before dismissing it entirely, we should consider the possibility—so what if all our reasoning cannot, ultimately, be trusted? Well then, what right would anyone have to claim they “know” God exists? I’m afraid Barlin’s objection is a double edged sword which cuts both ways. You can either admit we are capable of working toward objective answers, or not, but you can’t have it both ways.

Barlin gives a fitting example of two people arguing whether a glass is half empty or half full—correctly pronouncing that each is correct, but that their subjective interpretation of the glass and its contents are diametrically opposed. As such, I agree with Barlin when he asserts, “Far from being ‘the impartial judge’ empirical evidence has proved itself time and time again to be open to subjective interpretation.”

But I think he mistakes the evidence for the method in assuming that empirical evidence, when I think he means to say empiricism, is an impartial judge. Either way, empiricism is only claiming that each person has had an experience of a glass filled partially with water. Whether or not one can judge if the glass is half empty or half full depends on further evidence. Was the cup filled entirely, to full capacity, then 50% of its contents were depleted? Or was it only filled up to 50% of its capacity at which time the source of the contents stopped? Both are testable, and as a matter of fact, the test (or tests) will reveal, with great precisions, which person is objectively correct in their claim.

In other words, although both persons are correct in their observation that the glass holds water up to 50% of it’s capacity—only one man is correct in the claim of whether it is half full or half empty, because only one will be correct in the fact of whether the cup was emptied or merely filled part way.

Barlin then shifts the analogy over to God. He claims that when we look at the universe, for example, theists and atheists are interpreting the same evidence differently. He say a Christian who looks out at the galaxies is basically awe struck at the beauty and attributes God as the artificer of such, whereas the atheist will claim such beauty is inherent in the majesty of random events—and are not dependent upon a creator. Barlin clarifies his point, by saying:

If a person has convinced himself beforehand that there isn’t a God out there, he wouldn’t be able to see Him even if all the empirical evidence in the universe was staring him straight in the face. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

Again I would seek to correct Barlin’s mistake. Atheists have not jumped to conclusions as theists have. Remember, we are distinctly without the prerequisite evidence which would allow us to pronounce on the existence of God. As such, there is no “evidence” to be at odds about. Moreover, most atheists I know became atheists because of their undying curiosity, and they are always in search of answers and new truths, which is to say they are continually opening their eyes and aiming them toward new horizons because they want to see! It is the theist, who in blind faith, has closed their eyes to the evidence—because they don’t like the fact that the evidence we do have largely makes their God concept irrelevant.

Here Barlin moves on to his third objection to atheism, insisting:

Closely related to this and perhaps the biggest flaw in atheistic thinking of all, is that it subjectively defines and dogmatically insists on applying its own set of rules.

Barlin gives a series of examples, ranging from a star further than we can see (still actually might exist beyond our scope of horizon so we should not dismiss it)[i] to a version of the elephant in the dark room exercise, to a football analogy. Although they are fun analogies, they seem to be getting away from his point about atheism making its own rules, except that these analogies are meant to clarify his meaning, which I’m afraid they don’t—because after reading them I was a little puzzled at what he was trying to say. Although he mentions the supernatural, and metaphysical realities, apart from the natural world—but how this relates to atheists making “their own rules” I cannot tell.

After sorting through a bit of confusion, Barlin offers a hypothetical discussion between God and an Atheist. It goes like this:

Along comes the atheist and insists that there can’t be a God because he can’t see Him with his physical eyes. God turns around and says: “You won’t be able to see me with your physical eyes because you are using the wrong piece of equipment. I am a Spirit (something that exists beyond the physical realm) if you want to see me you must make use of your spiritual eyes. (John 4:24). To which the atheist replies “But I’ve used my physical eyes all my life, why should I use a different pair of eyes now? To which God replies: “Like it or not, I make the rules around here because I am God. If you want to see me you will have to position yourself so that I can reveal myself to you, you will have to activate the spiritual dimension of your make up and, by the way, I made you.” To which the atheist, rather offended by now retorts: “I am a self-made man I’ll have you know and have a very clever mind thank you very much. Furthermore I don’t believe in this “spiritual dimension” thing that you talk about because I can’t feel it and I don’t really see the need for something that I can’t feel and that I don’t understand. I am a good person in my own way and haven’t really done anyone any harm. My I.Q. (I don’t want to boast), is a bit above average and my brains have got me pretty far in life thus far so, if you can’t make me see you in a way that I can logically understand, you can’t possibly be out there, in fact, I’m being a bit of a fool talking to you like this. God’s answer: “I don’t make anyone do anything. I have given you a free will. You must choose if you want to see me. If you do then I will be able to reveal myself to you, if you don’t, my hands are tied.” The atheist responds: “Listen, I’ve already told you, because I can’t see you, you can’t be there. You can’t really be God if, as you say, ‘your hands are tied’, surely if you were God, you could do anything? Anyway, as I said, my rules are – no see, no believe. Capiesh!” To which God, with tears streaming down His face replies: “You’re playing with the wrong set of rules, this is the spiritual world that we are dealing with here, not the physical – goodbye fool” and goes back to running the Universe. The atheist however carries on along his merry way thinking smugly to himself – I really sorted his case out this time!

Honestly, I don’t know where to begin. Instead of being meaning, and tearing apart the inconsistencies and discrepancies of this hypothetical piece, I will just say this, any rational atheist who paused long enough to realize he was in fact having a conversation with something other than himself, and that this entity called itself God, would at least admit to the possibility that God exists. However, atheists being rational, also have the habit of recognizing when they are merely talking to themselves, and would never mistake such inner monologues as conversations with God, as so many theists seemingly do.

I also like the part where God keeps reminding the atheist that he is strictly a spiritual being, with no actual body to see, but later has tears streaming down his face; and then insults the atheist calling him a fool. Such a loving God! But enough of my commentary, back to critiquing Barlin’s horribly misconstrued vision of atheism.

Emphatically, Barlin insists:

The atheist insists that everyone (even God) plays according to his empirical evidence rules. In other words, empirical evidence, the scientific method is elevated above God, (should He be around).

Again, some correction is needed. Atheists don’t insist God must abide by the scientific method, empirical evidence, rules and all. What we are saying is, that given the laws of this universe, if God wants to interact with nature and effect things—whether it is answer the faithful prayers or inflicting hurricanes on infidel nations—all this requires a God which abides by the same physical laws he supposedly put into place. It is a telling fact that we see no evidence for any such God. So contrary to Barlin’s point, atheists aren’t insisting God play by their *man-made rules, but rather, we are only holding God to play fair according to his own rules—the rules he set up in the first place.

This brings us to Barlin’s closing remarks.

Don’t be a fool. Atheism will get you nowhere, has no logical foundation and is a sure-fire belief system that will mess up your life and ultimately destroy you. There is no need for you to discard your intellectual integrity when you approach God. He will satisfy your mind and so, so much more. If you are prepared to “open the curtain” of your life for Him to shine in, He will and if you are prepared to play the game “according to His rules” you will win every time. As the ancient psalmist put it so beautifully: “O taste and see that the LORD is good: Blessed is the man that trusts in Him.” (Psalm 34:8)

Personally, I feel Barlin’s closing remarks are somewhat distasteful. Not because he has completely confused atheism, in every possible degree, or conflates being an atheist with being a fool, not only a tad insulting if not entirely untrue, but that he feels atheism will “destroy” you. Powerful words from someone who has missed the side of the barn entirely. Barlin’s take on atheism is everything we have come to expect from theists who write outside of their expertise, it is a jumble of misrepresentations, unrelated facts, needless trivia, and so many tangents that the initial point becomes lost in the debris of random and unrelated thoughts and fragments.

Needless to say, I do happen to find Barlin one of the better Christian writers I have come across, even though he still gets stuck behind useless analogies, tangential asides, and hyperbolic language which only clutter what he could say more precisely. In the end, although I could sometimes guess what points he was trying to make, I frequently found his points rather unimpressive, or else, sorely in need of support. Barlin talks with authority on things he hasn’t really looked into all that much, such as empiricism, as is evident by his often misuse/misrepresentation of the concept. I would have at least expected the author to research his subject matter before writing an entire piece on it. Beyond these failings, it seems to me that Barlin failed to explain why atheism is in any way destructive—or at all undesirable—which means he failed to support his conclusion. Contrary to what Barlin may think, which I am still unclear about—except for that we know he feels atheism is somehow “destructive”—I feel he actually (perhaps unintentionally) helps to show what atheists are really trying to say when we claim most theists really don’t understand the position of the atheist or what atheism really means.

Subsequently, I have sent Pastor Graham Barlin a link to several atheist explications of what atheism is and what it means to be an atheist, written by other atheists, hoping he would see the accord between the various atheists and how they describe themselves. I don’t know whether or not he will read these articles, but I’ll provide the links here if you want to read them and freshen up on your knowledge about atheism.

Dead Logic: What is Atheism?

Advocatus Atheist: Atheism Defined

Infidels.Org: An Introduction to Atheism

Infidels.Org: Atheism, Agnosticism, Noncognitivism

The Secular Outpost: Being Identified as Atheist

Atheism: Proving the Negative: Philosophical Atheism Bibliography

Iron Chariots: Atheism

Wikipedia: Atheism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Atheism and Agnosticism

Philosophical Disquisitions: Maitzen on Morality and Atheism

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[i] Although the analogy is fine to paint the example of not taking things for granted just because they remain unseen, Barlin’s science is a little confused. If there are stars which exist beyond out sight, it is because they exist outside of the currently observable universe—technically speaking they would need to exist before the big bang. Which isn’t out of the realm of possibility—but then we would, in essence, be dealing with purely theoretical concepts—which would be synonymous (not analogous) with God existing outside of the known universe. Either way, it does nothing to explain why this is problematic for the atheist. By my reasoning, it only reinforces the atheist’s point that God concepts are just concepts, until evidence establishing said God’s existence is brought forth. Finally, if there is no tangible evidence for God, and God cannot be empirically verified, then such a being is as good as nonexistent, making it difficult to establish said belief.