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Ask an atheist!
What is an atheist? What is an agnostic? What is the difference?
Ken Ueda, Columnist, kueda@smu.edu
Issue date: 8/28/08 Section: Opinion
Agnosticism is actually a somewhat intellectually dishonest response, since it seems to place some special epistemic standard when it comes to theological questions. It would seem silly for a person to say, "since there is still a possibility that Zeus could exist, my stance is that I do not know that Zeus exists." So the agnostic has the burden of explaining why non-evidential theological beliefs have different epistemic standards than non-evidential Zeus beliefs or non-evidential unicorn beliefs. In fact agnosticism is in a completely different category in of itself because one could be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist: one who does not know that God exists but believes that He does or one who does not know that God exists but believes that He doesn't. "Agnostic" has sort of taken on the connotation that someone really has no preference one way or another, but of course this says nothing about one's metaphysical stance and is a nice way of saying, "I don't really care about theology," which I am sympathetic towards but I just do not think that most agnostics mean this. Actually, I think a lot of Christians are really agnostics since they really don't care if God exists because most of their arguments come from the pragmatic benefits of belief, not really the evidential kind.
Atheists have sort of taken a strange connotation, especially with fundamentalist groups, synonymous with communist, feminist, immorality and abortionist. Of course, atheist merely means one who does not believe God exists. There is a little clarification though because although technically Buddhists are atheist in that definition, the modern definition sort of means one who does not believe in the supernatural. Many modern atheists identify with skeptics, humanists, naturalists, rationalists, and other schools of thought. I identify myself as an antitheist, a school of thought that argues that not only does God not exist but also religion is extremely destructive and dangerous and something that should be resisted. This should preface my responses to my later articles.
In any case, I want to make sure that people realize it is incorrect to say that atheists are dogmatic, ideological or religious. Dogmatism, ideology and religion all have a faith component towards it, or belief without evidence. To claim that atheism is any of these is to argue that atheists believe that God does not exist without evidence for his non-existence. This of course makes no sense because you cannot have evidence for a universal negative. I can never have evidence that definitively proves that Big Foot does not exist, since I would have to observe every square inch of the Earth for every moment in time.
Ken Ueda a senior math, physics, and philosophy major. He can be reached for comment at kueda@smu.edu.
Atheists have sort of taken a strange connotation, especially with fundamentalist groups, synonymous with communist, feminist, immorality and abortionist. Of course, atheist merely means one who does not believe God exists. There is a little clarification though because although technically Buddhists are atheist in that definition, the modern definition sort of means one who does not believe in the supernatural. Many modern atheists identify with skeptics, humanists, naturalists, rationalists, and other schools of thought. I identify myself as an antitheist, a school of thought that argues that not only does God not exist but also religion is extremely destructive and dangerous and something that should be resisted. This should preface my responses to my later articles.
In any case, I want to make sure that people realize it is incorrect to say that atheists are dogmatic, ideological or religious. Dogmatism, ideology and religion all have a faith component towards it, or belief without evidence. To claim that atheism is any of these is to argue that atheists believe that God does not exist without evidence for his non-existence. This of course makes no sense because you cannot have evidence for a universal negative. I can never have evidence that definitively proves that Big Foot does not exist, since I would have to observe every square inch of the Earth for every moment in time.
Ken Ueda a senior math, physics, and philosophy major. He can be reached for comment at kueda@smu.edu.
Viewing Comments 1 - 4 of 4
Ian Bushfield
posted 8/28/08 @ 9:10 AM CST
Awesome article. It's great to see an articulate defence of one's own position.
A-leprechaunist
posted 8/28/08 @ 10:42 AM CST
In my experience, the reason for the distrust of atheists is that religious believers can't fathom where one would get their morals if not from a supernatural authoritarian parent figure! Atheists are therefore assumed to be less ethical (and less trustworthy) than their religious counterparts. (Continued…)
Reginald Selkirk
posted 8/28/08 @ 3:42 PM CST
"but we all tend to be a-unicornists"
Blasphemer! Mr. Ueda defies the Great Unicorn.
Rhys
posted 8/29/08 @ 6:58 AM CST
Very well done. Now if only more people could understand this. I'm an atheistic, antitheistic agnostic. I think god is fairly unlikely perhaps less than 5% likely and if your talking about a particular god such as the abrahamic god it drops to the tiniest, tiniest, fraction of a fraction of a percent. (Continued…)
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