Faith to be an atheist

Apologies to those of you out there who agree with me that this is a boring post. I didn’t want to have to do it. But the prompt for it has just fallen into my lap and, more and more, I’m thinking that this is just sort of a rite of passage for an atheist blogger. And if I write this, this one time, I can just link people to it in the future and save myself the trouble of explaining it again.

So, here we go.

In the wake of all that hullabaloo over my comments to that Christian cartoonist last Friday, I noticed this pair of tweets. First, jacktx42 said:

@THEWesMolebash what many atheists fail to realize is that it takes FAITH for any set of beliefs, for or against God.

Then, cartoonist Wes Molebash replied:

@jacktx42 I agree with ya.

To be an atheist is to lack belief in any deities. This is not the same as believing that there definitely are no deities, for certain. Admittedly, there are some atheists out there who take the stronger stance as well and claim that God definitely does not exist — but these atheists are a minority, and this belief is not part of the definition of the word “atheist.”

Many atheists, including myself, are of the opinion that such claims about the certain nonexistence of God do require some measure of faith, and are therefore unreasonable claims. Nonexistence proofs are next to impossible, when you’re talking about actual entities rather than mathematical constructs (not that they’re easy in the latter case, but you know what I mean). In order to verify that some thing doesn’t exist, you’d need to check everywhere. Everywhere is pretty big. You never know if the thing you’re looking for might be under the next rock you’d turn over, or under some rock on the next planet you’d check, in the next solar system, in the next galaxy. I don’t think I could say with certainty that leprechauns don’t exist, for this very reason.

Add to this the fact that most definitions of God are inherently untestable — they claim that God exists in some other plane which we mere mortals can’t perceive, and so on — and it becomes increasingly illogical to say that you know for sure that there is no god of these definitions. Such a claim would certainly depend on some measure of faith.

Like I said, this claim of certainty is not part of what it means to be an atheist. Nevertheless, most atheists are of the opinion that there is no God, because that seems most likely to be true. Should some additional evidence or reasoning present itself, that opinion would obviously be revised. For simplicity’s sake, though, you form an opinion of what is probably true based on what you know in the present, and the way all the evidence you have seems to be pointing. (I would say without hesitation, “I do not believe in leprechauns.”) This seems to me to be a very different approach from what anyone would call “faith”… yet theists keep characterizing it as such.

Let’s get it straight. If you form your opinions via reasoned consideration of the evidence available, that is not faith. Having faith means believing something without regard to the evidence, or even in spite of the evidence.