I just noticed a bizarre article on the Center for Inquiry’s website titled “The Problems With the Atheistic Approach to the World” by Michael De Dora Jr., who’s described as the executive director for the New York City Branch of the Center for Inquiry. Jerry Coyne has claimed the article as evidence that CFI “seems to have one foot on Templeton Avenue,” and when I saw the title I expected dumb misrepresentations of what atheism is, but on a closer look the article mostly just looks badly written.
The title is dumb because it suggests that there is such a thing as the atheist approach to the world, when atheism is just non-belief in God, meaning there can’t be an atheist approach to anything any more than there can be a non-Leprechaunist approach. But the text suggests De Dora understands this, since he says atheism “is not a philosophy or a worldview, it is a lack of a specific religious belief.” This suggests De Dora knows what he’s talking about, he just isn’t very good at expressing it.
The clearest indicator of how confused the text is something Coyne points out, the inconsistent statements of De Dora’s thesis. He says he has five arguments, but the first is said to be an argument against “atheism” (the idea), the third is against the “march of organized atheism” (a social phenomenon), the fourth is about “this view of the world” (another idea, but what idea isn’t clear from the preceding text what idea the “this” refers to), and the fifth argument is against “‘atheism’” (the word).
I actually think some of the thoughts in the article aren’t crazy. For example, unlike Chris Mooney, De Dora doesn’t seem to think politeness has to mean not expressing certain ideas. Unfortunately, none of the ideas in De Dora’s article are discussed in enough detail to make the discussion worthwhile.
I can only hope that in a couple of days De Dora will replace the article with a different one saying something like, “Sorry about that, I pounded out that article over lunch during a very busy workweek because I really wanted a new article up online. Re-reading it, I realize I did a terrible job of saying what I wanted to say. What I really meant was…” and then go with a re-written article from there.
“The title is dumb because it suggests that there is such a thing as the atheist approach to the world, when atheism is just non-belief in God”
If there is no such thing as an atheist world view then atheism as such does not exist. What this shows is the fallacy of the New Atheist position that it merely “lacks belief” i.e. that it has no stance or relationship whatsoever with theism.
This isn’t just nonsense, it’s nonsense on stilts.
A newborn baby is not an atheist. The attempt is a cheap rhetorical ploy at conversion by definition. Is someone who is asleep, unconscious or otherwise in a coma an atheist? They surely “lack belief”. Are theists really atheists when unconscious? No, your sophistry is paper thin.
The truth is that atheism, like theism, is an ism, a stance, a relationship, a way of positioning oneself with respect to the world. It is not possible to be in this world and not place oneself within it. Worse, there is no atheist I have ever met who actually exemplifies this ideal ‘no-atheist’. Everyone of them has an opinion, an argument, a passionately held belief in regard to religion.
I am btw an agnostic and followed a comment posted on Urban Philosophy here. For what it’s worth.
Replace “non-belief in God” with “belief that God doesn’t exist” and the point still works. The denial of one particular belief doesn’t typically constitute a worldview. Though I’m kinda sorry about phrasing the point the way I did, I didn’t mean to take a position on the weak atheism/strong atheism debate, which I’ve never cared about. But them I’m kinda not sorry about phrasing the point that way, because it was the least-cumbersome way I could think of.
I think there is a huge difference between “I have no beliefs whatsoever therefore I am immune to any and all attacks because I am the mighty no-atheist” and “I have reasonable grounds for not believing religious claims.”
noen,
Let’s take this one step at a time. Do you understand the point about the denial of one belief not typically being a worldview?
“Do you understand the point about the denial of one belief not typically being a worldview?”
I understand it but I reject the claim that it does not constitute a world view. It is not possible to assert the propositional speech act “I deny the existence of God” or even “There is insufficient evidence for the existence of God” without also asserting the Background or the Network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Or in other words, you bring your world view with you whenever you make a speech act.
Another way to look at it is to say that it is not possible to be a Being in the World without having or placing oneself in relation to other Beings in the World. By performing the speech act of declaring oneself atheist one automatically places oneself in a relationship with others.
Or still another way. One cannot draw a figure without simultaneously drawing it’s background. The figure/ground relationship is absolute. One cannot exist without the other. Both figure and ground taken together constitute a world view.
“Or in other words, you bring your world view with you whenever you make a speech act.”
But why think there is a single worldview attached to every speech act? Why not think different atheists have different worldviews attached to their denial of belief in God?
Alternatively, one might think that the sorts of beliefs that underlie our speech acts are often to broad to constitute worldviews. If a theist and atheist appeal to many of the same background beliefs to give sense to their respective affirmation and denial of God, it would be odd to say they share a worldview.
I just stumbled into this conversation with noen, but something seems odd about the speech act/infants aren’t atheists line of thought.
First, with the speech act argument, although it’s clear what you’re getting at, the definition seems too broad to be all that useful. Any conscious being brings a network of experiences and beliefs into any speech act, but there’s a difference between making a speech act that consciously asserts a world view within that speech act, and making a speech act that simply exists within a particular world.
Example: “May the force be with you” is a speech act that consciously brings in this network of beliefs about Jedi mojo that penetrates the universe. Outside of the world of the narrative, if someone makes that same speech act, it might entail the same meaning as it entails in the narrative, and possibly and George Lucas’s attempt to channel Joseph Campbell’s conversations with Bil Moyers. Or it may be just ironic. Point being, there is a conscious appeal to a broader supernatural experience.
Another example: “Ouch – I got stung!” is a speech act that simply conveys the pain experienced when stung by a wasp or bee. The fact that it’s made in English necessarily brings in a network of experiences and beliefs that are framed by the grammar and syntax of the language — subject-verb sentence structure that privileges the speaker over the action, for instance, and a vocabulary that conveys declaratives for pain. But there’s nothing in particular in that speech act that links the speaker back to any particular world view that either means an acceptance or rejection of some sort of supernatural existence.
But that doesn’t work just for humans. There’s been plenty of research to show that other animals have language. For instance, dogs have a grammar in their barks. Certain barks mean certain things — there’s a cat nearby; there’s another dog across the street; I’m happy to see you; I’m not happy to see you; there goes a rabbit, you go that way and I’ll go this way. These are often combined with physical postures – tail position, ear position, head position. (Disclaimer: I’ve raised lots of hunting dogs. Strangely, I don’t hunt.) The different barks are consistent across breeds, and may even be evidence of acculturated behavior built on top of hardwired tendencies. But unless speech acts are reserved just for humans, then it’s hard to say that particular barks that convey particular messages aren’t speech acts. Yes, they entail a network of experiences and beliefs; however, a dog’s experiences will entail its person’s speech acts, but its person’s speech acts that consciously assert a world view don’t necessarily translate into a world view that the dog accepts or rejects in its speech acts. There isn’t anything in “There goes a rabbit, you go that way and I’ll go this way” that entails any larger world view. One could argue that dogs simply lack the mental capacity to understand any larger world view, but if that’s the case, then speech acts themselves are not enough to justify a particular position about a world view. The nature and context of the speech act must be considered before assuming any speech act reaches all the way through a network of experiences and beliefs back to an acculturated religious
I’m also lost on how unconsciousness and belief are (un)linked; since when does being asleep entail “surely” lacking belief? Noen called that paper-thin sophistry, but defining a state of sleep as a state that lacks belief, and then linking that state to being an atheist, seems like the very definition of a straw-man argument.
People still dream when they sleep, and those dreams are reflective of that person’s beliefs and experiences. We don’t always dream when asleep, but all conscious activity doesn’t jut cease. The same goes for near-death experiences; those are unconscious states, and there is research showing that people’s near-death experiences are highly inflected by their world views prior to death – Christians see “the light” or angels, Buddhists have reported experiences that are reflective of their particular views of the afterlife/rebirth, atheists have reported seeing friends from their life. In other words, that very unconscious state is highly inflected by an individual’s network of experiences and beliefs; they don’t necessarily lack belief when unconscious.
So the claim that newborns can’t be atheists, based on the arguments noen presented, don’t follow. Does a newborn make a speech act? What is a newborn’s speech act? Since when does lack of a belief in something require a speech act? Is a speech act required to express a lack of belief in something, say like an unknown species such as the dog-sized rat recently found in New Guinea? Again, the nature and context of the speech act must be considered, but its not clear that speech acts in themselves necessarily articulate a particular pro- or ant- world view.
The point is, don’t confuse atheism as or conflate it with a counter-stance to a theological position, when the definition of atheism simply means there is no position to be held. Atheism doesn’t entail anti-theism, but anti-theism may entail atheism. Just because we live in a theologically-drenched world does not mean that every speech act is made with some theological inflection, just like a dog’s rabbit-bark does not entail a network that includes its person’s knowledge of a newly-discovered dog-sized rat in New Guinea (even though the dog’s experiences do entail its person’s own speech acts). Theistic belief systems are cultural experiences that are passed on from one generation to the next; before one has developed the language to even learn those cultural experiences, it doesn’t make sense to call them anti-theist, but don’t confuse or conflate anti-theistic with a lack of knowledge of belief. Doing so might get you called out for sophistry.