ex-lion tamer

as a follow-up to this post and the comments thereof, i would like to put up here an email response i sent to duncan, whose comment i found to be engaging. it is my sincere hope that i didn’t come off in the email like such an insufferable windbag that he deleted the email before finishing it, although that would be entirely his prerogative. i respond in emails to maybe 1 out of 10 of my commenters [not that i have 10 commenters...], so it’s a relatively rare and possibly slightly interesting conversation.

Hm, well, yeah. I guess no one has pointed out the stylized red A that some atheists are using — see FriendlyAtheist.com or PZMyers’s Pharyngula blog (I think scienceblogs.com/pharyngula will get you there) for examples.

I’ve seen that one. It’s kind of funny in a literary-meta sort of way, ironically referencing Hawthorne and all that.

Rather than reduce atheism, or anything else, to a soundbyte, I’d prefer that people learn how to
discuss what they believe, or don’t, in a reasonably coherent, informed, and rational way. I know, I’m dreaming.

Well said, I absolutely 100% concur with you on this one…and like you, I am also not sanguine about the likelihood. It’s hard enough for me to make myself do it - I can’t imagine making anyone else do it.

I’m an atheist who’s read quite a lot of philosophy, so I have to wonder if you have read much.

Probably less than you. I have one sibling and two very good friends who were Philosophy majors at big schools, and usually when I want the “for dummies” version I go to them. I’ve tried to keep up on stuff like post-structuralism for example but it gives me a headache. I’m somewhat interested in Philosophy of Science which I studied in college - Hempel, Hull, of course Kuhn’s great “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, and my sibling and I are big Paul Feyerabend fans (particularly “Against Method”). I’ve poked around in Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Camus, Proudhon, all the usual suspects. I’m more of a lazily curious dilettante than a scholar by any means. I’m probably more interested in semantics and poetry.

Atheism is not a clearly defined doctrine or position, even among professional philosophers.

And thank goodness for that. Anytime I come across a clearly defined doctrine or position, I reach for my revolver. I’m far more interested in questions than answers.

I like Antony Flew’s position of what he called “Stratonician atheism,” which puts the burden of proof on theists to 1) make clear what they mean by god and 2) give good reasons why anyone should believe in its existence, let alone 3) worship it and obey its wishes and whims. [em. mine - ed.]

These are of course absolutely excellent questions, and I think any theist of good conscience who cares about observing their faith with integrity should probably ask themselves these questions at least twice a day, like brushing their teeth. In my experience faith isn’t about having any answers or knowing what’s “right” - it’s about hunger and discipline. I think maybe, just maybe, theologians, philosophers and scientists share these two traits.

What do I mean by god? Augh. [Rubs face vigorously with both hands] I wish I knew. Um - let’s just say, without going into a huge outpouring of my life story, that I experience what may be God or God-like as a pervasive connection and relationship between my fellow human beings and our ecosystem, which at certain times has manifested in the form of “peak experiences” or ecstatic states in which I felt the differentiation between my own ego-structure and all of life to be minimized. This connection had the quality of a personal presence and at times even a commanding [wordless] voice which only told me three things: [1] “See me and know that I am here”, [2] “I am not separate from you” and [3] “Find me in others”. Try and tell this story to various people and you get various reactions: [1] “Maybe you were hallucinating” [2] “Maybe it was just a chemical reaction in your brain” (which makes me laugh - correlation ain’t causality where I come from) [3] “Maybe that’s just part of being human and nothing outside us has anything to do with it”. I can’t vigorously argue with any of these points, least of all no. 3. But that “personal presence” in my life just feels larger than something within the confines of my skull. It just does. That’s all I really know how to say about it, that’s my confession.

Why should anyone believe in its existence? They shouldn’t. I would hope that they would be open to the possibility of direct experience of something like that at least once in their lives, and then to evaluate it on their own terms. Belief wouldn’t have anything to do with it, other than having faith that perhaps an experience which one cannot explain or even completely understand might still have meaning for them. This is something most people are able to do with Art, if they’re into that sort of thing.

Why worship it an obey its wishes and whims? That, interestingly, is the part that feels the most beyond my control, if not beyond choice. It’s a lot like falling in love. In fact, it’s almost exactly like falling in love. And usually, obeying its wishes and whims seems extraordinarily troublesome and inconvenient and ill-advised. However, not obeying, upon reflection, has always seemed worse.

I think that declaring more or less dogmatically that a given god doesn’t exist is more a matter of temperament and rhetorical strategy than of philosophy.

But it’s worth remembering that Thomas Huxley, who not only was an agnostic but coined the word, was quite certain that Yahweh and other gods didn’t exist.

Sometimes I read about Yahweh and other gods and I don’t recognize any of them. The great books can point you in a certain direction, but unless one has opened oneself to the rigorous discipline of mystical experience (I know that sounds like an oxymoron), it’s all just words. At the end of the day, I would paraphrase Sartre that “God is other people” - in other words, there is nothing of a spiritual nature that is worthwhile to be found outside humanity or at the very least a human experience of nature.

I think atheists should be agnostic about what we don’t know, and agnostics should not pretend not to believe what they do in fact believe — or at least, be aware of their agnostic heritage. See excerpts from Huxley at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-huxley.html

I shall. I am intrigued about the concept of “pretending not to believe what they do in fact believe” - I am curious to hear some examples of this. I think I might have an inkling as to what you are getting at - for instance, the political triangulation of theocrats in order to manipulate their constituency - but I may be unconscious of any time at which I have been guilty of this myself.

I call myself an atheist, not because I claim to know with 100% certainty that there is no god, but because I don’t know what a god is

Neither do I. I just have sneaking suspicions that haunt me on a daily basis. Just as one over-simplified and gross example, I continue to search myself for the cause or source of my giving even one tiny shit about other people, when I in fact really don’t want to, and I keep coming up against an overwhelming sense that it involves a connection to them that I cannot see, which at this juncture appears to reside outside of any categorization or quantification (one could say “We evolved that way for survival”, but that doesn’t satisfyingly answer “Why?”)

I see no reason to believe in the gods of existing religions, and I live my life without reference to concepts of gods.

To be able to limit one’s beliefs to what is reasonable is a rare gift of which I am greatly envious. It appears to me as something which would require a great deal of discipline. As an artist I am ruled to a certain extent by my emotions - it’s the reason I am unable to explain reality to anyone other than myself, but it’s probably not my job, or if it was I wouldn’t be very good at it. What I do know is that one may live one’s life without reference to any concepts at all, be they of god or of anything else - and that would be an enviable accomplishment - and still feel that there is something binding one to others that defies explanation. To tell you the truth I’ve met plenty of atheists who are far more spiritual than self-proclaimed believers, if only as exemplified by how they live their lives in communion and fellowship with others. I’ve met plenty of atheists who are functionally more “Christian” than most Christians because that’s how they behave. Does motive matter? Or belief? I’m not sure. I think that a whole lot of people who call themselves Christian, or Jew, or Muslim, or whatever - if they were to actually meet their God in person, would not recognize Him/Her/It.

If I were to wish anything in particular for my atheist friends, it would be that they remain open to a sense of wonder - to respond to their experience not merely with an “Ah, I know what that is, that’s a _____” and instead be able to shorten it to “Ah.” That’s a good goal for everybody I think.