[MD] How is atheism a religion?

[Matt Kundert]

Marsha,

Marsha said:
Recently I've heard from multiple sources atheism being described as a 
religion.  I don't get it.  I don't adhere to organized religion of any 
kind.  I also deny the existence of a deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, 
of any kind.  So how is atheism being called a religion?

Matt P said:
Atheism is still a system of belief (however it just happens to be 
non-beliefs), which I guess classifies it as a religion??

Marsha said:
It still doesn't make sense.  If I deny the existence of unicorns, how does 
that become a system.

Matt:
Yeah.  Well put point, Marsha.

The logic behind these kinds of classifications (atheism, Marxism, 
secularism are just three more religious instantiations) isn't exactly 
convoluted, but it does seem a little silly--think of everything you'd have 
to include.  The enabler of the classification is an expanded definition of 
"religion".  Matt basically gave one version, religion as "a system of 
belief".  If we are using that definition, then the others all seem to fall 
into place--sort of.  Your counter-analogy is very instructive because it 
shows how small an atheist's (as opposed to a Marxist's) "system of belief" 
is--one belief, "God does not exist".  However, if one pulls implications 
from this, like the truth of, say, existentialism or Darwinian evolution, 
then one plausibly starts extending the number of beliefs housed under the 
system of belief called "atheism".

But it's still silly.  This all started when the Enlightenment started 
opposing "beliefs" to "knowledge".  They did so to put Christians on the 
defensive.  You couldn't be an open atheist in the old days, but as the 
Renaissance wore into the Reformation and then the advent of the New 
Science, atheists (all of whom were intellectuals) became bolder and bolder. 
  And they had a _lot_ of built up resentment over having to be in the 
closet.  The Enlightenment was the explosion of all this.  Particularly with 
Galileo and Newton doing such fine work, they started asserting their 
supremacy over Christians by making invidious distinctions between tradition 
and reason, prejudice and rationality, superstition and facts, beliefs and 
knowledge, etc.

As time has worn on, however, religious intellectuals have learned from 
their mistakes.  In particular, they've gone on the offensive.  The 
Enlightenment was able to make all of these invidious distinctions because 
they believed (mostly because Kant had said so) that their philosophy was 
presuppositionless--bereft of assumptions.  Christians had made the mistake 
(from this point of view, a tactical mistake) of resting their philosophy on 
_faith_, on the unarguable nature of God.  Well, Enlightenment philosophers 
jumped all over this.  The New Science opened up massive hope for not just 
having to accept things on faith, but being able to _prove_ them.  So, 
everything unprovable, unarguable, must be based on second-rate faith.  Like 
faith that unicorns do, in fact, exist.

Theologians tottered off into a corner, licked their wounds, and began to 
scrutinize just what had happened.  They noticed that these Enlightenment 
folks liked to talk about everything, that offering clipped "the Bible tells 
us so" isn't good enough for them.  They wanted arguments that played by the 
rules of logic.  "Okay," they said, "we'll give you an argument."  They 
honed in on the notion of "presuppositionless," noticing that the atheists' 
most used weapons hinged on it.  They noticed that for an argument to get 
off the ground, you need to take for granted certain things--you can't argue 
about everything all at once.  The Enlightenment notion of 
"presuppositionlessness", however, seemed to suppose that Enlightenment 
philosophers didn't have to take _anything_ for granted--they had no 
assumptions.  But any argument that is made clearly shows that to be 
false--every argument has assumptions.

They rolled that around in their heads for a while and eventually figured 
out that if Enlightenment philosophy was true, it was impossible, but since 
it was not impossible (it being an historically instantiated actuality), it 
had assumptions--assumptions that could be attacked, just as their's had 
been attacked.  One line of attack is this: if beliefs are opposed to 
knowledge based on the fact that you can't argue or prove beliefs and you 
can about knowledge, then your "knowledge" (for instance, "there is no God") 
has a background of belief that cannot be argued or proven.

This little story is, of course, not literally what happened (atheists, in 
fact, had more to do with giving Christians these weapons then they 
themselves had to do with creating them).  But I hope it shows the outlines 
of how calling atheism a "system of belief" makes sense.  This little tall 
tale is, in fact, what leads directly to the contemporary inflammation of 
creationism, or intelligent design as they're calling it these days.  ID 
defenders like Phillip Johnson, Ken Ham, and Michael Behe blend together 
things learned from evil post-modernism with wonderful Bible dogmatism in 
the weirdest possible way--and yet it is fairly coherent, just really 
stupid.  I take the recent "backlash" against Darwin to be the clearest 
signal, far more powerful than anything Rorty or anybody else has written, 
for us to finally and forever ditch Enlightenment philosophy and all of its 
remenants.  Adherence to Enlightenment philosophy and its rhetoric is what 
allows Johnson and his compatriots a foothold, or a "wedge" as they like to 
call it.  If we ditch Enlightenment, scientistic rhetoric, the wedge has no 
crack to enter.

At any rate, to sum up: atheism is a religion only if you define religion in 
broad, almost useless ways like "system of belief".  If your definition 
involves the accumulation of multiple labels for a person (i.e., a Christian 
is also a democratic citizen, meaning that Christianity as a system of 
belief does not include democracy as a system of belief), that a person is 
the intersection of a number of "systems of belief", then atheism is a 
pretty weak system of belief because "system" seems to imply more than one 
belief: God doesn't exist.  Atheism becomes the call for the abandonment of 
a particular kind of system of belief.  It becomes the suggestion that the 
sector in our network of systems of belief, where beliefs that revolve 
around the word "God" exist, should cease to be a sector in which we do any 
thinking, it should be emptied out and left alone.

So the next time somebody brings up the "fact" that atheism is a religion 
for polemical purposes, just counter by saying, "Yeah, okay, if you stretch 
religion so far as to include atheism, then its a religion.  But it's still 
the religion that says that all this God-talk is pretty pointless."  I've 
found that switching the grounds of debate from "belief" to "stuff we talk 
about" is fairly effective.

Matt

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