[MD] How is atheism a religion?

[david buchanan]

Matt and all Godless Heathens:

Matt said:
This all started when the Enlightenment started opposing "beliefs" to 
"knowledge".  ...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.

dmb says:
Invidious? Um, I think your tall tale might be a bit too tall on this point. 
The distinction between beliefs and knowledge looks like nothing but a 
power-play built on sheer fiction.

Matt continued:
Theologians ...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.

dmb says:
I don't see why the belief/knowledge distinction has to rest upon the notion 
of presuppositionlessness. I always thought it rested on whether or not a 
particular assertion has some empirical basis. Isn't that how we arrived at 
the present sceintific world view? While I'm quite happy to admit that this 
whole idea rests on an assumption. Its based on the "presupposition" that 
empirically based assertions are superior to non-empirically based 
assertions. But isn't that "assumption" really a judgement based on 
experience, a conclusion based on empirical evidence. I mean, how can such a 
thing be denied? Its one thing to say that every argument has assumptions. 
Its quite another to say that there is no difference between belief and 
knowledge....

Matt said:
..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.

dmb says:
I don't get the logic of this at all. I think it doesn't add up. If beliefs 
are different than knowledge because knowledge is based on "proof", then 
knowledge is based on belief cause is based on the "beleif" that proof 
matters? That strikes me as a rather transparent attempt to use a rhetorical 
slight of hand to defeat a truth that's sort of undeniable. I mean, it seems 
pretty obvious to me that the superiority of empirically based beliefs CAN 
be argued and proven. This attack by the theologians strikes me as 
exceptionally flimsy and silly. Kinda like...

Mattt continued:
...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.

dmb says:
Weird, stupid and yet coherent? That would be quite a trick. I disagree with 
your suggested remedy because I have made a slightly different diagnosis. If 
postmodernism and Bible dogmatism are working together in an attack on 
Modernism, the solution is not to join the attack. And using postmodern 
arguments to bolster a pre-Modern view strikes me as intellectual dishonest 
as wall as incoherent too. The solution is not to "forever ditch 
Enlightenment philosophy and all of it remenatnts". That would be a 
disaster, is a disaster. I think the idea is to use postmodern perspectives 
to resolve the conflicts between faith and reason. Use broader perspectives 
in sorting out what's good about Modernity and what's bad about it. You 
know, we gotta keep telling tall tales about the conflict until things get 
sorted out.

Matt said:...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.

dmb says:
Exactly. It makes little sense to say that atheism is a belief system since 
an atheist can believe in anything at all except God. It seems silly to 
define a belief system by the one belief it excludes. But its one of those 
words that makes sense in our culture and in our time. Its a negative term 
for a reason, you know. Death of God and all that. When people tell me that 
they are an atheist I always gotta ask them to be more specific. Which God 
don't you believe in, I ask. I realize that they are rejecting 
supernaturalism in general, but what's really going on in the rejection of a 
certain belief system, namely Western monotheism, usually one kind of 
Christianity or another. Of course.

Finally, Matt said:
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.

Finally, dmb replies:
I agree with the general point, but I still have to object to your point 
about the pointlessness of God-talk. I think we ought to ditch the idea of a 
supernatural creator being and re-examine a lot of that God-talk. You know, 
if you don't take the low-grade yelping about God too literally and all 
that. I think that we gotta ditch the idea that there is some intelligent 
entity seperate from us and/or beyond human experience and look at that 
material as if it refered to a certain kind of human experience, an aspect 
of our reality instead. Theism is what you get when this stuff is taken too 
literally, see? I think one of the main reasons that believers have trouble 
coming up with any kind of proof, trouble coming up with some basis in 
experience for the existence of the theistic God is because the whole notion 
is based on a profound misreading of God-talk. I think its not quite enough 
to simply deny the existence of this supernatural entity, although I agree 
with that as far as it goes. But the trick is to avoid throwing the baby out 
with the bathwater. The God-talk that goes on the the world's Great 
religions may have drawn up some pretty confused and misleading maps, but 
that doesn't mean there's no territory there worth charting properly. I've 
become quite convinced that this stuff points to some of the most 
interesting of human experiences. I mean, this baby is well worth saving. 
Again, dusting off and sorting out rather than total abandonment.

Thanks.
dmb

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