'Being' an atheist is an ambiguous business. It doesn't literally amount to any philosophy in itself but tends to exclude all philosophy. Why? Because the history of the negativity of the atheist still extends itself through the atheists of today.
Everyone knows that an atheist used to mean an immoral person - godless precisely because immoral. All learning and rationality was unknown to or foolishly ignored by the atheist. An atheistic 'worldview' would be the worldview of the beast: a mistaken image grounded in bodily hunger, and nothing more. Not a great start, but the irony is that Christendom made up something impossible - man without God - in order to persecute and ridicule, and it turns out in the end that man without God may be something of a necessity. 'Looks like the foot's on the other hand' etc. And yes, of course it should be strictly possible to be an atheist in the 16th century or whatever, as it is at least a legitimate worldview, but when I say the 'negativity of the atheist' I'm of course not talking about possible true atheists, I'm talking only about the historical, discursive atheist, the atheist-scapegoat of the past.
Today atheists have two outstanding features (other than feet). Firstly, they tend to be republican with an emphasis on the development of 'secular society' away from the influence of the power of the traditional churches (in the UK this means decrying the place of the CofE in the House of Lords, for example). At any rate it is assumed that an atheist is a secularist, and the atheist is held to be a statist - despite such people as, say, communists, anarchists and anarcho-communists, And yes you can in fact take it for granted, as there are less and less people with alternate political persuasions these days.
A little intersting is the fact that some religious people and some ministers of religion feel that a secular society is the best or most progressive one (!), seemingly despite their instincts for a spiritually united people. The question of how religions behave amonst others seems important here: whether they wish to gather power for themselves and treat rivals with suspicion, or whether they wish to live alongside other faiths. They may well also believe that a secular society gives churches more freedom to flourish at their best - in control of the meaning of people's lives rather than control over their administration. But this doesn't really bear on the argument, or whatever it is I end up writing.
I'll briefly point out the theological basis of the individual assumed to be capable of making fee choices and decisions in the atheists' radical secular democracy. For a thoroughgoing conception of democracy, all citizens should be informed citizens, and as religion stands in the way of a clear understanding of human action and relationships, it really ought to be educated out. However social science and philosophy (both of which many people hate because they make points like this one) tell us how the 'decision maker' model of human agency presumes a place for a human mind outside of nature, radically different in kind from the emotions, and a mere spectator to history. This place is in fact somewhere a 'soul' used to be, and willing an informed citizenry that is able to make positive rational use of its democracy isn't in the end necessarily all that different from a Christian society preoccupying itself with God's will. Why is this? Probably because what people think and act like as well as what they're able to or likely to ever learn, is determined by their history, and a rational 'decision maker' belongs to historical lineage just as religious sentiment does, it just seems more likely for historical reasons. If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't. Well, maybe I'll write that one up another time.
If you granted the argument about the historical locality of your supposedly ahistorical mental faculties, you could perhaps still say that the new democracy would rightly embody the good things about Christians without the bad things (i.e. weird beliefs like the ones that say that there is a God and that God wants us to do stuff). Even if human beings don't have a mind outside of history or if they're constantly subjected to and compromised by their emotions, they still have to try and behave as if it were true that they made their own decisions. And you actually have most of educated humanity summarised in that sentence. Two problems of course - 1) politically, you lose any honest sense of a society freely chosen by the people once you admit that probably most people aren't 'behaving free enough' to effect it (though you could enjoy lots of controls, and that's why there should be suspicion!). And also, 2) it's ethically demented.
The second outstanding feature of atheists today (again, despite their feet), which is that you can be sure that they deny the place of God in explaining the universe, given the hard sciences' good form in doing so without reference to miraculous and other unexplainable occurances. What is somewhat less clear is why the universe needs explaining, other than to get on God's nerves. Of course, the pursuit of happiness, emancipation from superstition, the growth of the human race toward the stars and away from disease, the 'need' to have knowledge and to enjoy that knowledge (enjoying false knowledge has however been far more popular if you take a quick look at any amount of history), all these could be cited as reasons for explaining the universe, and they're ok, but why do I care?
If you're not a scientist or even particularly good at or knowledgeable about science, why do you care to further scientific understanding? Given that at some important level you are recognizing that scientific understanding is really for the best, why do you therefore refuse to improve your own understanding (that old paradox - why do you not do good knowing that it is good?)?(?)...?....1+3=? Now, you could be the kind of monster that watches children starve in Africa and does nothing about it, and therefore the kind of monster that can know that there is understanding and innumerable ways to gain understanding, but chooses to remain ignorant. My point is that these chains of reasoning are (literally) no basis for your action and not injunctions you should want to entertain. And of course, with Plato, I'll assert that if you truly knew in what direction lay justice, you'd move toward it in whatever way you could, and you wouldn't be ashamed.
Well, it seems too trivial to mention, since you're all aboard the Good Ship Lollipop and you imagine yourselves to be a part of the moving history of society that will eventually end in perfect democracy (no, really, you do!). But your hypothetical involvement in understanding the world doesn't really make sense anyway. You may say that your opinion regarding scientific understanding is a good one and that you're a 'good member of society' in holding to that opinion, and however inept you may be personally to further science yourself, at least you 'support' the idea of furthering science in principle. Through the magic of democracy, the correct opinion then prevails within the political system itself, and society gradually becomes more science-oriented and less God-oriented. Arguments against this kind of fantasising could take the form of showing how different it is to be a political subject on a matter such as race, and a supposedly political subject on the matter of science. If you are a racist, you can vote for 'the racist party' - most countries have at least one, and be politically effective. But there is no 'science is better than religion' party. So this argument says that (even if democratic action were effective, which it isn't) unrepresented opinions can have no effect on the status quo. Similarly, you can simply point out that the reason there isn't a science vs religion politics is that the political class sees this issue as suicidal, and so you can't vote on it. Erm, so there.
The original issue was why the individual cares about there being scientific explanations for the world, instead of religious ones. Atheists deny that God is an explanation for important things in their lives. God doesn't explain what their actions mean and prescribe what they should morally do. If this isn't a political thesis, then it is a personal one, but what is this personal value that merely denies its opposite? As I've said, it seems that atheists believe in scientific understanding, and philosophical principles, that they don't further. Does it not seem that atheists are therefore blind? It just can't be enough to be an incidental atheist, to truly be an atheist. On the face of it, anyone is an atheist who denies God, by definition, but in practice it seems that only a small percentage of these 'atheists' carry atheism through to some sort of active dimension (and I mean scientists, as philosophers are shit right now). The risk, of course, is that an inactive and reactive atheism collapses back into religious practice.
There are problems with republicanism and problems with beliefs about science (not to mention the ignorance at the tenets of the philosophy of science), in these two characteristics of the modern atheist. Who is to say that the irrational nature of the animalistic atheist of centuries ago doesn't significantly describe today's liberated atheists?
Atheism needs furthering and defending. Media atheists like the New Atheists are all there is right now, and there needs to be something significantly more in entirely different directions. The problem with the New Atheists is that they can only inform and entertain, whilst religious people have been willfully ignorant and cruel monsters for as long as human history.
V
Everyone knows that an atheist used to mean an immoral person - godless precisely because immoral. All learning and rationality was unknown to or foolishly ignored by the atheist. An atheistic 'worldview' would be the worldview of the beast: a mistaken image grounded in bodily hunger, and nothing more. Not a great start, but the irony is that Christendom made up something impossible - man without God - in order to persecute and ridicule, and it turns out in the end that man without God may be something of a necessity. 'Looks like the foot's on the other hand' etc. And yes, of course it should be strictly possible to be an atheist in the 16th century or whatever, as it is at least a legitimate worldview, but when I say the 'negativity of the atheist' I'm of course not talking about possible true atheists, I'm talking only about the historical, discursive atheist, the atheist-scapegoat of the past.
Today atheists have two outstanding features (other than feet). Firstly, they tend to be republican with an emphasis on the development of 'secular society' away from the influence of the power of the traditional churches (in the UK this means decrying the place of the CofE in the House of Lords, for example). At any rate it is assumed that an atheist is a secularist, and the atheist is held to be a statist - despite such people as, say, communists, anarchists and anarcho-communists, And yes you can in fact take it for granted, as there are less and less people with alternate political persuasions these days.
A little intersting is the fact that some religious people and some ministers of religion feel that a secular society is the best or most progressive one (!), seemingly despite their instincts for a spiritually united people. The question of how religions behave amonst others seems important here: whether they wish to gather power for themselves and treat rivals with suspicion, or whether they wish to live alongside other faiths. They may well also believe that a secular society gives churches more freedom to flourish at their best - in control of the meaning of people's lives rather than control over their administration. But this doesn't really bear on the argument, or whatever it is I end up writing.
I'll briefly point out the theological basis of the individual assumed to be capable of making fee choices and decisions in the atheists' radical secular democracy. For a thoroughgoing conception of democracy, all citizens should be informed citizens, and as religion stands in the way of a clear understanding of human action and relationships, it really ought to be educated out. However social science and philosophy (both of which many people hate because they make points like this one) tell us how the 'decision maker' model of human agency presumes a place for a human mind outside of nature, radically different in kind from the emotions, and a mere spectator to history. This place is in fact somewhere a 'soul' used to be, and willing an informed citizenry that is able to make positive rational use of its democracy isn't in the end necessarily all that different from a Christian society preoccupying itself with God's will. Why is this? Probably because what people think and act like as well as what they're able to or likely to ever learn, is determined by their history, and a rational 'decision maker' belongs to historical lineage just as religious sentiment does, it just seems more likely for historical reasons. If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't. Well, maybe I'll write that one up another time.
If you granted the argument about the historical locality of your supposedly ahistorical mental faculties, you could perhaps still say that the new democracy would rightly embody the good things about Christians without the bad things (i.e. weird beliefs like the ones that say that there is a God and that God wants us to do stuff). Even if human beings don't have a mind outside of history or if they're constantly subjected to and compromised by their emotions, they still have to try and behave as if it were true that they made their own decisions. And you actually have most of educated humanity summarised in that sentence. Two problems of course - 1) politically, you lose any honest sense of a society freely chosen by the people once you admit that probably most people aren't 'behaving free enough' to effect it (though you could enjoy lots of controls, and that's why there should be suspicion!). And also, 2) it's ethically demented.
The second outstanding feature of atheists today (again, despite their feet), which is that you can be sure that they deny the place of God in explaining the universe, given the hard sciences' good form in doing so without reference to miraculous and other unexplainable occurances. What is somewhat less clear is why the universe needs explaining, other than to get on God's nerves. Of course, the pursuit of happiness, emancipation from superstition, the growth of the human race toward the stars and away from disease, the 'need' to have knowledge and to enjoy that knowledge (enjoying false knowledge has however been far more popular if you take a quick look at any amount of history), all these could be cited as reasons for explaining the universe, and they're ok, but why do I care?
If you're not a scientist or even particularly good at or knowledgeable about science, why do you care to further scientific understanding? Given that at some important level you are recognizing that scientific understanding is really for the best, why do you therefore refuse to improve your own understanding (that old paradox - why do you not do good knowing that it is good?)?(?)...?....1+3=? Now, you could be the kind of monster that watches children starve in Africa and does nothing about it, and therefore the kind of monster that can know that there is understanding and innumerable ways to gain understanding, but chooses to remain ignorant. My point is that these chains of reasoning are (literally) no basis for your action and not injunctions you should want to entertain. And of course, with Plato, I'll assert that if you truly knew in what direction lay justice, you'd move toward it in whatever way you could, and you wouldn't be ashamed.
Well, it seems too trivial to mention, since you're all aboard the Good Ship Lollipop and you imagine yourselves to be a part of the moving history of society that will eventually end in perfect democracy (no, really, you do!). But your hypothetical involvement in understanding the world doesn't really make sense anyway. You may say that your opinion regarding scientific understanding is a good one and that you're a 'good member of society' in holding to that opinion, and however inept you may be personally to further science yourself, at least you 'support' the idea of furthering science in principle. Through the magic of democracy, the correct opinion then prevails within the political system itself, and society gradually becomes more science-oriented and less God-oriented. Arguments against this kind of fantasising could take the form of showing how different it is to be a political subject on a matter such as race, and a supposedly political subject on the matter of science. If you are a racist, you can vote for 'the racist party' - most countries have at least one, and be politically effective. But there is no 'science is better than religion' party. So this argument says that (even if democratic action were effective, which it isn't) unrepresented opinions can have no effect on the status quo. Similarly, you can simply point out that the reason there isn't a science vs religion politics is that the political class sees this issue as suicidal, and so you can't vote on it. Erm, so there.
The original issue was why the individual cares about there being scientific explanations for the world, instead of religious ones. Atheists deny that God is an explanation for important things in their lives. God doesn't explain what their actions mean and prescribe what they should morally do. If this isn't a political thesis, then it is a personal one, but what is this personal value that merely denies its opposite? As I've said, it seems that atheists believe in scientific understanding, and philosophical principles, that they don't further. Does it not seem that atheists are therefore blind? It just can't be enough to be an incidental atheist, to truly be an atheist. On the face of it, anyone is an atheist who denies God, by definition, but in practice it seems that only a small percentage of these 'atheists' carry atheism through to some sort of active dimension (and I mean scientists, as philosophers are shit right now). The risk, of course, is that an inactive and reactive atheism collapses back into religious practice.
There are problems with republicanism and problems with beliefs about science (not to mention the ignorance at the tenets of the philosophy of science), in these two characteristics of the modern atheist. Who is to say that the irrational nature of the animalistic atheist of centuries ago doesn't significantly describe today's liberated atheists?
Atheism needs furthering and defending. Media atheists like the New Atheists are all there is right now, and there needs to be something significantly more in entirely different directions. The problem with the New Atheists is that they can only inform and entertain, whilst religious people have been willfully ignorant and cruel monsters for as long as human history.
V
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