I started working on a reply to some of the comments of my last post, and decided I might as well as use it as an excuse for a new post.

My last post was a bit of normative philosophy. While I’m sure the point has been made elsewhere, I argued that one of the underlying assumptions of common forms of agnosticism, namely, that the non-existence of gods is something that demands proof, is logically absurd, and thus the resulting agnosticism is nonsensical. Relatedly, common definitions of atheism (as typically defined by non-atheists) are often set in contrast to such agnosticism, and thus are similarly silly.

I didn’t make a point to take a generous view of the ways that various versions of these positions play out in different social circumstances, but certainly the terms atheism and agnosticism take on different and more complex meanings for those who identify with them. The “New Atheists” are a good example of this. For them, atheism is about more than the basic non-belief in gods; it aligns with broader conceptions of rationality. I’ve written about this previously and find their notions of combating public ignorance with scientific facts wrong-headed.

The inevitable problem of trying to prescriptively define some term is that you will find that people attach different meanings to the term, and, the crucial point here, act on these meanings in different ways. Hence why terms like feminism, or environmentalism, or really any ism, are notoriously difficult to pin down. Though, incidentally, I do think that atheism as a concept is infinitely easier to make sense of than environmentalism, for example. I guess insofar as I’m interested in relatively neat normative definitions of atheism, I would say that the ways that people like Richard Dawkins act out their atheism is just extra-baggage, certainly in no way implied or necessitated by atheism per se. Or, perhaps more plausibly, atheism is merely the subsidiary. People like Dawkins, with their particular conceptions of rationality, are the kinds of people that would also be atheists. And obviously, many people self-identify as agnostics. They think it means something different than atheism. Bertrand Russell even thought it did. I don’t. Continue reading →