For a Substantive Definition of Atheism

My post about the uses of “atheism” and “agnosticism” has gone up on the Huffington Post religion section, and I’ve been mulling it over for a few days. I want to focus specifically on some uses of the word atheist, because they are as muddled as the uses of “agnostic.”

Google can’t possibly be wrong. Neither can the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I wrote in my post that I reject the awkward, clumsy, and evasive definition of atheism as “the lack of a belief in any god or gods.” This has the benefit of putting something at stake for atheists—namely that we can be right or wrong—and it also keeps us from artificially bolstering our numbers. An agnostic would find little to support in the projects of American Atheists, so I think disbelief and uncertainty should remain distinct positions when it comes to God.

This refined definition has the added benefit of saving us from some awkwardness later on . Some atheists often like to hold that atheism is the default position, pithily claiming that we’re born atheists. While this might have a bit of rhetorical force, it just further demonstrates the limits and absurdity of the clunky lack-of-a-belief definition. If babies are atheists, what else? Rocks? Chairs? Galaxies? Mitochondrial DNA? That can’t possibly be right. It would be arbitrary to limit the definition to people, but it seems wrong that objects should count as nonbelievers. You might argue that it’s necessary to be able to believe in God in order to count as an atheist, but then that naturally excludes babies. We save ourselves some headaches by using the stronger definition.

This also means we have to ditch the awful “you’re an atheist about all the other gods you don’t believe in” argument, or the “everyone’s an atheist, we just believe in one less God than you do” argument.

Christians might think Muslims off about a few details, but atheists reject the entire package. There’s so much Christians and Muslims have in common that atheists reject outright—the existence of an all powerful, all knowing, maximally good deity that looks after us, has a plan, vindicates the righteous, gives us life after death, and so on. If you think that someone can believe all of that, but still be an atheist towards something, then you must have a very weak conception of “atheist” as a label. Such quips might have some persuasive force for rejecting a few cultural specifics of each religion—the divinity of prophets, the historic validity of holy books, trustworthiness of purported miracles, and so on—but that itself has nothing to do with whether or not God exists.

Let me argue again for why it’s important that atheism mean something more substantial. It forces us to take responsibility and ownership over our own beliefs—instead of being stuck with a lame lack-of-belief, we get an active, supported, evidence-based position. It puts something on the line for us—instead of pointing out weak arguments for the other side, we need to present strong arguments for our own. This pressure can only be a good thing if we’re trying to find out what’s true, because it exposes our beliefs to scrutiny.

Lastly, it gives us something more substantial as a base for a movement—a lack of a belief seems strange like a strange thing to orient around. There’s no sense in getting together a group of non-football players, as the jokes tend to go. But, to extend the silly metaphor, there is an obvious reason why people who might think that football is harmful should rally together. A belief provides something in common, even if that belief is the negation of another belief (because all beliefs can be framed as a negation of something else.) Under the definition I’m advocating for, an atheist movement makes sense. Under the lack-of-a-belief definition, the case for an organized movement doesn’t stem much further than pragmatic happenstance.

Semantics are often a tricky thing to argue, and I don’t expect the matter to be settled any time soon. I think, though, that it’s time to get past this limp definition of atheism to something more appropriate for a serious position and movement.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.