Atheism in religious clothing.

Atheism is not faith. Stop it.

A friend of mine was on a date with a cute girl a few months back. As the date wore on they entered into deeper conversations about the nature of the world and the meaning of life. It was during this conversation that the girl, upon realizing that my friend was an Atheist, asked “Oh, so you only believe in science?” That was their first and last date.

There seems to be a notion that science is to Atheism what Christianity is to religion. This is not too uncommon in the religious discourse when arguing about the existence of God. Famous Atheist proponents like Richard Dawkins are often critiqued for being like any other televangelist when they go on book tours spreading their message of secularism and non belief. One can see why this rhetoric is appealing since the term Atheism is used as though it were a competing faith in religious debates; “Christianity leads to X, Atheism leads to Y”. It is also a logical response when asked about your faith. Rather than saying “I don’t believe in any gods” one answers “Atheism” in the same way as one would answer “Catholicism” or “Hinduism”. This semantically aligns it with the other faiths, as one faith among many.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Like many have pointed out before me, we wouldn’t be tempted to suggest that the non belief in, say, dragons is a faith in itself. There is nothing that ties the world’s dragon deniers together other than their non-belief; there are no traditions, no rules, no houses of worship. The same lack of communion goes for Atheism. This is merely a name to sum up the phrase “I don’t believe in any gods”. One can argue that a belief in the scientific method is naturally common among atheists as it is often religion’s failure to pass scientific scrutiny that draws one away from it. However, a scientific disposition is not a prerequisite for atheism, and not even an identifier for lacking faith in the supernatural. It is important to understand that there is nothing intrinsically scientific about atheism, because atheism is simply non belief. This is all the more self evident when one considers the fact that any religious person is an Atheist in respect to every religion other than their own. Still, no one would be tempted to claim that the non belief in Sikhism is what creates a sense of community among Mormons. Granted it can be argued that atheists are united by the fact that they are the only group of people that does not believe in any gods at all, but this is no more significant than the fact that vegetarians are the only ones in the cafeteria who aren’t eating any meat. They do not inherently share anything other than that.

What a person who claims that atheism is just like any other religion is actually saying is that atheists hold scientific beliefs just like religious people hold religious beliefs. A little Yes, but mostly No.

If this is to be true then the terms belief and faith must be diluted so much so as to lose all of their semantic use. If flipping the switch in your bedroom and then drawing the conclusion it was this action that made the room light up is an act of faith, then yes. In that case any assumption that we make about the world around us is a matter of faith. If so, we all hold the belief that eating will make us less hungry, but this is clearly not the correct use of the term. We see evidence that every time we flip the switch in our room the light goes on and we can repeat this experiment a hundred times over to be certain. If very curious we can even go on and read about the workings of electricity and how light bulbs function. We draw conclusions based on what seems to work. Even if we were told that indeed it was not the flipping of the switch which turned on the light, but the clapping of our hands, we would probably discard this new thesis and stick with what worked. In fact, this is how everyone, religious and non religious alike, makes sense of and functions in the world. Compare this to exclusively religious practices like prayer or miracles. A miracle is a suspension of the laws of physics, ie. something happens that is not supposed to be able to happen. To believe that an unusual event is an act of divine intervention is a matter of faith because there is nothing that logically leads us to this conclusion. Say your mother is cured in the hospital after the doctors have flung their arms in the air and screamed that all hope is lost. Claiming that this is a miracle, that a god intervened to save her, is not something that we can call a logical or reasonable claim. Not only would you first have to work out why this god focused on her specifically when people die in horrible agony every day, but you would also have to discount all of the far more probable scientific explanations. In no other aspect of your life would you go “I don’t know how this happened, therefore it must have been magic”, but for some reason this explanation is ready at hand whenever we get something we really want but didn’t think we would get. If your remote controller to your tv stops working for a while and then suddenly comes back to life you would rather attribute it to a glitch in the batteries than to a god breathing new life into the device.

Everyone “believes” in science to some degree, just as everyone is atheist to some degree. If this were not true then prayer would be the number one prescription drug, and everyone would believe in every god imaginable. When our child falls mortally ill no one (with a scant few exceptions) will hesitate for a second to choose a skilled doctor over a prayer to our respective god. However, as mentioned above, this trust that we put in science is not in any way similar to that of religious faith. Atheism means nothing more than not believing in any gods. In no way is it a religion in itself. Being consistent when it comes to scientific inquiries about the nature of life is the exact opposite of fanatic. Science changes all the time because there is no god given truth and is therefore as far as one can possibly get from taking someone on their word that there was once a magical being who dictated the dos and don’ts of this world.
So please – stop it.