Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (12 page)
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Authors: Dale McGowan
After puzzling over the problem for some time, Huxley came up with the word
agnostic
— Greek for “not knowing” — to describe his position. He quickly learned that he was not alone, because countless writers and thinkers in England and beyond quickly adopted the term themselves.
Agnostics before agnosticism
Agnosticism was around long before there was a word for it. The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras of Abdera wrote, “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be” — a sentence that could easily have come from Thomas Henry Huxley himself. And a generation before Huxley’s birth, pioneering feminist Frances Wright said, “With respect to myself, my efforts have been strenuously directed to ascertain what I know, to understand, what can be known, and to increase my knowledge as far as possible” instead of bothering ourselves with unknowable things like whether God exists.
In each of the hundred generations between Protagoras and Wright, countless other people, well known and unknown, shared Huxley’s position before a term existed to capture it.
Discovering Humanism: The Thousand Steps That Follow
Atheism is a huge statement about the biggest question of all — whether a supernatural God exists. Though atheism itself answers this one question and goes no further, the implications of that answer are enormous. The idea of God answers questions and solves problems. That’s what it was created for — to fill in the gaps in human knowledge and to provide comfort in the face of the admittedly serious problems of human existence.
When you remove the God solution, the problems themselves remain. So what’s the best way to respond to a world in which there is
no God? The answer for many atheists is
humanism,
the thousand steps that follow the conclusion that God doesn’t exist. Humanism is a worldview that focuses care, compassion, and a sense of wonder on this world and this life instead of focusing on a God and an imagined afterlife.
Looking at the world in a different way
A world without a God is very different from a world with one, but basic human needs, hopes, fears, and aspirations remain very much the same. People still seek pleasure and avoid pain. They still need to understand what it means to be good and to be motivated toward ethical behavior. They still fear death, and they still seek meaning and purpose.
An unseen but accessible deity who is all-powerful and all-good solves these problems pretty neatly. Want to know how to behave? No problem — he’s written a book (though if actual morality is what you’re after, I’d skip the first few hundred pages). Afraid to die? No worries — God cancelled death. Need a purpose? Serve God and do his will.
Humanism is an ongoing attempt to address these same needs using reason and compassion instead of religious tradition, church authority, or holy scriptures. It’s a different way of looking at the world, one that offers both challenges and opportunities.
Coming to terms with terms: Humanist or secular humanist?
In the mid-19th century, a British agnostic named George Holyoake coined the term
secular humanist
to more clearly distinguish humanists who don’t believe in a deity from those who do. (Holyoake was interestingly also the last person in England to be convicted of blasphemy, in 1842.)
So what term should you use when referring to a humanist? In the years since Holyoake, the presumption of religious belief reversed itself.
Humanist
without a modifier now implies a secular humanist, and religious humanists are the ones who must add the modifier (religious) to be clear. As with the word “atheist,” sometimes the letter H in Humanism is capitalized, and sometimes it’s not.
Getting to know the Renaissance humanists
The first humanists were not always atheists but included many religious believers living in the Renaissance era. Like modern secular humanists, these religious humanists felt that human concern should focus on this world and this life, not on the supernatural or the afterlife, and that human reason could and should guide our ethics and decision making. Their work was inspired and informed in part by discoveries of ancient Greek and Roman philosophical works extolling a similar approach.
The Renaissance humanists urged social and educational reforms including a greater emphasis on literacy, critical thinking, tolerance, and informed engagement in civic life. It was a crucial step toward the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, helping Western thought to find its way out of the reliance on scripture and authority that held sway on the continent for over a thousand years.
Renaissance humanists included the poet Petrarch (1304–1374) and monk, scholar, and satirist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536).
Setting God aside: The implications
In her brilliantly funny and personal one-woman show
Letting Go of God,
comedian Julia Sweeney describes her process of letting go of Catholic religious belief to become an atheist. In a way both humorous and deeply touching, Sweeney describes the implications of a world without God, one by one, and responds at every point with the essence of humanism — the urgent desire to understand the world, to support each other, and to put human compassion and justice in place of a divine illusion.
One of the most extraordinary parts of the monologue describes her first encounter with the idea of a world without God. “I’m embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy,” she says. “I actually had the thought, ‘Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean we’re just hurtling through space? That’s so vulnerable!’ I wanted to run out and catch the earth as it fell out of space into my hands.” Then she remembers that gravity and angular momentum do the trick without divine intervention.
She wonders why we are ethical, realizing at last that we evolved a moral sense in order to live in community with each other. She thinks about innocent people in prison who are praying to no one for help, and then shouts out, “We gotta do something to get those people out of jail!”
Finally she confronts the most difficult reality of all: that we really do die, and that everyone she loved who has died is really gone. It also hits her that Hitler didn’t face any ultimate justice or punishment. Her reaction is deeply humanistic: “We better make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Slowly she begins to see the whole world differently. “I had to rethink what I thought about everything,” she says. “It’s like I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind.”
Seeing the humanist heart of atheism
Atheism is often described (even by some atheists) as being too much about thinking and not enough about feeling. Many atheists would rightly counter that there’s a good reason for this — that emotional need is what gets people into religion in the first place, and that intellect and reason help them get out and stay out.
True enough. But eventually people find themselves confronting those human needs again, many of which are expressed in emotional terms. And that’s where humanism, “the heart of atheism,” comes in. When an atheist works to alleviate poverty or support human rights, or helps a friend or neighbor, he or she might be motivated by atheism, by the conviction that there’s no God to do these things for people. But the compassionate actions themselves are best described as an expression of that person’s humanism.
Forcing a Square Peg into a Round Hole: The Unpigeonholeables
No discussion of religious belief and disbelief is really complete without recognizing the galling presence of people who’ve thought so carefully about their labels that they decline to sit in any of the black-and-white categories the world has prepared for them. Religious believers and atheists alike are quick to claim the best of them as their own and to shunt the worst of them to the other side. But they aren’t traditional believers in any creed, and they aren’t strictly atheists either. I call them the Unpigeonholeables.
Not surprisingly, some of the deepest and most complex thinkers of every generation have fallen into these categories outside of categories. That’s what thinking can do to a person. Even within each of the labels in this section, you can find a lot of qualifiers like “Pantheists
most often
. . . ” and “Deists
generally
. . . ” and “Religious atheists
usually
. . . ” Even in their exile from the broad categories, these folks are hard to pin down.
Believing in a different kind of creator: Deists
Deism
was first described in the 1620s and for two centuries was the philosopher’s worldview of choice. Deists generally believe in the existence of a supernatural creator, but that’s as far as the parallels to traditional religion go. They tend to believe that this creator-god set the universe in motion but hasn’t clocked in since. He doesn’t answer prayers, and most believe he doesn’t reward or punish behavior. In fact, given the heaping helping of pain, bad manners, and bum luck in the world, many deists think he/she/it doesn’t even know humans are here at all.
Deists have no central creed or authoritative scripture, and they tend to believe that human reason and observation of the natural world are the best ways to understand that world, to see evidence of an intelligent creator, and to work out how to behave.
This may be confusing at first, but it really does make sense. You can criticize
Star Wars
and still be a movie fan. Likewise, you can criticize Christianity and still believe in a creator god — just a very different kind.
Though deism as a label fell into decline in the early 19th century, it helped give rise to a number of liberal religious movements. According to a 2005 Baylor University study, when you scratch the surface, about a third of religious believers in the United States hold beliefs that are closer to deism than anything else. That means they really have as much if not more in common with nonbelievers than with believers in a traditional, prayer-answering, behavior-watching God.
Many Founding Fathers were deists
Although some people claim that all the Founding Fathers of the United States were Christians, many, in fact, were deists. Because Thomas Jefferson said in his personal correspondence that the Gospels were built on “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications,” called the Book of Revelation “merely the ravings of a maniac,” and said “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter,” he was often assumed to have been an atheist. But no — Jefferson was a deist.
Thomas Paine called the Bible “trash” and “[a] collection of lies and contradictions.” But he wasn’t an atheist; Paine was also a deist. And even though Benjamin Franklin said, “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches” and called Christian dogma “unintelligible,” he also said, “I never doubted . . . the existence of the Deity.”
Seeing nature as God: Pantheists
Pantheism
, which means “all-God,” is the view that the universe and God are one and the same. Any reverence or worship is directed not to a god in human form, or in any form at all, but to the whole of the cosmos, and spirituality is centered not on a traditional deity but on nature.
Daniel C. Dennett, a prominent atheist philosopher, said, “Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.” Though I doubt Dennett would call himself a pantheist, his quote touches on this nontraditional worldview, one that found itself a name in the late 17th century.
As with agnosticism and other labels, the practice predated the term by thousands of years. Many thinkers in ancient Greece, China, and India expressed conceptions of God that today is called
pantheistic.
Christian church leaders considered pantheism heretical during the medieval period, and then it was revived and gained its name in the run-up to the Enlightenment.
Being religious without a god: Religious atheists