Atheism 101 by William B. Lindley Definitions There are two definitions of "atheism" or "atheist", and they are enough unalike that a lot of misunderstanding can result when this label is used. An atheist is a person: (1) without a belief in God. Michael Martin, in his book Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (©1990, Temple University Press), calls this position "negative atheism;" I would call it "soft atheism." George H. Smith and Gordon Stein agree that this is the correct definition, even though it is not the more popular one. (George H. Smith is the author of Atheism: The Case Against God, Prometheus Books, ©1979 and other works; Dr. Gordon Stein is the author of The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Prometheus Books, © 1985 and other works.) or: (2) who denies the existence of God. That is, a person who assents to the statements: "There is no God" and "God doesn't exist." Michael Martin calls this position "positive atheism," and I call it "hard atheism." Frederick Edwords, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, who labels himself an agnostic, believes that this is the correct definition, and, indeed, the term "atheist" is used this way by most people. (A series of correspondence between Edwords and Gordon Stein was published in the March-April 1987 issue of The American Rationalist. It is on the question "What is the best term for a non-believer: Atheist or Agnostic?", and is a thorough discussion of the issues raised in the definitions offered above.) As more people come to use computers and thereby come to recognize the term "default option", an intermediate definition can come into use: An atheist is one for whom the default option is: "There is no God." We might as well define "agnostic" while we're at it, since there is a similar division of usage. I call a "soft agnostic" one who says: "I don't know whether there is a God or not." A "hard agnostic" is one who says: "The proposition 'There is a God' is undecidable." Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), the great 19th- century freethought orator, took the hard agnostic position when he said: "The Agnostic does not simply say, 'I do not know.' He goes another step and says with great emphasis that you do not know." George H. Smith uses the term "agnostic atheist" for this position. He uses the term "agnostic theist" for a person who "believes in the existence of god, but maintains that the nature of god is unknowable." Yet another position, taken by Alfred Jules Ayer (author of Language, Truth and Logic, ©1936) and many skeptics, is: "The statement 'There is a God' doesn't make sense, since the term 'God' is undefined or incoherent." Such people do not call themselves agnostics, since they clarify the definition of the hard agnostic given above by expanding it to "The proposition 'There is a God' is significant and it is neither true nor false: it is undecidable." They then deny that the proposition is significant. Such people are clearly atheists in sense 1 above, but are also clearly not atheists in sense 2. Ontological Categories When a believer and an unbeliever get together and argue about the existence of God, they stumble upon a variety of categories of existence and nonexistence. I shall list five such "ontological categories", two of things that exist and three of things that do not exist. There are no doubt more categories, and the discussion here could be wrong in various interesting ways (see the works of Willard Van Orman Quine, especially his From A Logical Point of View, ©1963), but I plunge ahead anyway. Category 1: space-time entities that exist, such as people, tables, zebras, the sun, etc. Category 2: abstractions such as whole numbers. Category 3: fictions, such as Pegasus, Sherlock Holmes, Utopia. Category 4: logically impossible things such as a square circle. These are also called oxymorons. Category 5: words or notions that are made up on the spur of the moment. Discussions about the existence or nonexistence of God use all five categories. Believers on a more primitive level will speak of God as a space- time entity. The God of the Bible is represented as such in numerous verses: Genesis 3:8 "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day..." The voice wasn't walking; God was. Exodus 33:20-23 "And (God) said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen." (This notable Bible passage is sometimes referred to as "the moon over Mount Sinai.") To some believers this God is not a fiction, so he goes into category 1. Most believers these days will insist that God exists but is not a space-time entity; they expand category 2 to include persons-at least one, and maybe three. Trinitarians in fact put God in both categories 1 and 2: "...very God ere time began, born in time the Son of Man..." Most unbelievers regard God as a fiction, putting him in category 3, along with Zeus and Pegasus. They consider the question of theism vs. atheism as a question of evidence: God belongs in either category 1 or category 3, and the other categories are not even thought about. As you can guess by now, I consider this to be a major mistake among unbelievers. Michael Martin devotes a good portion of his book to putting God in category 4, exposing the incoherence of attributes that believers say God possesses. I have two square-circle models for God, and many believers believe in both of them. The first is a male person who is not a biological entity. The point here is that gender, maleness or femaleness, is inherently biological; we know of it only through knowledge of plants and animals, including ourselves. To extend gender to entities that are not biological organisms is to create a metaphor. A male person who is not a biological entity is like a trapezoid that is not a geometrical entity, or a senator who is not a political entity. The second widely accepted oxymoronic model of God is the omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator of this universe. This, in one phrase, is the "problem of evil" that has vexed theologians for centuries. Various solutions have been proposed, and each of them fudges the sense of one or more of the terms. "God is omnipotent-sort of" or "God is omnibenevolent, but not all that omnibenevolent" or "This isn't the universe God created; God created a perfectly good one, and we botched it up." Whatever the fudge is, it destroys the plain sense of the terms used. Category 5 is perhaps the most amusing. It comes into play when the believer says: "You can't prove God doesn't exist." Of course not. You can't prove that pliths don't exist either. (Plith is a word I made up. I used to use "ving" for this purpose, but somebody invented a new kind of door-opening device and called it a ving key, so there you go. Not only can't I prove that vings don't exist: they do!) Another way of answering the charge is: "And you can't prove that Harvey, the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit standing beside me here and now, doesn't exist either." And, of course, he can't. Category 5 exposes how shallow and worthless the "can't prove a negative" argument is. Atheist Organizations Here is a short and probably incomplete list of active atheist organizations. (1) Atheists United, P. O. Box 5329, Sherman Oaks, Calif. 91413, (818) 594-0678 (the Los Angeles area); (2) Atheist Network, P. O. Box 130898, Houston, Texas 77219, (713) 686-6310; (3) Atheist Coalition, P. O. Box 4786, San Diego, Calif. 92164- 4786, (619) 622-1892; (4) Minnesota Atheists, P. O. Box 6261, Minneapolis, Minn. 55406, (612) 588-1597; (5) Atheists of San Francisco Region; (6) Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin; (7) Atheists of Florida. There is an Atheist Alliance to which these seven groups belong, formed in 1991, but I do not have an address for it. Outside the Alliance, there are: (1) Atheism SIG (Special Interest Group) of Mensa, P. O. Box 2307, Waldorf, MD 20604-2307, (301) 843-9854, Compuserve address 72400,1775; (2) American Atheists, P. O. Box 140195, Austin, Texas 78714-0195, (512) 458-1244, Compuserve address 71700,2744; (3) Atheist Centre, Benz Circle, Vijayawada 520006, India; and probably others. There are also numerous Humanist, Freethought, and Rationalist groups. The one most worth mentioning, perhaps, is the Freedom From Religion Foundation, publishers of Freethought Today. Address: P.O. Box 750, Madison, Wisconsin, 53701, (608) 256-8900.