Mental 04: Labels for Belief (and Lack thereof)

    Around the time I began this blog, I was talking to a friend one evening about religion &tc when we got around to the topic of what it means to be an atheist. He, like many others I've talked to (and perhaps even myself, at one point) believed that an atheist was someone who believed God did not exist. I fear this misconception is rather widespread, and since I'm too lazy to write anything productive at the moment, I will address it in this blog post, starting with

Theism¹

    Broadly, "theism" is the belief in the existence of at least one or more god² or goddess. A monotheist believes in one god; a polytheist believes in several, and an atheist believes in none. More recently (during the 17th century) the term came to mean something more specific: in the context of monotheism, being a theist meant you believed in a personal which you could come to know through divine revelation and which interacted with the natural world. I will refer to this distinction by calling the first "theism v1" and "theism v1".  People developed theism v2  so that they could contrast their belief with

Deism

     Deism is a form of theism v1, but unlike v2, deism does holds neither that god is of a personal nature nor that god interferes with the natural world. Instead, this god could be known through reasoning about nature. Many Christina deists did not believe in the infallibility of the Bible. and most distrusted organized religion. Fun fact: the founding fathers of America were mostly deists!
    Deism are also classified under a broader category of

Nontheism

     Non-theism is specifically "not theism v2". So, while deists are a form of theism v1, they are also non-theists. There are plenty of other religious non-theists, but of course that's not why I'm writing this, so I'll move on to one that isn't inherently religious or nonreligious,

Agnosticism

    Agnosticism, in regards to the existence of a deity, is the position of "not knowing." It can be weak, as in such a claim as "No one knows whether a god exists," or strong, in "It is impossible for us to know whether a god exists." Someone who holds this claim, however, can still be a theist (this is called agnostic theism). How is this possible?

    We enter into an important distinction. Up until this point, we have been talking about belief in a god. Agnosticism, however, is a position about knowledge of god. The two are not the same, even though we often conflate them. Although this distinction deserves its own blog post, suffice it to say that no matter how much I believe something to be true, it is questionable for me to claim I know it if I can't provide reasons for my belief. An agnostic theist is just such a person - they believe a god exists, but they know they don't know this. While possible to do this, I think it's much more common for an agnosticism to coincide with

Atheism

    That's right. Most people use the term agnostic to distinguish themselves from atheists, but in truth they are also atheists, because atheism is "without theism," or the lack of belief in a god. This confusion, I think, is largely due to extremists in both camps: evangelicals for making a false dichotomy of "you need just as much faith to think that God certainly does not exist", and atheists for claiming that they do in fact know a god doesn't exist. But note, you can be religious and also atheist. Ancestor worship, Shintoism, etc, are all religious even though they don't believe in a god. What most people think of as atheism, they are actually thinking of strong atheism, which is the positive claim that no gods exist (this is also contrasted to weak atheism, which is the previous, most-inclusive definition of atheism given). Finally, there's

Antitheism

    This term has two very different meanings. If you're an antitheist atheist, you are against organized religion and/or any belief in a god at all. Many of the popular "New Atheists" are atheist anti-theists, whereas the Yawists of ancient Hebrew were more probably theist anti-theists. (They condemned the worship of Ba'al, one of the three Hebrew gods.)

    So with all that, what am I? Definitely I am at least a weak atheist - I lack belief in every god of every religion I know of. For some specific gods - like the god of the Creationist movement - I am a gnostic atheist; we know that the Earth is older than 6,000 years old, and that there was never a global flood, so the god that caused all these could not exist³.

    More generally, for claims about untestable supernatural phenomenon, I would most often consider myself a weak atheist. The difference is in degree, though, and not kind. I know very certainly that there is no shark in my room, because of the limited scope of my room and my ability to investigate large objects (like sharks) in it. With a god, it's more like looking for keys and only staring at one small corner of the room. I could say that "the keys are not in this room," only if I did not really know there was much more room to look in. But I would not believe that the keys were in this room unless I had good reason to - such as actually finding them.

1: All definitions from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Theology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nontheism
2: I'm using this term interchangeably with deity, though some monotheists may object.
3: But the god who caused all these and then re-arranged all the evidence to make it look otherwise could possibly exist - I'm looking at you, Flying Spaghetti Monster.