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June 18, 2014 • 8:08 am
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This is all very worrisome — this incessant fixation on “atheism” as an identifier, as a group with a membership. The reason is very simple: it is entirely possible to be an irrational atheist. That is to say, it is entirely possible to accept as true a particular metaphysics (namely one in which supernatural entities don’t exist) for epistemologically *bad* reasons. I have met many atheists myself — nominally the same as me — who, when asked *why* they believe what they believe, don’t have a good answer; who say “Well, I just like the community better” [a matter of taste], or “Well, I’m a scientist and all my friends are atheists” [an instance of social conformity], or “Well, religion just never worked for me” [a pragmatic rather than epistemological reason].
If one can accept atheism for bad reasons, and one certainly can, then establishing alliances with others simply because they identify as atheists is totally misguided. It misses the point. Alliances should be formed on the basis of *the extent to which one’s beliefs are supported by the totality of available evidence*, and that’s it.
In this way, the comment posted above totally misses the point. So what if atheists have never showed up at your doorstep! Certainly, they could. You can hold that supernatural beings are non-existent and also, at the same time, think that poisonous snakes aren’t poisonous. There is nothing about atheism that prevents such a mixture of beliefs.
If fundamentalism is the position according to which one holds one’s beliefs without any possibility of changing them, then an atheist could indeed be a fundamentalist. Observe: “God doesn’t exist and there’s nothing you can say to change my mind. Ever.” The atheist who says this (and note that there is nothing about atheism *itself* that prevents such an attitude, or even inclines one towards fallibilism) isn’t any closer to my own position than the dogmatic Muslim. This whole focus, quite salient on this blog I’m sorry to say, on *being a member* of the group “Atheist” is very disheartening to people like myself who ultimately care about living in a more *reasonable* world.
In my view, a reasonable world would indeed (almost certainly) be an atheistic one, but an atheistic world need not be reasonable at all. Epistemology, not group identity, needs to the focus. The commenter above totally misses this.