RE: If there were no atheists?
July 20, 2018 at 10:11 am
(This post was last modified: July 20, 2018 at 10:17 am by Anomalocaris.)
It is as impossible for there to be no atheists as it is impossible for a population of people with normal color vision without any of them ever seeing sky is blue.
Atheism is not an invented ideology that could have not been invented, there is no self styled prophet to reveal atheism to the world. There is no rag containing the received word of atheism. It is an observation of what works for developing useful understanding of reality.
To imagine a world truly without atheists is to imagine a world where the range of observation and cognitive capacities exhibited by the human population is sharply truncated at the top end compared to what it is now.
So the proper question is not “what would not having atheism take away from human society”. It is instead “how much must you reduced the range of intellectual potential of the human population for there to be no atheists”.
Atheism is not an invented ideology that could have not been invented, there is no self styled prophet to reveal atheism to the world. There is no rag containing the received word of atheism. It is an observation of what works for developing useful understanding of reality.
To imagine a world truly without atheists is to imagine a world where the range of observation and cognitive capacities exhibited by the human population is sharply truncated at the top end compared to what it is now.
So the proper question is not “what would not having atheism take away from human society”. It is instead “how much must you reduced the range of intellectual potential of the human population for there to be no atheists”.
