A Believer's Thoughts on Faith

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

 i'm starting to wonder if i know exactly what atheism is, so a definition (in one's own words) would also be helpful.

For most of history, atheism has been defined as the belief that God doesn't exist. An atheist is a person who says "God isn't real." 

Recently, especially on the Internet, some people have started using a different definition. They say that atheism is simply the lack of belief in God. To them, atheists are people who say "I don't believe in God."

Philosophers of religion have been known to refer to the latter, new definition as "Lacktheism." 

I was interested to see that very recently the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been updated to include the new definition. The Lacktheism meaning is called the "psychological sense of the word." 

In the psychological sense of the word, atheism is a psychological state, specifically the state of being an atheist, where an atheist is defined as someone who is not a theist and a theist is defined as someone who believes that God exists (or that there are gods). This generates the following definition: atheism is the psychological state of lacking the belief that God exists.

Specialists tend to stick with the old definition.

In philosophy, however, and more specifically in the philosophy of religion, the term “atheism” is standardly used to refer to the proposition that God does not exist (or, more broadly, to the proposition that there are no gods). Thus, to be an atheist on this definition, it does not suffice to suspend judgment on whether there is a God, even though that implies a lack of theistic belief. Instead, one must deny that God exists. This metaphysical sense of the word is preferred over other senses, including the psychological sense, not just by theistic philosophers, but by many (though not all) atheists in philosophy as well. For example, Robin Le Poidevin writes, “An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe, rather than one who simply lives his life without reference to such a being” (1996: xvii). J. L. Schellenberg says that “in philosophy, the atheist is not just someone who doesn’t accept theism, but more strongly someone who opposes it.” In other words, it is “the denial of theism, the claim that there is no God” (2019: 5).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/

On this forum, for whatever reason, the frequent and passionate posters demand that we use the Lacktheist definition. 

I don't care about definitions so much, as long as we're all clear on what we mean. 

If the Lacktheist type of atheism is a psychological state, then of course it may not be based on any kind of logic or reasoned conclusion. It may just be an unthinking whim or emotion-based reaction. 

And if atheism is lack and only lack, it can (and has) led to ridiculous statements, for example that rocks and lizards are atheists in exactly the way that adult thinking humans are atheists. I mean, if people want to claim that their minds are as reasonable as rocks, I guess they can do that. However among thinking conscious adults who have been raised in society, all atheists have heard and rejected religious claims. If they have good thoughtful reasons for rejecting those claims, I don't see why they wouldn't want to state them. 

For example, the belief that science explains the world adequately without the need for God as part of the explanation is a metaphysical belief. It may be an extremely good one, but it is still a belief. If "faith" just means that we are committed to our beliefs even though they are not proven by science, then the belief that we don't need God to explain the world is a faith. Nobody here will admit that, though.

From the same article (bold mine)

Of course, from the fact that “atheism” is standardly defined in philosophy as the proposition that God does not exist, it does not follow that it ought to be defined that way. And the standard definition is not without its philosophical opponents... Again, the term “atheism” has more than one legitimate meaning, and nothing said in this entry should be interpreted as an attempt to proscribe how people label themselves or what meanings they attach to those labels.

Furthermore, your claim that the belief that we don't need God to explain the world is an article of faith is simply wrong, because we have alternate, evidence-based (albeit provisional) explanations for existence that don't require gods. Remember Laplace's response to the Emperor Napoleon.

Boru