Is everybody equal in atheism?
September 3, 2012 at 1:22 am
(This post was last modified: September 3, 2012 at 6:48 pm by Tiberius.)
The recent furore over Atheism+ has provoked my curiosity: Is atheism about all of humanity, or is atheism ideologically singular?
You see there are two ways you can go with atheism. On one hand, you may say "Atheism is the only truth, and we need to convert the world to our way of thinking". On the other hand, Atheism can see itself as coexisting with other beliefs, with the focus simply on protecting and preserving the rights and freedoms of atheists and converts to atheism.
These two positions have two starkly different perspectives on the truth. The first kind sees one singular objective truth: That atheism is the one true way to a humanist utopia. The other sees truth as subjective; Truth is whatever you make it, and everybody is free to go about it in their own way. The classic "coexist" bumper sticker exemplifies this position.
Which kind you are, and which kind atheism ought to be is a serious question.
The first position is much firmer, but carries the burden of a much higher epistemological weight. It says that there is objective truth out there, and presumes that atheism is it. Can atheism truly carry such a weight? Can we say that we have incontrovertible evidence that atheism is the right way of seeing the world?
To understand the nature of this claim we must delve into necessary and contingent facts. Necessary facts are necessarily true no matter what, in any possible world you can imagine. Some would argue that mathematical and logical truths reside in this category.
Contingent truths rely on certain other factors. For instance, the claim "it is raining outside" is true contingent to the reality of whether it really is raining outside. It might also be contingent on whether your sensory perceptions are accurate.
We cannot know whether atheism, or any kind of position about God is necessarily true unless we determine it is actual. It's tempting here to invoke modal logic, with the S5 possibly necessary to necessary modality, but this would, it seems to me, lead to two contradictory answers. Since both atheism and theism as we see it "can" be true, and if one is actually true it becomes necessarily true, we end up having two necessarily true but contradictory truths. Maybe someone who understands modal logic can sort this out for me here.
But until then, we have to take atheism as contingent or possibly true. I'll go over the implications of this in my next post.
You see there are two ways you can go with atheism. On one hand, you may say "Atheism is the only truth, and we need to convert the world to our way of thinking". On the other hand, Atheism can see itself as coexisting with other beliefs, with the focus simply on protecting and preserving the rights and freedoms of atheists and converts to atheism.
These two positions have two starkly different perspectives on the truth. The first kind sees one singular objective truth: That atheism is the one true way to a humanist utopia. The other sees truth as subjective; Truth is whatever you make it, and everybody is free to go about it in their own way. The classic "coexist" bumper sticker exemplifies this position.
Which kind you are, and which kind atheism ought to be is a serious question.
The first position is much firmer, but carries the burden of a much higher epistemological weight. It says that there is objective truth out there, and presumes that atheism is it. Can atheism truly carry such a weight? Can we say that we have incontrovertible evidence that atheism is the right way of seeing the world?
To understand the nature of this claim we must delve into necessary and contingent facts. Necessary facts are necessarily true no matter what, in any possible world you can imagine. Some would argue that mathematical and logical truths reside in this category.
Contingent truths rely on certain other factors. For instance, the claim "it is raining outside" is true contingent to the reality of whether it really is raining outside. It might also be contingent on whether your sensory perceptions are accurate.
We cannot know whether atheism, or any kind of position about God is necessarily true unless we determine it is actual. It's tempting here to invoke modal logic, with the S5 possibly necessary to necessary modality, but this would, it seems to me, lead to two contradictory answers. Since both atheism and theism as we see it "can" be true, and if one is actually true it becomes necessarily true, we end up having two necessarily true but contradictory truths. Maybe someone who understands modal logic can sort this out for me here.
But until then, we have to take atheism as contingent or possibly true. I'll go over the implications of this in my next post.
