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« on: February 25, 2009, 04:41:22 am »
Hi!
With all the heated debates going on about religion and so on (just see the now-locked thread on Intelligent Design), I felt I should share my view on these things.
First of all, to be fair, I need to point out that I am a faithful atheist. That is, I am an atheist, not because I don't want to pay church tax, but because I honestly believe that there is no God or similar entity or entities.
Now that my own position is clear, I hope you can correctly evaluate the worth or lack of worth of my propositions.
First of all, I consider basically atheism to be effectively another religion - in the sense that I define religion as "a system of basic believes that can not be proven". Personally, I also feel that science as we are used to have it is only fully compatible with the atheist belief system as the latter does not include much that contradicts the necessities of the former (even though, as a belief system, by definition it has to make claims that are not subject to scientific analysis). However, this last point (the relation between atheism and science) is not an absolute one for me and if someone can show how another religion works well with science, I am willing to listen.
I know I am kind of muddling terms in the following argument, but I have the impression that many of the discussions we have witnessed already do this muddling to a degree as to make a clear distinction between scientific and atheist neigh impossible. So, in the following argument, please be aware that at times, I am equating science and atheism, while that is actually not completely correct as stated above. I hope that my meaning still remains understandable.
There seems to be some tension between a camp of followers of the "traditional" religions (the theistic ones, I mean) and a camp of followers of atheism (which, according to my definition is also a religion, which is why I used "traditional" to mark the others in contrast). The things I have noticed in the threads were on the one hand complaints about religion bashing and accusation of close-mindedness while the other side called the believes of the other "fairy tales" in a clearly derogative sense.
In my opinion, this issue has two aspects that are intertwined and are messing things up pretty badly.
First of all, there is the high prestige modern society places with science. The term "scientific" still holds a certain weight, even though it probably lost some of the power it had around the end of the 19th century. As such, things that are not scientific are subjected to ridicule, even if that is not really applicable. However, and I think that is what is causing some problems here, the term is also so prestiguous that people sometimes feel the need to include their own approaches under that term, regardless of whether it really fits them. Putting it bluntly concerning the Intelligent Design discussion: What does Intelligent Design gain by claiming to be scientific?
This brings me to the second issue at hand, which is part of what I consider a problem of identity of the atheist religion. As I stated before, atheism is a religion because in the end, you can find some basic beliefs that are not provable in any way but absolutely necessary for atheism to work. Just as an average theist religion has to postulate the existance of a God, atheism can only work if it categorically denies the existance of a God. The statement at the core may be different, but both rely on unprovable axioms, and there is actually no reason to make a distinction between atheism and religion.
If we are to subscribe to the previous statement that atheism is just another religion and has as much a claim to veracity as any other religion, we should then move to the question how religions relate to each other. Can we really say a religion is better than the other, or worse yet, say that a religion is ridiculous?
Personally, I really doubt that as any such claim would require a serious evaluation. It is true that we can evaluate the consistancy of certain mechanisms and claims and criticize contradictions within a system, but how are we to evaluate the very basis of the system? Criticizing applications gets us only that far, as can be seen with Christianity: What happens in the Catholic Church does not really have any correspondence in what I have seen in the Bible, quite on the contrary, but it is still considered a valid branch of the Christian religion based on the Bible. In other words, applications are derived and subject to change too readily to make them the basis for a final evaluation.
But if we want to evaluate the very basis of a religion, we are facing a truly unbeatable problem: On what basis will we ourselves argue? An argument does not stand in a void. It needs some basic mechanisms and assumptions itself. However, whatever argumentation method you use, a thorough investigation will undeniably lead you to realize that it is based on axioms similar or related to those very axioms you are investigating. Thus, by its very existance, your argument is already biased and can not give you clear results but rather a confirmation of its own belief system possibly at the demerit of the other system.
In other words, no matter what we do, we will always argue from the point of view of a belief system, so we can not evaluate belief systems without a bias.
If that is so, why is especially the rejection of the "traditional" religions so common? Especially if we consider that "real atheists" are probably a minority (I also distinguish between people who are actually atheists, that is believing in the non-existance of God and those who claim to be atheists in order ot identify with political, mostly communist ideas while actually believing in some divine power).
I think the answer to that last question lies in the first issue: Prestige. As I stated before, I feel that the axioms of atheism are especially close to the scientific method and it seems that many people share that feeling. Because of that affinity and the resulting equation of the two, atheism has gained somewhat of a prestige advantage - leading to the absurd situation that it is at the same time rejected and embraced.
To sum it up, I think there are problems involving people putting unnecessarily high prestige on science, mixing up science and atheism, and finally believing that it is possible to compare religions while in my opinion it is actually impossible to propose a valid comparison between such fundamental belief systems. All this put together unfortunately results in a lack of mutual respect which leads quite naturally to the high flamability of threads involving these issues.
I hope some may find my propositions at least interesting and it would be awesome if they actually found at least some of the suggestions worth consideration.
Deathworks
