Over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars there’s a discussion about the relationship between evolution and atheism:
There is the Dawkins/Dennett position […] And there are people like me, Wesley Elsberry and Eugenie Scott, who take the position that while evolution is certainly incompatible with certain forms of religious belief, it is not incompatible with other forms of religious belief […] But many [intelligent design] advocates believe that people like Wes and Genie and myself are just pretending to think that they’re compatible, and that really makes me angry.
As I commented, it seem to me that this is an inevitable consequence of a massive (historical) equivocation on the word “god”. Everybody picks the high-level dichotomy: “atheism” vs. “some form of ontological commitment towards something that the believer chooses to label ‘god’“. But in terms of belief-clusters, the difference between one self-avowed believer and another may be huge. Remember that the Romans called the early Christians “atheists”….
Personally, I style myself as an atheist because there is nothing that I believe exists that I choose to label ‘god’. Of course there are plenty of things that I do believe exist that other people have chosen to label ‘god’, but I prefer not to play the equivocation game. When Frank “Omega Point” Tipler and Pat Robertson both use the word “god”, how much overlap is there? Precious little, I suspect. (Semantic or ontological!) (And don’t get me started on Freeman Dyson!)
When a non-atheist challenges my atheism, my response is usually along these lines: “Over the centuries (and even today), so many people have used ‘god’ in so many different ways that I honestly don’t know what you mean by the word. Do you mean ‘sol invictus’, or ‘Odin’, or ‘Osiris’, or ‘the god of the Pentateuch’, or ‘infinite mind’, or ‘Gaia’, or something else? Define your god, tell me in what way it exists for you, and I’ll tell you if I believe in it.”