Colin McGinn has written a marvelous essay on “Why I am an Atheist”. He begins by pointing out that the atheist cannot rationally limit his stance to a simple assertion of non-belief: he…

… doesn’t just find himself with a belief that there is no God; he comes to that belief by what he takes to be rational means—that is, he takes his belief to be justified. He may not regard his atheistic belief as certain, but he certainly takes it to be reasonable—as reasonable as any belief he holds. Just by holding the belief he regards himself as rationally entitled to it (or else he wouldn’t, as a responsible believer, believe it—that being the nature of belief). Also, given the nature of belief, he takes himself to know that there is no God: for to believe that p is to take oneself to know that p. The atheist, like any believer in a proposition, regards his belief as an instance of knowledge (of course, it may not be, but he necessarily takes it to be so). So an atheist is someone who thinks he knows there is no God. Thus he is prepared responsibly to assert that there is no God. The atheist regards himself as knowing there is no God in just the sense that he regards himself as knowing, say, that the earth is round. He claims to know the objective truth about the universe in respect of a divinity—that the universe contains no such entity.

Many theists (and agnostics) protest loudly that such a position is unwarranted, arrogant, and epistemically unreasonable: a an example of the fundamentalism which many atheists criticize in theists. But McGinn will have none of this: theists have exactly the same confident disbelief in many things – other gods, for example – that atheists do. They have no basis for insisting that the atheist should adopt a selective agnosticism:

My state of belief mirrors theirs, except that I affirm zero gods instead of one. (In fact, the idea of many gods has its advantages over the one-god theory: it comports with the complexity of the world and it promotes tolerance.) Yahweh, Baal, Hadad, and Yam: which of these ancient gods do you believe in and which do you think fictitious? I believe in none of them, nor in any others that might be mentioned; if you believe in one of them and disbelieve in the others, then you are just like me with respect to those others. Atheism is not confined to atheists, and the epistemology is the same no matter which gods you disbelieve in.

Having made his case, McGinn confesses that he finds the label of atheist a rather misleading one:

So my state of belief is not that of one continuously denying the existence of God, with an active belief that there is no such entity (though it is true that I am more often in this state than I would be the issue were not constantly debated around me). I am, dispositionally at any rate, in a state of implicit disbelief with respect to God—as I am in a state of implicit disbelief about ghosts, goblins and Santa. I simply take it for granted that there is no God, instead of constantly asserting it to myself. The state of mind I am in while composing this essay is not then my habitual state of mind, and even to be explicitly denying the existence of God strikes me as taking the issue a little too seriously—as it would be to write an essay making explicit my negative implicit beliefs about Santa Claus. So I am really as much post-atheist as post-theist, when it comes to my natural state of mind—just as I suppose most people are post-a-polytheist as well as post-polytheist. Polytheism, for most people, is simply a dead issue, not a subject of active concern. Theism for me is a dead issue, which is why it is misleading to call me an atheist–though it is of course strictly true that I am. It is misleading in just the way it is misleading to speak of a traditional Christian as an a-polytheist or a normal adult as an a-Santa-ist, since it suggests are far more active engagement with the issue than is the case. Many other difficult issues engage my mind and remain unresolved or at least open to serious question, but not my disbelief in God.

He closes with some thoughts about what it might mean for God-talk to remain with us in a purely fictional mode. I’m not holding my breath. All the same, it’s a wonderful essay. (Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I?) If you want to know what I believe, you could do worse than read it.

From QualiaSoup:

(Via DebunkingChristianity.)

It’s because nobody else seems to care about this kind of crap. Why aren’t the Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of the US speaking out against this obscene kind of totalitarian warping of Christianity?


UPDATE: Blast – this video has been taken down by HBO. Never mind; you can check out the material discussed by Bill Maher and his guest, Jeff Sharlet, at Jeff’s website.

From Dan’s report on the “symposia on faith and religion” sponsored by The John Templeton Foundation as part of the Darwin bash at Cambridge University:

The second talk was by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, a Professor of  Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and it was an instance of  “theological anthropology,” full of earnest gobbledygook about embodied minds and larded with evolutionary tidbits drawn from Frans de Waal, Steven Mithen and others.  In the discussion period I couldn’t stand it any more and challenged the speakers: “I’m Dan Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and we are forever being told that we should do our homework and consult with the best theologians. I’ve heard two of you talk now, and you keep saying this is an interdisciplinary effort—evolutionary theology—but I am still waiting to be told what theology has to contribute to the effort. You’ve clearly adjusted your theology considerably in the wake of Darwin, which I applaud, but what traffic, if any, goes in the other direction? Is there something I’m missing? What questions does theology ask or answer that aren’t already being dealt with by science or secular philosophy? What can you clarify for this interdisciplinary project?” (Words to that effect)  Neither speaker had anything to offer, but van Huyssteen  blathered on for a bit without, however,  offering any instances of theological wisdom that every scientist interested in the Big Questions should have in his kit.

But I learned a new word: “kenotic” as in kenotic theology. It comes from the Greek word kenosis meaning ‘self-emptying.’ Honest to God. This new kenotic theology is all the rage in some quarters, one gathers, and it is “more deeply Christian for being more adapted to Darwinism.” (I’m not making this up.) I said that I was glad to learn this new word and had to say that I was tempted by the idea that kenotic theology indeed lived up to its name.

Via Why Evolution Is True.

Here we go again: another self-avowed atheist blaming fellow atheists for the state of dialog between believers and non-believers. Here’s Julian Baggini over at CiF:

Perhaps a period of New Atheist exuberance was necessary. At least it got people thinking, although I fear it has confirmed every negative stereotype about it. We now need to turn down the volume and engage in a real conversation about what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away. If we don’t, we will only have ourselves to blame if the vague platitudes of Bunting and Armstrong win the war for hearts and minds.

In other words, fundamentalist religion is obviously absurd and is doomed to extinction, but unless the New Atheists shut up and show a little respect, it will be replaced by a “woolly-minded” kind of “doctrine-lite”.
Now this seems utterly absurd. It simultaneously dismisses atheists as being unable to prevail against arguments that are “vapid and shallow”, and stipulates that atheists are responsible for setting the tone of the discourse.
Perhaps it’s just a UK thing. Maybe over in the land of my birth orthodox religion is on the point of collapsing, and like demolition experts destroying a tall building, atheists need to place a few small charges in the right place, get out of the way, and wait for a tidy implosion. But somehow I doubt that: if anything, the patterns seems to be that the “woolly-minded” are breaking apart, some becoming more fundamentalist and others joining the apatheists. This would make a nonsense of Baggini’s argument, of course.
Over here in the USA, atheists are also being told to shut up. Will Wilkinson rejects the idea:

I was recently reading somewhere about Christopher Hitchens’ debate with William Lane Craig at Biola and someone in the comments of whatever blog I was reading made the observation that there are tons of Christian schools like Biola and Wheaton and so forth full of smart kids who undergo training in arguing for the existence of God. It’s not like it’s treated as an open question at these places. The Christian schools and their Christian students know the result they need, and they practice in the most persuasive arguments that deliver that result. None of these arguments are any good, of course, as there is no God, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, and so on. But my sense is that there are about a gazillion works of theistic/Christian apologetics for every God Is Not Great. But write a God Is Not Great or a The End of Faith and you’re colored as some kind of obnoxious disrespectful lout out to set the lions on all those downtrodden Christian. Why is that? Even other atheists are encouraged to deplore the brazen “New Atheists’” alleged in-your-face lack of humility. I find this completely ridiculous.

UPDATE: PZ Myers skewers Baggini and Bunting in his inimitable way.

The Friendly Atheist asked how atheists celebrate Easter Sunday. I don’t know about “celebrate”, but we like to sit down together to watch The Life of Brian. And Hannah’s visiting from Scripps for a few days, which makes it extra nice. “Always look on the bright side of life…”

Andrew Sullivan links (without comment – chicken!) to a letter in Science in which neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy “worry about fundamentalists attacking neuroscience”. For some reason, Andrew illustrates the piece with some pretty flowers, which he usually does when he has no answer to the points just made except an appeal to the emotions.
The problem for mysterians like Andrew, who claim that they embrace doubt while at the same time being utterly enslaved by their faith, is that neuroscience isn’t just a threat to “fundamentalists”: it undercuts every religious view which assumes the existence of a soul that is distinct from (and can exist independently of) the physical body. We’re talking about all of Christianity, Islam, the dualist variants of Judaism, and any belief system which includes reincarnation. And we’re not just talking about naive, folk-theories about souls (being reunited with loved ones after death, or having out-of-body experiences); even the most subtle and sophisticated theological positions are pretty much threadbare. And that includes Andrew’s. Pretty pictures of daisies won’t make up for that.

909sickle.com gives us the definitive account of the Origins of Atheism.
(Oh, wait: swb claims to be working on a condensed version…)

From the American Humanist Association:

AHA Poster congratulating President Obama

George H. W. Bush, August 27, 1987:

I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

Barack Obama, January 20, 2009:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

Thank you.