Mon 13 Apr 2009
Atheism as a default position
Posted by Darren under Apologetics , Atheism , Epistemology , Faith , God , Naturalism , Philosophy , SkepticsI've seen it claimed, in discussions regarding differing worldviews, that atheism itself is a worldview, or even that strong (or "militant") atheism is a religion. (For the record, I would not consider atheism a religion, though I would consider it a worldview.)
A response that I've seen is that atheism is not a worldview because it is not a belief, rather it is merely a "default position". The rationale given sometimes compares belief in God to unicorns or some other such mythical animal, in the sense that unbelief in such things (or anything, really) is the default until convinced (or proven) otherwise.
While I can certainly see the reasonableness of this line of thinking and its general applicability, I wonder if it applies equally well to the question of God. There's at least two reasons to think in this specific case things might be different. First, the vast majority of people throughout history have believed God (or gods) exist(s), a phenomenon which remains the case today. Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?
And secondly, related to the above, if Richard Dawkins and those who agree with him are correct that human beings have evolved a natural proclivity towards belief in God(s) as some sort of survival/social assistance mechanism, should not belief in God be considered the default position, since we are supposedly "hard-wired" for such belief? Shouldn't such naturally impelled belief be considered the default? Although I would agree with Dawkins that human beings seem to have an innate proclivity towards belief in God, I would suggest that there is different reason why so many people seem to have an innate awareness of God.
20 Responses to “Atheism as a default position”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:28 am
" Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?"
No. The claim has the burden of proof.
"should not belief in God be considered the default position, since we are supposedly “hard-wired” for such belief?"
Naturalistic fallacy. Rape is inherent as well, but no one has claimed it was good for being hardwired.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Hi SS, thanks for your comments!
Re "The claim has the burden of proof.", I can certainly understand the tension between the need for any statement to be justified before belief is warranted, with the fact that certain most common beliefs (ex God) are, at least in the majority of cases, accepted without any such justification. I'm surprised that you didn't note that the "God is the default because most people believe it" is some sort of argumentum ad populum fallacy. 😉
"Naturalistic fallacy. Rape is inherent as well, but no one has claimed it was good for being hardwired."
While I agree with your first point re claims having the burden of proof, I disagree with this second one. I didn't say anything about belief in God being good or bad. I only said it seems to be the "default". If rape is inherent as you say (I do not know whether that is true or not, but let's say that it is) it would imply that it is a default behavior, but not that it is good (aka moral). The same could be said for belief in God, since I am not concerned with the morality of such belief here.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Opps. Mixed up the fallacies on occasion.
" I can certainly understand the tension between the need for any statement to be justified before belief is warranted, with the fact that certain most common beliefs (ex God) are, at least in the majority of cases, accepted without any such justification. "
It is a problem we always have to deal with because we rely on other people. The thing is alot of beliefs can be checked. If a belief CANNOT be checked, then it is time to start questioning it. The other one is if it works- if an explanation has predictive power and can be used to get results, that is generally good enough.
Remember, this not only applies to things that you can't see because of time/classification, etc but also things that are too big to be seen- the economy, the world's population, etc.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Hi, thanks for this interesting post! I looked up the research you mentioned about us being hard-wired to believe in God, and although the headline does indeed dramatically proclaim that faith is "hard-wired in the brain," the media might have sensationalized the story a bit because the actual conclusion is, "people of different religious persuasions and beliefs, including atheists, tended to use the same electrical circuits in the brain when solving a moral conundrum as well as when dealing with issues related to God." So I don't think this physiological research is necessarily useful to us when considering the default belief system.
I don't know the answer to this interesting question, but I know several atheists and agnostics who believe that agnosticism would be the default position because it basically says they don't know if there is a God or not. In contrast, atheism is taking a strong stand by saying definitively, "There is no God." And people of faith are taking a strong stand by saying definitively, "There is a God." I think the agnostics' claim of being the default position is supported by my 1-year-old daughter, whose default position very much appears to be "I happily don't know and I'm wide open to learning!"
Thanks again for your interesting post!
April 14th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Makes me think of Romans 1:18-23. Perhaps it isn't a trait of humans being hardwired, but an evidence in the world that proclaims God? It's the shift of perspective from man-centered to God-centered.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
It seems to me that there may be a bit of equivocation about the usage of the term "default".
Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?
If we mean by "default" the default REASONABLE position, then sure. Why not? Human beings are not necessarily terribly prone toward reasonableness so the fact that one position is in the majority may have little bearing on which is the most reasonable position.
However, if by "default" we mean what's natural to humans then clearly supernaturalism of some variety (not necessarily theism) seems to be the default position.
Perhaps default is just not the best word to describe what we're talking about.
May 9th, 2009 at 2:22 am
I think you need to define "atheism" and "default".
Depending on how you define it, atheism claims that God does not exist. It thus cannot be the default position, for the claim that God does not exist requires just as much evidence as the claim that God does exist.
If by "default" we mean the position we should hold in the absence of evidence for two competing hypothesis, then atheism certainly isn't the default position, nor does theism seem to be it either. Rather, it would be agonsticism.
If by "default" you mean something akin to the credulity principle, then it does seem that theism would be the default position. Our religious experiences and innate inclinations toward the divine are properly basic beliefs. That is, they are prima facie (innocent until guilty) justified.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Hey, just read your conversion story and didn't know where to leave a note. But I think you should check out the website http://www.conversiondiary.com. The author came to faith from atheism in a similar way (intellectual to emotional) and is a fully practicing Catholic.
God bless you
May 21st, 2009 at 4:14 am
@Timothy (as well as @DrDeb):
It very much depends on how you define atheism. That is just a very small part of the definition, and based on my experiences, adhered to only by a fairly small minority of atheists. Most atheists, in my experiences and discussions, do not run around adamantly claiming god(s) do not and/or cannot exist..they merely lack belief in such god(s).
Most of them would also adhere to, if prompted, being an agnostic athiest…one who maintains that mankind does not have the capability to prove/disprove the existence/nonexistence of god(s), but personally does not hold such a belief in whatever god(s).
So the idea that an atheist is inherently someone who claims god(s) do not exist isn't necessarily true. We can see this simply by breaking the word down:
Theism: Holding belief in god(s)
Add the a- prefix, which in English holds the meaning of "without, lacking, non-, etc."
Atheism: Without belief in god(s), lacking belief in god(s), and so on.
The words "belief in" do not by default mean lack of belief IN THE EXISTENCE of god(s), they merely mean the lack of belief in god(s)…the same way every person in this world lacks belief in many gods of the past or present.
May 21st, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Jon, I'm not sure I understand the difference between:
1. I believe in the existence of God.
2. I believe in God.
Could you explain how these differ?
May 27th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
"I’ve seen it claimed, in discussions regarding differing worldviews, that atheism itself is a worldview, or even that strong (or “militant”) atheism is a religion."
Hmmm…
You know, in my opinion, there is one specific problem with atheism; and that problem is that there IS really no…creed or belief that they can agree on as a group.
For so long, I used to think that atheists didn't believe in the existence of God; however, in recent years, I have begun to ask myself this question–was that idea of atheism really true?
See, let me explain; SOME atheists DO believe that the very CONCEPT OF GOD does not exist! Others disagree, saying that the MONOTHEISTIC'S DEFINITION of God is not true however there is an impersonal force existent and that there are other "gods" in the world that one could worship as God–but not in the Christian sense (see American Atheists). Then, there are the scientific naturalitsts which, if I'm not mistaken, don't believe in any kind of "god" or "force"; they only believe what they can test scientifically.
Therefore; in my opinion, I'd say that it depends on the atheist and what he/she believes AS AN INDIVIDUAL.
In conclusion…
While on the surface it seems that they don't have a common goal, there really is one; and in my opinion, it can be found in the Greek story of Pegasus. There was a man with an injured foot that was trying to get it healed from the gods. Taking the horse Pegasus, he rode to the top; frightened, I think, by lightning, the horse reared and threw him off, running away. The man had to climb his way to the top of Mt. Olympus, and when the gods saw him, they made him a deity too.
Since morals and ethics, in those times, were quite often taught through stories, if a lesson were to be learnt from this story, it is this one; man, by himself, is greater than any god in heaven or earth with unlimited potential to change himself, his imperfections, and his own destiny.
This idea therefore, in my opinion, is what unites the atheists and other world religions together as a whole–the belief in the power of man ALONE to change things!
–JFB
May 27th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
PS One last thing…
There is one very important thing to remember; knowledge and facts only take you so far–they only lead you to the edge of the cliff. When you look straight ahead, you see a new way of life (the other side).
You then have a choice; stay on the edge of the cliff or take the "leap of faith" to the other side.
Remember Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail?
The ONLY way to make it to the other side is if you take the jump…
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
The fact is that all positive claims of knowing that something does not exist need arguments, they can not be assumed just because of the absence of evidences.
This would hold true for all popular examples of the new atheists: there is almost certainly no teapot around Mars because teapots are the product of intelligent human beings and no man has been ever there, a Spaguetti monster could not exist because Spaguettis are a recent human (delecious) invention, they are an inert stuff which could not possibly have the properties we associate we life.
If unicorns existed on the earth, after all the knowledge we have accumulated over the centuries, they should have let evidences like bone remains.
Now, they are many things about which we have no evidence at all that could well exist: unicorns on an other planet somewhere in our vast universe, intelligent beings looking like lizards, a paralell universe with laws radically differing from our owns and I could imagine lots of further examples.
Certainly, everyone claiming we can be pretty sure none of these things exists would look completely silly, at least to my mind.
Defined as an intelligence at the origin of all things, God is not improbable as the three popular icons of atheism: his existence would be compatible with all our knowledge, and many very clever folks like Albert Einstein would be led to believe that there is an intelligence being the universe transcending our universe.
In fact, the three most virulent horsemen of theism, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchen, each recognize that it is very likely there exists a whole reality beyond our understanding conditioned by a biological evolution only caring for useful beliefs.
Nevertheless, they would go on to argue that the primitive, anthropomorphic of God given by the Coran and Bible is entirely at odd with the wonderful things we may observe in the cosmos.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:23 am
Atheism means "no theism" so just a lack of faith. This makes it difficult to claim that atheism is just theism on the other side. Though I would agree it is a worldview, not believing in a god is a way to view the world after all.
July 6th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
"Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?"
Yes, the majority position and the default position are two different things.
February 27th, 2013 at 2:44 am
Just because the belief in God is hardwire into our brains (Which it isn't, but I'll go with you for the sake of argument) that doesn't make God the default position. The world, the universe, anything that has an explanation, is the default position. The claim is where you add something to that default position, the add on being 'God'
Now then, the reason God is not included in 'Things that can be explained' is because not only does God have no explanation (never explained how, why, or even IF he exists) but the answer God doesn't explain anything else in the world.
"Where did we come from?"
"God made us."
The answer 'God made us,' provides no more explanation than not answering the question at all. It doesn't explain HOW we came into being. It doesn't Explain WHY we were brought into existence. Basically all you're doing is giving an arrogant 'I'm right, you're wrong, never speak of this again.'
December 18th, 2013 at 3:27 pm
Throughout this awesome design of things you actually secure an A with regard to effort and hard work. For now I will yield to your position.
December 20th, 2013 at 4:48 pm
In the grand scheme of things you'll get an A with regard to effort. For right now I will yield to your position.
December 22nd, 2013 at 12:51 am
Most of the things you claim happens to be supprisingly precise and it makes me wonder the reason why I hadn't looked at this with this light before. Your article truly did turn the light on for me as far as this topic goes.
December 22nd, 2013 at 6:28 pm
I really like this weblog, fantastic content material and I am going to bookmark this internet site for future updates.