Why Atheists And Theists Are Doomed To Talk Past Each Other
I recently came across a post on Threads that stated the following:
Someone said today, "Atheism is also a religion. It is the belief that God does not exist". Are you an Atheist?
Your perspective please
Now this was likely clickbait of the sort where to reply is to needlessly feed the algorithm. (Right now, a fair chunk of my timeline is posts about theism / atheism, and much of the rest is posts about US versus UK English, such as this flame war over whether it’s Lego or Legos). But against my better judgement I replied, with a quoting post saying this:
Say you believe that God created the universe in six days as described in the Book of Genesis. And say that you also believe that Odin did NOT create the universe from the body of a fallen frost giant as described in the Norse Sagas.
Would you say that your second belief is as important to you as your first belief? Or would you say that you have only one belief, because a failure to share someone else’s belief is not, in itself, a belief?
I thought that was quite a good reply. Surely any Christian would accept that even if you treated their failure to accept Odinists’ beliefs as a belief, it was merely an extension of their core belief in God, and not a separate, equal, and equivalent belief?
But it turned out I was mistaken, because a different poster replied, and we went down a rabbit hole of correspondence too long and convoluted to reproduce here. Although it’s perhaps worth reproducing the summary of the conversation I posted at one point as I think it gets to the gist of the semantics we were arguing over:
This entire conversation has been me saying “I don’t believe God exists” and you replying, “No, you believe God doesn’t exist”.
I eventually bailed when it got to this this exchange, where he posted, saying (emphasis mine, now):
I’m not sure why the discussion shifted to burden of proof. I have no burden of proof in this conversation as I’m not telling you God exists and trying to convince you. As the wikepedia describes, it’s the one who speaks who has the burden of proof. I am not speaking of a claim in this discussion about Gods existence. There is evidence for Gods existence. Your standard of evidence is just bad. It is not absurd to ask for clarity.
To which I replied:
I should stop, but… What is the evidence for God’s existence?
Which then generated the following reply from him (again, emphasis mine, now):
Well, the cosmological argument, design, Jesus resurrection, and plenty of things that require too much detail and discussion for threads. And after years of arguing online about this, it’s never been fruitful so I’m not interested in debating the evidnece for Gods existence. Especially since atheists define what counts as evidence for something differently than theists do. There’s a plethora of apologetics out there. But it doesn’t mean much unless we start with the same epistemic standards.
Now without, genuinely, wanting to attack the beliefs of Christians, there isn’t actually that much historical evidence that Jesus even existed; less than, for example, Julius Caesar, who has an author page on Amazon listing the book he wrote. (That’s not a joke by the way. Caesar wrote a memoir of his conquest of Gaul, and you can buy the English translation right now on Amazon.)
Having said all that, I, for one, think that taking into account Occam’s Razor, general balance of probabilities, and pure common sense, the most likely explanation for the birth of Christianity was that a Jewish man called Yeshua Bar Yosef from Nazareth became an itinerant preacher in the first part of the first century CE and assembled a group of keen followers. I’d go further and say that he was likely a charismatic individual and a good man.
But to then assert that said Yeshua died, was dead for two days, and then came back to life… well that’s a hell of an assertion to make. That’s fine if you want to make it, but what it isn’t is evidence — it’s an assertion in strong need of evidence.
It’s absolutely 100% fine for you to believe that Jesus was God in human form, that he died, and was resurrected, but to make that assertion and then use that assertion as evidence to prove that same assertion is circular logic of the most circular kind.
But it all got me thinking. It seems to me that there’s a fundamental disconnect between atheists and theists that makes these conversations so difficult, which is that we’re not so much disagreeing on the answers to the questions as disagreeing on what the questions are. In fact, more than that, we’re disagreeing over whether there are even questions to be answered.
Imagine that I and a theist have a loved one in common, who tragically gets a cancer of the sort that isn’t lifestyle related. He might ask why she got cancer, to which I might reply that one of the cells in her body malfunctioned, and started reproducing in an out-of-control manner. He might then reply that I’m simply explaining what cancer is, and he already knows that. What he wants to know is why she got cancer.
To which I would reply that there is no why, she was just unlucky. Sometimes stuff just happens. It’s all random chance. There is no meaning in the universe. The universe just is.
And then he’d likely say that there has to be some sort of reason, because everything happens for a reason.
And this is the disconnect between us. He doesn’t want to live in a universe that has no overarching meaning, no grand purpose. A universe that just is, where bad things can happen to good people not for some overall cosmic design, but simply by the application of cold, random, unthinking chance.
Whereas when I look at the universe I see only a blank canvas, where if we want there to be fate and destiny, then it’s up to us to create them. It’s not that I like the idea of a universe without meaning; it’s that when I look for meaning I can’t see any.
He can’t accept that our mutual loved one just got cancer. For him there needs to be a reason why a bad thing has happened to a good person. Whereas I might be angry and upset, but inventing a reason that I know to be false isn’t going to make me feel any better (and if you have zero reason to believe something is true, then that’s the same as knowing its false).
Move and more, I believe that discussions between atheists and theists are derailed by a fundamental disconnect not only over how we perceive reality, but how we would like to perceive reality. Theists search for meaning while atheists search for understanding. Everything the two sides think and believe flows from these different positions: how we interpret logic, our assumptions as to what is the default position, what we mean by belief, and the definition of evidence. It’s not simply that we disagree on what the evidence is. It’s what we can’t even agree on what counts as evidence. And on that, maybe I should give the bloke I was arguing with the last word.
Especially since atheists define what counts as evidence for something differently than theists do.
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