What is an Atheist?

I feel like what we’ve done is make everything worse for everybody. Like this whole episode is just about making everything worse.

I will frequently say if I just come in and muddy the water and then run away, I’ve done my job. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And today we’re going to be focusing on the latter end of that mission statement a little bit, aren’t we?

Yeah, man, I’m looking forward to this conversation. We are. We’re barely. I mean, are we even going to talk about the Bible? We might not.

We might brush up against it, maybe one or two passages, but that’s it.

Yeah. So we’re doing two “What Is That?” segments. We’re going to ask some pretty big questions and they’re questions that are sort of increasingly important in today’s kind of cultural landscape, I feel like. So we’re going to start with the question of—and this is a big one—what is religion? Because we all think we have a handle on that word, but I think we need to kind of define our terms on that.

And then the one that I actually feel like I might actually have something to say is we’re gonna ask what’s an atheist? So a lot of interesting stuff coming up. Let’s just dive right in.

Let’s do it.

“What Is That?” and our first “What Is That?” is religion. So yeah, like I said earlier, it almost feels like intuitively we all seem to feel like we have an understanding of that word.

Until you start to break it down. So why are we asking this question?

I think we’re asking this question because where the boundaries of the concept of religion are is increasingly contested and are becoming increasingly important not just on social media and in general social discourse, but even in the law and how our governments function and in a lot of different ways, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to determine what is and is not a religion. And different countries have different degrees of clarity regarding that. Like there are some countries where there are certain groups that are considered religious groups by the state, the government here, but in other countries like—nope, not religious groups. Sorry.

Right.

And so this has far-reaching implications. You mentioned it seems kind of intuitive that we know what a religion is. And this is common for most words that we see used frequently. If we have a backlog of experiences hearing words being used in reference to certain concepts or items or entities, we just intuitively kind of generate a concept of what that thing is. And so a lot of people, when they try to think about what a religion is, what they’re going to do is just retreat into their mind and just come up—try to imagine the imagery, the conceptual field that is evoked by that word, and then try to describe or define that. And people think, okay, that’s religion. The problem is, as we’ve talked about before—I think we’ve talked about prototype theory and cognitive linguistics a little bit before—the problem is that that’s entirely relative.

It’s going to be different for every person because we all have different experiences, right? And so if we try to retreat to “this is the conceptual package that is evoked in my mind when I hear that word,” great—that doesn’t really have any authority outside of your mind.

So it’s that definition of—I can’t remember which senator said the definition of pornography—well, I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it, sort of thing.

Yeah, that was a Supreme Court justice and it actually raises a very good point that you can’t define conceptual categories, at least not in a way that is analytical and objective and clear. And this—I get flack every time I bring this up—you just can’t. It’s just an impossibility. And people are like, “I can do it.” Great. Knock yourself out. You will never succeed. You will convince yourself you succeeded. But like—and I bring up things like furniture or game, or we could even go to pornography, or you go to a lot of different things—and I challenge people to define them. And usually they’ll just look in a dictionary and then they’ll come up with something. It’s like, okay, great, except for there are a bunch of exceptions to that.

Right.

And so you have not defined the term. You have just arbitrarily set up boundaries based on this false presupposition that all conceptual categories are reducible to necessary and sufficient features, which is—and please excuse me if I’m getting a little heady, but which is an Aristotelian assumption about typologies, about how categories function, because we tend to think of categories as boxes. It’s either in or out. The reality is our minds create and curate and use categories by focusing on the prototypes, the centers of the category, and kind of ignoring what’s going on in the periphery where the boundaries are. They don’t exist until you create them and they’re usually contested.

Yeah. And yeah, the minute you write a solid boundary, like you say, somebody’s going to come up with something and then you’re going to, okay, well we’ll do a little carve out for that. And then somebody’s like, but wait, the inside the boundary that you said, there’s this and nobody—that’s not right. Oh yeah, let’s carve out. Let’s, let’s change the… You’re always going to be changing your boundaries.

Yeah. And this is something that Wittgenstein noticed eighty-some-odd years ago in his Philosophical Investigations. He said, “Can you—” what I’m… well, originally it was in German, I don’t remember the direct translation, but basically said, “Can you draw a boundary around the concept of game?” No, because you’ve never had to. Right. You can create one, but you don’t discover one. You don’t dig one up. You create one if you need one. But until you need one, you don’t need a boundary.

And you start, and you start asking your question. Does the—does it include both board games and baseball? Does it include—okay, well it includes that and you just—it gets bigger and bigger and then, and then eventually you get to like, does Russian roulette count? And I don’t know, that feels not like a game.

And, and basically what we’re doing is we’re taking all the things that have been given that label and then we’re trying to find features that are shared by all of them and only by all of them.

Right.

And that’s the presupposition that they can all be reduced to necessary and sufficient features. But that’s not how categories develop. That’s not how the category of religion developed. And so when we’re talking about religion, this is another thing where we can’t define it. And it’s not because there’s anything wrong with the category. There’s not. It’s not because there’s anything special about the category. It’s a conceptual category and it can’t be defined. Only it’s a lot more critical to a lot of people today to be able to create those boundaries than it is for like the concept of game or furniture. Not high stakes for those words, but when it comes to religion there are stakes. So I want—

I, yeah, I was going to say that like one of the things I, I recently, not, not all that recently, but fairly recently. On my other show, Thank God I’m Atheist, we talked about some right-wing groups here in the US that were political groups. They’re political activism groups from a Christian right perspective that have now decided that they are or have declared themselves to be religions so that they can be—so that there’s no scrutiny of their finances. Because while they were already 501c3 organizations, meaning they were non-profit organizations here in the United States, if they declare themselves to be religions, not religious in their, in their purpose, but religions, but actually religions, then they don’t have to do filings with the government about what they’re doing with their money.

So like that’s a real world consequence to, to realizing that we have to—why we might need to define these terms a little bit more specifically.

Yeah, yeah. Now when we go back into the ancient world, a lot of people want to start with the, the etymology of religion. Most scholars would say it seems to come from this Latin word religio, but there are a handful of other words that are understood to kind of occupy the same conceptual space. Pietas, fides, lex, secta, cultus. These are all Latin words that, that kind of are surrounding the concept of religion. And then in Greek we have threskeia, which is the word that we actually find in the Epistle of James. And, and then an adjectival form in, in the Epistle of Peter, latreia and eusebeia.

And there’s a part where a, somebody is explaining, telling a story and he says he was going to leave. Says somebody calls me back directly and invites me to dinner. He says I had religio so I could not decline. And so how is religio being used here? If you, if you look at the way that religio is used in, in Latin, it seems to have to do. It’s almost like scrupulosity. It’s this notion that I feel an obligation to meet a bunch of social standards and expectations in relation to my relationship with other people as well as with God. So it’s basically observation of social expectations and standards in relation to people or to God. And so there’s a, it’s like I’ve.

I must follow the dictates of my priest and Dear Abby.

Yeah. Or, or the guy invites you to dinner and it’s like, ah, I’ve been placed in this, this certain situation where I am obligated by my scruples. And, and if you look this, this text up, a lot of places will translate religio as scruples. And so there are other places where it is used. It seems to be used more in reference to a type of scrupulosity. Like I’ve just got this, this thing where I’ve got to do all this stuff because it just has to be done. And it’s not necessarily in relation to any kind of God. It’s just kind of a scrupulosity. So you have folks like Lucretius who says that this is a superstition. He kind of equating it with scrupulosity to, to some degree, for Kikaro or, or Cicero as he’s also known, it was a, a virtue and it was contrasted with superstition. And, and so it’s being used to refer to kind of secular ideas as well as things in relation to a deity.

And you have one scholar, Ernst Feil, who’s kind of done the most comprehensive survey of how this word is used, says that it means the careful and even fearful fulfillment of all that man owes to God or to the gods and also to humanity. And when we get into early Christianity, when Latin is starting to take over from Greek, you have folks like Augustine or Augustine saying we don’t want to refer to following Jesus as a religion because it doesn’t necessarily have to do only with our relationship with God. He says religio is to be observed in dealing with human relationships, affinities and ties of every sort, not just with our relationship with God. And so he thinks religio is not applicable to Christianity, to followers of Jesus.

That makes sense. So I mean, for, for that use of that word, which is a different word than our word religion.

Yeah, so that’s, that’s the Latin from which we get the, the word religion. But we also have already within Christianity the, the Latin fathers, quote unquote, who are responsible for developing the use of this word within Christianity later on in Latin. And in other languages, they’re going to start talking about how Christianity, true religion is Christian. A ways to go to, to get there. When we get into medieval Christianity, this Roman usage is still in vogue. But then you also had an additional sense because religion refers to kind of the scrupulous observation of these relationships with humans and with. With gods. Religious begins to describe those who dedicated their whole lives to the scrupulous and withdrawn service of God. In other words, a religious person was a member of the priesthood, but you could also. You. So to become religious was to join the priesthood.

Right.

And become like a monk or something like that. Okay. Oddly enough, you had two different tracks within the priesthood. You could become a religious member of the priesthood, or you could become a secular member of the priesthood. Oh, they both referred to the priesthood and being some kind of monk or priest or something like that. In fact, we have, we have a text from Canon 13 from the 4th Lateran Council says whoever wants to convert to religion should enter one of the already approved orders. So the monastic orders there are religious and secular monastic orders within medieval and later Christianity. So in this sense, religion is not what we widely understand it to be today. And we have, we be. We begin to have religion kind of interiorized and universalized in the 14th and 15th centuries as we have humanist Christians applying Neoplatonic frameworks to Christianity.

Neoplatonic frameworks to Christianity. And a lot of this is coming in reaction to what’s going on with the Crusades and with the fighting with Islam and stuff like that. And, and so two that stand out are Germany’s Nicholas of Cusa and Italy’s Marsilio Ficino. They were Neoplatonist Christians and they both talked about religion as something that was innate to everybody. And this is a, this is an innovation.

And in part, one of the reasons they’re doing this is because they’re seeing Islam and Christianity going to battle. A lot of people are dying. There’s conquests, there’s, you know, property and land changing hands and everything. And they’re trying to find a way to kind of harmonize things. They’re the why can’t we all just get along folks of this time period. And so the. We have religion as this scrupulous observation of responsibilities towards God. And, and this is somewhat related to the idea that if you’re a member of the priesthood, then you could be a member of a religious monastic order. And so Cusa talks about trying to end violence by suggesting that the different rituals and rites and cultural conventions between Islam and Christianity are reducible to the same religion, he says there was only one religio in a variety of rites.

And so he’s, he’s talking about religion as an interior, innate impulse to observe these responsibilities related to God. But it gets shown through a sociocultural filter that’s different for Islam than it is for Christianity.

So we’re getting to an idea that’s almost. That could almost be described by the modern word spiritual or something where.

Yeah, like, like there’s piety or something like that.

There’s an. An innate sort of connection to the divine. And, and the outward expressions of those things are. Can be different in different. In different groups. But. But the religio itself is. Is this thing that lives inside everybody.

And. Yeah, and an internal, innate kind of pull towards God. And then about 20 years later, we have Ficino describing religio as a universal constant, as natural to humanity as barking is to dogs and neighing is to horses. So it’s, it’s an intuition. It’s one of those things. And so despite the illusion of all kinds of different rites and rituals, he writes in one place, all human opinions, all responses, all customs change except religion. That innate impulse to God is shared by everyone and is the same. So we’re still.

I will say that. I will say that my experience is that that impulse toward divinity is probably more present in dogs, and barking is. Is just as likely in humans. Yeah, that. That would be my quibble with, with that person, whoever.

And we, we. We had one dog that never barked, and then we, we’re like, hey, let’s get another dog. Barks all the time. So we have a very religious dog.

And we basically have an atheist dog, a secular dog. Okay.

Yeah. And. And I much prefer the secular dog, especially when I’m trying to get work done. And you know that the neighbor’s dog is out back who is also very religious. So. But part of what they’re doing is trying to reconfigure our understanding of humanity as a way to overcome these. The perception of these significant differences. You worship one God, you know, you worship the other God. And, and so it’s. So now we get this notion of religion not only as internal, but now we’re starting to loosen it from its cultural moorings. We’re loosening it from its manifestation in these rites and practices. And so this is not an enormous leap conceptually, but it sets the stage for the Protestant Reformation. Because one of the things that the Protestant Reformation is all about is trying to dislodge the church from. From state power.

And so if religion is now, this innate impulse that is universal and is not directly tied to certain priesthoods, certain rites, certain ordinances, all that kind of stuff, then that means that the Catholic appeal to power and, and the priesthood and the rites and, and all that kind of stuff is not fundamentally necessary to the practice of religion. And so this developing concept helps the Reformation along by allowing them to generate a new concept of religion as unconnected to priesthood, rites and rituals, and the material trappings of the Catholic Church and also the power associated with it, because they thought of. You had this concept of religion and secular. You had it in medieval Christianity with the different monastic orders. But around the time of the Reformation, the religious and the secular were two different arms of the Catholic Church.

The religious was the ecclesiastical arm.

I’m not 100% sure that I understand what the, what the distinction there is.

So the, the secular would be the police force of the Catholic Church, whereas the religious would be the priesthood of the Catholic Church.

And so. But they both fell under the umbrella of the Catholic Church. Right.

And. And both would sort of claim a devotion to the religion, to what we would now call the religion. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. And. And you have, in this time period, you have a tradition about there being four laws. And, and they’re, they’re called leges: the heathens, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muhammadans is how they’re—the—these texts are generally translated, but notice they’re. They’re referring to these as laws. These are the collection of cultural conventions and requirements and everything like that, which is distinct from the developing concept of religion, which the Reformation is trying to turn into this kind of abstraction of what the. The Catholic Church has long been doing. So they’re, they’re trying to be. It’s.

Sorry, it just occurred to me to note that it should be said that this is a purely Eurocentric—100%, yeah—we’re not talking about anything but like, just sort of how Europeans saw things through time.

And this. And this is going to be incredibly important because it’s Europeans developing the concept. And then when they start realizing there are people outside of Europe, right. What they’re going to do is they’re going to take the conceptual lens that they created and they’re going to impose it upon the other people.

Right.

So, like, in the 19th century, you had confrontations with Japan and America went over there, and they’re like, hey, we’d like to start up a relationship. We want to do trade and all this kind of stuff. And they’re like, great, that sounds awesome. We do, too. And they’re like, great. First thing we need, though, is we need to write up some rules and regulations. What religion do y’all follow? And they’re like, we don’t know what that is. Right. And they were like, oh, well, here’s what a religion is. And basically saying, okay, you have to meet. You have to come up with something that meets this set of. Of rules. And they were like, we don’t have anything like that. Let’s make something like that. And so there’s a whole book on the invention of religion in Japan, which is about how they took certain cultural conventions and they were kind of like, let’s call that our religion. Yeah. And then as. As Western ideas were more and more influential in the society, this thing that wasn’t a religion is starting to manifest, is starting to get closer and closer to resembling what the U.S. said they wanted them to describe.

So worst export ever.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, there’s a great argument to make for that. But we have, like, Calvin talks about how pure and genuine religion is confidence in God coupled with serious fear. Fear which both includes in it willing reverence and brings along with it such legitimate worship as is prescribed by the law. And so it’s still this kind of internal, innate impulse of. But it manifests in appropriate practices. And so we get ideas about genuine religion, and Christianity was genuine religion, but then we have concepts of false religion, which is basically Christians who aren’t doing it. Right. That’s false religion.

Right.

And as we get into these. As we get into the Enlightenment and Deism begins to take hold. One of the things that the Enlightenment was really good at was trying to categorize things and describe things. So you had a lot of philosophers, you had a lot of naturalists, you had a lot of scientists going out into the world to put labels on everything and put everything in a box and, you know, collect everything. And. And Darwin turns this into the theory of evolution, and we have a lot of. Of typologizing and categorization and everything. Yeah. And so Europeans are again, taking that lens of this is what we think of as religion. And now they’re applying it to other societies. And they’re expecting to find. Because religion is universal and is innate, they need to find it in all of these societies that they come across.

Right.

And so as with Japan, so to the Pacific Islands and so to Asia, and they go in and they go, okay, what’s your religion? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, well, what are your sacred texts? What are your beliefs about God? What are your. This, that, and the other? And so we have, basically, we’re imposing this framework on other nations and.

But are you saying that the world

religions class that I took when I was in college, lo, those many almost 30 years ago, was worthless now? Is that what you’re saying?

Not worthless, but the framework of world religions is one that is not really used much anymore because it has a potential to kind of mislead and kind of bias the way we look at things.

Well, and you can hear even from, like, as you’re describing all of these things, you know, you describe Europeans going to these countries that don’t even have concepts of religion. And just the questions that they would be asking are so Eurocentric, are so centered in their own understanding of sort of cosmology and theology that, like, yeah, I can see those questions not making any sense to someone who, you know, what’s your concept of God? Of what? Yeah, what are you talking about? Are you talking about my ancestors? What are you talking about?

Yeah, and you have to kind of bring the two things into juxtaposition with each other and say, okay, you see how we have this now? What’s your equivalent to that?

Right?

And what that does is that forces the one framework onto the other context. And there are a bunch of ways that Protestantism is a part of that, is presupposed in that, because what did Protestants do? It was sola fide, faith alone. It was sola scriptura, the scriptures alone. These were all the things that were genuine Christianity, genuine religion. And so religion became, because of Protestantism, the notion of a set of beliefs and practices related to God and your relationship to God. And so there was this presupposition that there were sacred texts. And this is the concept of scripturalization. And so we go into, we think every religion has its own scriptures, but really that’s just us taking Protestantism and superimposing it upon other cultures and trying to find something that matches that

datum in our framework. Right. And so we talk about other, you know, the Bhagavad Gita and other texts as their scriptures. Right. And it’s like that’s importing a whole lot of presuppositions about how these things function and their nature that might not fit how they actually came about or how they were understood before we came back barreling in and said these

this is your Bible.

Right. Yeah, exactly. So you have to use it the way we use our Bible and.

Right.

And so scripture will hold you to it and we’ll, yeah, we’ll, we’ll demand that you defend it

from our framework.

Yeah. We, we expect it to function the same way. And because we’re in charge, because we’re colonizing you or we’re an empire or whatever, you have to listen to us. And so there are a bunch of ways that fundamentally distorts how we view what these other cultures have that we have slapped the label of religion on, and even deism. So Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury is known as kind of the grandfather of deism. But he went through and he was like, hey, guess what? I’ve got these five rules of religion. Every religion has this: one, the belief that there’s one supreme God, monotheism. Go figure. Two, that he ought to be worshiped. Three, that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship. Four, that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them. Five, that divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishment both in this life and after it. Okay, so you can, you can see the Protestant outlines, right

of this deist concept of what religion is. Right. And so, but because deists thought, hey, we’re not, we’re not Protestants. We’re better than that. This is rational religion. They go and take that rational religion and slap it as a label on everything else.

And so as a result, I think the best way to understand and define religion is discursively. And what that means is that religion is created by and within discourse or discussion and media and stuff like that, it does not exist beyond it, and it is whatever that discourse says it is. Right. And so a religion is, is whatever a group decides a religion is.

And so, and that’s important, right, because like, if you’re having a discussion with people, it’s not important that, you know, the, the everyone uses the same dictionary to define things, but it is important that everyone knows what they’re talking about when a certain word is used. If we’re going to have a, a communication that makes any sense.

Yeah. And if, if one tries to lord their authority over the other, my definition is the right one and yours is the wrong one. And you know that that happens with things like racism today.

Does there have to be systemic power asymmetries in order for racism to be present? A lot of people say yes, awful lot of people say no. What’s at stake? Well, it’s our power. So there. And that’s true of religion as well. There’s a scholar named Kocku von Stuckrad who, who published a wonderful paper called Discursive Study of Religion, Approaches Definitions Implications, where he offers a discursive definition of religion. And, and I’ve shared this on my channel and, and you know, I can hear brains popping as people just get apoplectic about this. But he says we can define religion simply as follows. Religion, capital, all caps. Religion is the societal organization of knowledge about religion. And people like you’re not allowed to use the word in the definitions. Like, well, discursively you can because basically what you’re, what you’re saying is religion is whatever the group decides is religion.

And so it is relative. It is, it changes from time to time, from place to place, from. From group to group. And, and so there’s no one universal definition of religion, which is why I’m fond of telling people you can’t define it, but if you do want to define it, you have to define it in a way that, that preserves the, the relative nature of the concept.

Well, and you’re going to have to realize that there are going to be like, you know, you talked about, Sir, what’s his name’s idea of religion?

Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

That’s, that’s what I said.

And, and yeah, if you, if you asked a, you know, a Buddhist to define religion, none of those things that are included in Sir Trevor of Hervin Verven in his, in his definition, none of those premises are going to be there.

Right.

And so, and so anytime you try to Draw those lines. Somebody else who practices a religion is going to disagree with your definition of a religion. It’s kind of like the way people want to draw the word, draw lines around the word cult, which is, you know, always an inflammatory word. It is not, it’s a word that like, you can’t use without offending somebody.

And I think it’s, it’s fundamentally a pejorative term. Yeah, I think that’s the way it’s functioning. It’s not, I don’t think it’s an analytically useful term. And, and a lot of scholars are, are on the same page there.

But I agree with that. I, I mean, it’s just one of those things where it’s like at, at some point, for most uses of the word cult, cult just means a religion that I don’t like or that I’m scared of.

Exactly. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that that’s, I, I think that’s really interesting. I, I and I’m glad that the conclusion is, oh, because, like, yeah, that’s a more useful, that’s a more useful place to land than just, I mean, at very least we’re not setting any, you know, planting any flags. And, and, and we’re realizing that, like, people who do plant flags are doing so in the service of structuring their power.

Yeah. Because it, it doesn’t serve their interest for, to recognize that, hey, man, this is, this is all relative because that’s, that’s not going to help them much. And one example of how this relates to study of the Bible. People talk about religion in the Bible all the time, and when they do that, they approach it as a question of belief. And belief is primarily a Protestant, it is centered primarily because of Protestantism. Now, Protestantism is what developed our modern Western notion of religion, and so that’s why it’s central. But there was a book called the Meaning and End of Religion by a scholar named Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and he writes, so characteristic has it been that unsuspecting Westerners have been liable to ask about a religious group other than their own as well, what do they believe? As though this were the primary question and certainly were a legitimate one. But when we, when we look at these practices elsewhere, they may not have anything to do with belief. It’s like, why are you doing this?

Because that’s what our society does. Like, well, what do you believe? Doesn’t matter. It’s, we’re, it’s what we’re doing.

Right.

And, and even within Protestantism, a lot of times it’s still about behavior, but we’ve developed a bunch of, a bunch of ways to try to make it about belief. Yeah, you know, if you really believed this, then, then you would behave this way and say, well, that’s not how human behavior works. Beliefs and behaviors are not often one is not downstream from the other.

Right.

And so, yeah, when we, when we central, when we center belief about deity as the necessary and sufficient feature of religion, we’re basically saying, how much is it like Protestantism? And.

Right. Okay.

And there’s even, there’s another scholar, Brent Nongbri, who wrote a book called Before Religion, which is talking about how the concept of religion developed. But he, and he put that in. I don’t remember exactly what the words were, but he said we could very accurately define religion as anything that sufficiently resembles Protestantism because that’s, that’s how the, the concept developed. Now, I will add one caveat. You mentioned that this is all European and we’re primarily downstream of the European development of this concept. However, medieval Islam also was developing a concept of din that is very, very closely related. And so there’s an argument to make that Muslims actually systematize this concept and more or less the way we understand it today, centuries before Protestantism did it. But I think we’re, we’re more directly connected to the Protestant iteration and manifestation of that concept. And so I think that’s, that’s more relevant to the discussion for English speaking Westerners.

But, but Islam certainly has a claim to have developed the concept of religion independently. Although I, I think in, in some ways it’s kind of merged more recently. So, so what is religion? Whatever a group says it is. And also nothing.

And also nothing.

Because it, I, I say that from time to time as well. There’s no such thing as religion. Good luck with, not outside of our.

Good luck taking that with you into a conversation.

That’s, that’s just how I throw bombs into, in the thing. It’s like I, I gotta get going. Hey, guess what? And conversation.

And then you run away.

All right, friends. Well, if you are a patron over on our Patreon, then you will just, we’ll just be moving on to our next segment. If not, you’ll be, you’ll be hearing an ad right now and then after that we’ll be going into another. What’s that? So our second what’s that? Is kind of about the opposite of religion. And since we just decided that religion is nothing, then the opposite of nothing is nothing or something. Anyway. I don’t know, I think we’re probably going to come to a similar point, but there is, there is a lot of talk on my TikTok feed. I don’t know about yours, I assume yours as well about what is or is not properly called an atheist. So I don’t know. We haven’t really discussed how we’re going to dive into this. Do you want to start the conversation?

What do you want to do?

Yeah, I’m happy to start. I’ll make two points to start off and then we’ll just see where the night takes us.

But, or you know, the early afternoon. So the first comment I’ll make is that the word atheism actually is, is ancient, goes back to ancient Greece. We, we see it in 2nd 3rd century BCE in, in reference to the irreligious and specifically, and we just talked about how religion isn’t a thing, but irreligious in the sense of opponents of the state requirements regarding worship and things like that.

And as a matter of fact, I, I remember reading that ancient Greeks would accuse Christians of being atheists. They would, they would term Christians to be atheists because they didn’t believe in the full pantheon of Greek gods.

Yeah, yeah. So it, it generally referred to some kind of opposition to or refusal to engage in the requisite behaviors related to specific deities and specifically the state sponsored deities. But, and, and one thing I, I want to point out is that the, the term atheist describing an individual I think points out that what, what we’re talking about is, is the behaviors of people. And so atheism and what it means to be an atheist is, is wrapped up in an identity. And, and so I, I want to suggest that atheism fundamentally is about membership in a group and an identity. And the same is true, I think of religious, when we talk about religious people and the adjective religious and the concept of Christian, the concept of Jewish, the concept of, of Muslim, these have historically always been used to refer to people who are representatives of a group, both negatively.

So from the outside people accusing others of being atheists and internally people identifying as atheists or identifying with atheism. And I know that’s going to rub some folks the wrong way, but I want, and, and I think we’re going to get to why I, I think that is as we get to atheism in, in the modern world.

But yeah, it, it, it becomes a tricky thing. Right, because I think that most atheists now. And you know, as we’ve talked about with, with religion, the word religion, the word atheism has meant a lot of different things going down through history. And I think that the word. And I think it’s still evolving and I think people want to really nail it down.

And, and they do it for the same reason that they want to nail down the word religion. They want it to mean what is most convenient for me. And, and the me. You know, if the me is a Christian who wants to sort of demonize atheism, they’re going to have their definition that they hold to very strongly.

And if, and if it’s a, an atheist who wants to sort of lionize atheism, they’re going to have their, their definition that they hold to very strongly.

I would agree with that. And I get accused of being an atheist all the time. And it is a horrible accusation.

Yeah, terrible.

People treat it as an accusation. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s like when, when people use the, the word gay as an accusation.

Right.

It’s like, I’m not offended by that. I’m offended by you thinking that that’s offensive. Yeah. But it’s because they want to excise me from their group. Because when I say I’m a Christian, but I’ve compartmentalized my Christianity over here, right here, I’m just doing scholarship. And they’re like, you can’t have that. You’re an atheist. You’re a closet atheist.

Right.

Because that’s the way that they protect their worldview and their understanding of what religion is, what Christianity is. Right. But there’s a wonderful book, I mentioned it before we started recording. Tim Whitmarsh published a book called Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, which is a great discussion of, of how the concept of atheism seems to have developed anciently. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that within the law, within culture, within philosophy, within a lot of things. As people are trying to analyze things and, and find origins and reasons and explanations for all kinds of stuff, including, you know, history. Historians are often trying to figure out why things happened between, like the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE, a lot of Greek thinkers started moving away from the God did it explanation and started coming up with more humanistic, more rational explanations for, you know, why some general did what they did or why a battle turned out the way it did.

So, like, Herodotus is one of the, one of the folks that Whitmarsh talks about coming up with explanations that don’t punt to, “oh this was the gods responsible for all of this.” And so this later down the road would turn into kind of, “we don’t need the gods to explain stuff anymore because we have better explanations.” But like you said, Christians were accused of being atheists because they rejected the state gods, they rejected everybody else’s gods.

So that’s one way you defang the accusation by adopting the identity and then we get into the modern world, it begins to be used primarily as a reference to antitheism, rejection of the existence of gods. And then the one I wanted to get your thoughts on and the one that I’ve seen, I think since—I want to say like it really starts to ramp up post-9/11, that’s when I begin to see it popping up the most—the idea that it’s just the absence of belief in deity. And you mentioned that people understand these terms in ways that serve their interests and their structuring of power. And I see this as an example of that because it seems to me that this facilitates the argument, “Oh, everybody’s born atheist,” which means that our club, our group is everybody until this mind virus or whatever takes over.

And so it, it’s a, it’s a way to assert that this is the default state of affairs and any other state is a corruption or a fall from the default state.

I, I would, I, I would quibble with certain parts of that. Okay, what I would say is that probably that definition of atheism—and it’s one that I probably would use myself with maybe some difference, but we can get to that—but my idea is I think that what happened was towards the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, there became a lot of question in the philosophical world about how do we ask the questions about God and about whether there exists a God. And it became a philosophical question rather than anything else. And how do we prove that God exists? And you know, rather than it being just an assumption that God does exist, how can we philosophically explore this idea? And I think that it became a question of what does the evidentiary landscape tell us about the existence or non-existence of a God or gods?

And that’s, I think, where people started to become more interested in aligning themselves with a position along that spectrum. Rather than a religious position, it’s a position of—I have, you know, when I assess—an epistemological—yeah, when I assess the evidentiary landscape, where do I fall? And so I think that, you know, I just had a conversation in preparation for this discussion with a friend of mine who’s a philosophy professor because I kind of wanted to steel man my own arguments about that, about the word, and really know what my thoughts were. And I actually, as of this morning, I’ve kind of changed my thinking about the definition of the word atheist and agnostic because up until this morning, I was kind of using the words separately as defined as being used as sort of asking two different questions, right?

So atheism asked the question of belief: Do I believe in a God or do I not believe in a God? And agnosticism versus gnosticism asked an epistemological question: Can we know whether or not there’s a God? And it turns out that that’s not a very useful way of thinking about agnosticism because any honest person who presumably hasn’t met God would say we can’t know for sure. Which then renders everyone functionally an agnostic. You know what I mean? Like they’re—yeah, I’m an agnostic atheist and you’re an agnostic theist. And like, how useful is that term then if it can apply to pretty much everybody? Yeah, so I liked what we came to, me and my friend Jim this morning, which was that an atheist is a person who looks at the evidentiary landscape and decides there is insufficient—

There is insufficient evidence for belief in a God.

A theist is someone who looks at the evidentiary landscape and decides that there is sufficient evidence for a belief in a God.

And an agnostic is a person who looks at that same landscape and says, I don’t have enough information to decide one way or the other.

Now what do you, what do you do with the folks who, who are believers, who are theists, firm theists, but say it’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of faith, which is, which is not so much about the evidentiary landscape as it is this decision based on whatever they decide their decision is based on. Because I, I, you will every, every now and then run into folks who are like that, people who are trying to prove it are just lost. That’s not what faith is all about. So we don’t need the evidence.

And, and I think that that’s like one of the frustrating things that I think we need to acknowledge about these questions is that they are not, they’re messy. This is a messy question. And it doesn’t work the same way other philosophical questions work.

There is like the word faith is kind of a conversation stopper.

You know what I mean? Like, I can’t move past that word. If you want to say I just have faith, that’s fine, but it means that I have nowhere.

I, we’re at an impasse.

Yeah. I don’t have anywhere to go with that anymore.

Yeah, there’s, there’s nothing left to argue about at that. Yeah. Because, because you said it’s, you know, nothing’s going to change that. I think a lot of people would like it to be. And this is the way I hear it. I hear it discussed on, from, from atheists talking about atheism as well as Christians talking about Christianity and all this kind of stuff. They’ll say it literally means. And it’s like, no, you can’t, you, there’s no paper you can rub on this word that’s going to turn pink if the person is actually an atheist. It means whatever people use it to mean.

Right.

And you explaining that those, the, that the origin of the word is a meaning without, and theos, meaning God doesn’t help us functionally.

That’s the etymological fallacy. And that’s, and that’s very, very common because people would like to be able to nail it down and have the authority to say it has been nailed down. And the reality is, no, it’s, it’s not ever going to be nailed down because as with religion, it’s subjective, it’s relative, it’s a conceptual category. You can’t define it, you can only describe it. And so everybody’s going to have different understandings of it.

Yeah. And I think, and I think when you start to hear people talk about it, you know, you’ll, you’ll, hear people talk about weak atheism versus strong atheism or implicit atheism versus explicit atheism. And, you know, if that’s a useful term in terms of, you know, having the conversation that you want to have, I guess that’s fine. But yeah, you, I think it’s fair to say that everyone’s going to use that, that use all of these words in the way that they, that they find useful and meaningful. And if you want to have a meaningful conversation that isn’t just about, you know, you structuring your power or you, you, know, proving that you’re right and everyone else, you know, the other person is wrong. If you want to have a meaningful conversation, you’re going to have to sort of work to understand terms.

And I think a big part of that is being comfortable with leaving things as they are, with tension and with recognizing, okay, you have the, you think about it the way you’re thinking about. I’m thinking about it the way I’m thinking about it. You know, we don’t, maybe it’s not about convincing the other person that our worldview is better. Maybe it’s about understanding people better so that you can move forward more productively.

And different ways of thinking about it will be diff. Will be more useful in certain conversations than others. So, for instance, my definition that I proposed is useful in a philosophical context, but as you, but as you point out, it’s not useful the second someone says, you know, my, I’m not, you know, I would say, you know, the person that you propose who says it’s just faith. I would say that they are still using evidences. They, like most people when they, when they talk about their faith, say, you know, my, my faith comes from the fact that I had this very potent experience when I was reading the book or, you know, my, you know, my grandmother was dying and I prayed and she revived and, or any number of, you know, experiences or ideas that are, that I say are part of the evidence that they are using to, to support their theist assertions.

But maybe that’s not totally fair. As you say, it may be like, we’re, we’re in the mystical. We’re in the, we’re, you know, the beliefs can be, can be sort of outside of the realm of, you know, once we get into a subjective thing that cannot be, it can’t be exported to other humans. Yeah, you know, your, your personal experience that you had reading the Bible might be deep and important to you. And, and the thing that your faith is based on, it’s worthless to me.

And so, and yeah, like I say that’s, that’s, that’s a bit of a conversation stopper if we’re, if we’re going to argue about whether or not God exists, if.

It’s, if it’s about somebody trying to win, then then yeah, that’s, that’s frequently not going to be successful. Two, two things that I wanted to, to point out. One, I think a fascinating observation. Pew does, Pew Research does a study of religion, Religious Landscape, every few years. And it’s always fascinating because they have one of their questions is about belief in God. And they ask a bunch of different people. They’re absolutely certain there’s a God. They’re fairly certain, they’re not too certain, not at all certain, they don’t know, they do not believe in God. And then there’s I don’t know if I believe in God. And it’s fascinating because every year that they do this, people who identify as atheists, there’s about 3 or 4% of self-identified atheists who are certain there is a God. And then on the religion side you have, I’m looking at the chart right now, 27% of Buddhists say nope, there’s no God.

10% of Hindus, 17% of Jewish folks and then single digit percentages of different Christian denominations where people identify as Christian and are certain that there is no God. And so when, when we, when, when we think about it as an identity, you know, there are people who identify as certain religious groups or as atheists because of the, there’s a social, social aspect of it that they want to be a part of.

Right.

That, and, and they report either not believing in God or in believing in God in contradiction to what we imagine to be one of the necessary and sufficient features of that identity. And so yeah, you, you said earlier it’s messy. And I think that’s one of the, that’s an incredibly important observation that it is messy. And the more we try to reduce it down to simple binaries, the more distorting our discussion becomes.

Well, and there’s also a whole bunch of people like yeah, when we talk, I, I, when people bring up things like you know, Pew studies or, or other studies and you know, they want to know how many atheists there are in the United States or whatever, it’s like, well okay, good luck finding out from a study because you know, a whole, there’s a whole subset of people that I would say are atheists who would never self-apply that term because there’s social stigma attached to that word. And so, you know, there may be a whole. There may be a whole slew of people who would never say that word to a person, to a pollster who’s asking them, you know, but are. But, you know, functionally, as far as any definition that makes sense to me, they are. So. Yeah. Like, it. Yeah, it’s just, it’s. It’s tricky.

So I feel like what we’ve done is make everything worse for everybody. Like this whole episode is just about making everything worse.

No, I will frequently say if I just come in and muddy the water and then run away, I’ve done my job. Because I think we need to. I think we need to be more comfortable acknowledging that things are a lot messier than we would like them to be. And so that’s one of the points of. In my opinion, that’s one of the points of sharing this kind of stuff, is to let people know it’s messy and it’s sticky and it is problematic and it’s not going to get resolved. But I think just knowing that hopefully can help people respect other people a little more, get along a little better. Maybe conversations don’t have to end in fights and in ruined friendships and in blocking people on Twitter. Maybe it can. Not for me, I’m still going to block most of the people I engage with on Twitter. But. But I think that. I think hopefully being more thoughtful about this, well, I think is a way that we can advance the discussion and we can improve relationships nationally and internationally as this important question continues to be debated.

And you can use these questions for all the words that you use, because when you deploy a word, you can ask yourself, am I deploying this to be a jerk about that, about that thing, that group, that concept, whatever, or am I deploying it in a way that I am.

And those are very different ways to deploy words.

Yeah. There’s a. There’s a way to approach language where everything is a speech act, where we’re not just saying words, we’re trying to accomplish things with those words and make things happen. And sometimes being a jerk is the rhetorical goal that somebody has. I’m. I’m certainly familiar with that rhetorical goal, but I, I am.

I am definitely guilty of that rhetorical. I, I do my damnedest not to as much as I can, but every now and then.

Well, I. Every now and then on, on TikTok, I’ll scroll through and I’ll see that you have a live going on where you’re, where you’re talking about atheism or, or you’re talking about theism or something like that. And I’ve, when, when I’ve stopped to watch for just a little bit. I think you’ve done an admirable job of trying to stay focused and, and trying not to take the bait that, that I think those, those kinds of debates frequently invite.

All right. Hopefully we haven’t muddied your water too much. Dear listener slash viewer, uh, we appreciate all of you, you for joining us. If you would like to be part of helping make this show go, even though we’ve, we’ve. We’ve ruined your definitions of things, please feel free to become a patron. You can get early access to an ad-free version of every episode over there on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. At a certain level, you can also get access to our afterparty, which is bonus content content every episode. You can also reach us if you want to by reaching out at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

What is an Atheist?

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The Transcript

Terminology