I have decided to begin my project by examining the claims of atheism. Atheism is different then all the other systems because it does not espouse a set of doctrines. There are no atheist heretics that pervert and twist the tradition of atheism but keep the title of atheist. In order to be accepted into the ranks of atheism all one must do is believe that God in any name shape or form does not exist. However, at its core atheists and theists still share a common enemy. They are both firmly and militantly entrenched in a unintentional alliance against the growing invasion of postmodernism. This is because atheism does reserve for itself the description of truth. This is slightly different then that of religious systems. Atheism does not claim to posses truth itself but it claims to posses the only means to truth. It depends exclusively upon the observation of the tangible to form its objective conclusions of what is true and what is not.
Therefore, it is not possible to examine its conclusions in order to compare our respective truth claims. We must compare the means to truth. Their is no authoritative source of what atheism is or what it believes. Upon recommendation of an atheist friend I have decided to begin by reviewing “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” By Carl Sagan. This book is not intended as a call for atheism. It is a passionate call for dependence upon the scientific method for truth searching. This the heartbeat of atheism and is the positive truth claim that sets atheism into conflict with postmodernity. I will review each chapter and attempt to reduce them down to the core ideas that the philosophy of atheism depends upon. I encourage you to leave a comment or e-mail me at romans1verse20@gmail.com and participate in this project.
sorry romans. Atheism makes absolutely zero claims. Atheism is a lack of belief so it is not required of one to make a positive assetion that god does not exist. (Though you still can)
And how can you say atheism “claims to possess the only means of truth” after being with the forums so long? You should know better than that.
For some strange reason you are still deluded to the fact that atheism requires a philosophy to stand on. You are putting baggage onto a simple word romans.
Science and Atheism
Science is different from religion. It does not pretend that it knows everything. There are even now deep questions about the origins of the universe that we don’t have answers to now though it is possible we may be able to answer some of them in the future.
But the inability of science to provide answers to these questions does not prove that religious faith, tradition, or an ancient holy text has the ability to answer them. Science cannot prove that God does not exist, but this in no way establishes that God exists. There are millions of things whose lack of existence cannot be established.
The philosopher Bertrand Russel had an analogy. Imagine that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun. It is impossible to prove that the teapot does not exist because it is too small to be detected by our telescopes. Nobody but a crazy person would say “Well, I’m prepared to believe in the teapot because I cannot establish that it doesn’t exist.” This means that maybe we have to be technically agnostics, but really we are all atheists about teapots with orbits around the sun.
But now let us suppose that everybody in our society including our teachers and the sages of our tribes all had faith in a teapot that orbits the sun. Let us also suppose that stories of the teapot have come down to us for many generations as one of the traditions of our own society and there are ancient holy texts about the teapot. In this case people would say that a person who did not believe in the teapot is eccentric or mad.
There are infinite numbers of things like celestial teapots whose lack of existence we are unable to establish. There are fairies, for example, and there are unicorns and goblins. We cannot prove that any of these creatures of the imagination do not exist in reality. But we don’t believe they exist, just as we don’t believe that the gods of the Scandinavians, for example, have any true existence.
We are all atheists about almost all of the gods created by societies in the past. Some of us, however, take the ultimate step of believing that the god of the Jews and the Christians, like the gods of the Greeks and the Egyptians, also do not exist.
As any atheist will tell you, atheism is defined as having NO beliefs regarding the existence of deities.
Thus, when you say “In order to be accepted into the ranks of atheism all one must do is believe that God … does not exist”, you are simply arguing against your own strawman.