Atheism is Not a Religion Like Any Other

Dogma makes all the difference.

Wherever atheists are discussed, this argument seems to pop up: Atheism is just like any other religion. The suggestion is that atheists have their improbable beliefs and unfounded assumptions, just like everyone else.

But that’s just not true. There is a significant difference, and it can be summed up in a single word: Dogma.

All religions I am aware of have dogmatic beliefs that you are required to share to be taken seriously as a believer. Atheism does not.

True, atheists also believe things they cannot prove – everyone does. But there are two big differences:

• Most of those beliefs are independent of atheism, in a way religious beliefs are not independent of their religion.
• Atheists can change their beliefs as they learn about the evidence, in a way that belief in the revealed truth of religions can not be changed.

Theism without any core beliefs or dogma is not religion, but a philosophical stance that can be prodded, interrogated, and challenged, and that changes under pressure. And that’s basically what atheism is, too. Religion, on the other hand, resists pressure.

As you can probably guess, however, there are some caveats.

Hard and soft atheism

First, we should acknowledge that there are different kinds of atheists. There is one distinction in particular that causes a lot of confusion: The difference between hard and soft atheism. It is the somewhat subtle difference between “I don’t believe in god” and “I believe god does not exist”.

Think about it like this: You probably don’t have strong beliefs about who is going to win the Eurovision Song Contest five, ten, or twenty-five years from now (or if the competition even still exists then). However, if someone told you they knew who was going to win, you wouldn’t necessarily claim that they’re wrong without knowing a bit more. It’s such a strange claim that you might give them a chance to make their case. However, unless they had some pretty compelling evidence to back up their claims, you wouldn’t have any reason to believe them either. (In fact, if many people made many different predictions, all equally confidently, you might just bet against them all.)*

The important point here, is that you don’t have to make up your mind about whether or not it is true. You can just discard the claim as unconvincing, and go on your way.

Most atheists I engage with, online or off, are soft atheists. They don’t make strong claims about whether or not god exists. They just don’t see any good reason to believe. And without good reason, why should they believe?

That is not, however, what most theists seem to think atheism means. Usually, they take it to mean hard atheism – the confident assertion that there is no god. Even if hard atheists aren’t as common as  many people think, there are certainly enough of them out there. And I completely agree that that is a claim that requires justification and evidence that they usually fail to deliver.

Specificity is a bitch

Still, even the hard atheist’s claim is not comparable to the unjustified claims made by the apologists of various religions.

The atheist’s claim is – for better or worse – very general and vague: “There is no god!” Well, then everything hinges on what is meant by the word “god”. And if religious believers responded with nothing more than “there is too!”, then those claims would be symmetrical and comparable.

I have, however, never come across anyone who believes in just a generic god, without ascribing some qualities and actions to that god. Instead the claim about the existence of god(s) is usually elaborated in some way, like: There is only one god – the one true, omniscient, and benevolent god of the bible, who created the universe and the first human beings – and Jesus is his son. That is quite a stack of claims, and it’s only just scratching the surface of a single belief system.

To be fair, we know nothing about the initial probabilities of any of those claims, so we can’t calculate which claim is more or less likely to be true with any useful precision. However, the specificity of any claim works to its disadvantage. Any additional claim you make that you don’t have evidence for, including any specific property of that claim, can only ever decrease your chance of being right, never increase it.*

In my experience, the god that your everyday hard atheist in the street rejects is not the generic hypothetical god of academic philosophy (he’s just an accidental victim of a blanket rejection), but the specific gods described in various holy texts that are chok full of historical and scientific errors, contradictions and unlikely events, and dubious moral teachings.

Their atheism goes one small step too far, in my opinion, when it flat out rejects the possibility of the existence of god, rather than just discarding it as unconvincing assertions.

Naturalism and humanism

But, some will argue, that’s not all atheists believe!

Well yes, that’s all atheism means. I don’t go around suggesting that all religious people believe in elephant-headed gods, genital mutilation, or that women should be subjugated to men, even if some do. Similarly, there’s nothing to stop an atheist from rejecting all of science and humanism, and believing that the universe is just an imaginary fur ball coughed up by a cosmic unicorn, and that we should all obey our dogs, but most atheists don’t believe that.

Even hard atheism makes only one specific claim: “there is no god”.

Still, I know the objection, and can address it. A lot of people who call themselves atheists (especially in the modern west) are materialists, naturalists, and self-proclaimed skeptics who claim to believe in science and reason, yet will make semi-confused claims about evolution, The Big Bang theory, and quantum physics. They have strong beliefs in grand scientific theories, but don’t admit (or sometimes even realize) that all those theories rest on logical and mathematical axioms, cosmological constants, and laws of science that we simply have to accept and trust and "take on faith".

That’s a lot like the kind of dogma you find in religion, right?

No, it is not. Because none of those beliefs are essential to being a naturalist – much less an atheist. In fact, science and skepticism encourage you to question your assumptions, and to change your beliefs if you find convincing evidence that contradicts them.

Unlike religious dogma, the beliefs you arrive at through science can be changed in a moment. That does not mean that they are arbitrary, but that they have to align with the observable universe we live in, and if they don’t accurately predict outcomes and describe the real world, they are discarded or revised, until they do. Do you know of any religion that works like that?

There are, of course, plenty of examples of stubborn individuals, entrenched orthodoxies, and ugly group think in the history of science. That’s not because of a problem with reason and scientific inquiry itself, but because humans aren’t perfect reasoning machines any more than they are perfect moral beings. There would be no winner in a contest between institutions about its adherents living up to the ideals of their cause. It’s not a fight anyone walks away from unscathed, considering how much humans love a good witch hunt and inquisition.

But at least natural science and liberal humanism are built on anti-fragile principles for self-correction in the face of reality, rather than prophecy and dogma set in stone.

If you’re going to believe in something, observable, predictable, reality seems like a pretty good place to start, and calling that a religion like any other is disingenuous, to say the least.

Footnotes

1) Contrary to what many believe, this is not the same as agnosticism. Agnosticism is about what you think you can know. A lot of people will agree that we simply cannot currently know for sure whether or not there is a god. But some will conclude that it’s silly to believe in something you can’t know anything about, others will lean heavily into faith, and others will hesitate to make a conscious decision, though their choices and decisions will typically betray a certain belief after all. Hard atheists will claim to know that there is no god. Soft and hard atheism are therefore sometimes called agnostic and gnostic atheism.

2) [If I ask you to pick a card, any card, from a standard deck, and then correctly guess that your card is red, that’s not very impressive. I had a fifty-fifty shot. If I guess it’s hearts, that’s a bit more interesting, as the odds 3:1 against me getting that right based on luck alone. Still, hardly mind-blowing. But if I correctly guess that you picked the ace of hearts, then I can put on a costume and start to perform at kids’ birthday parties. Weirdly, human psychology has this backwards. We will trust specific claims more than vague ones. Probably because it’s harder for liars to make up coherent lies with lots of detail.

Image credits

Darwin by Hulki Okan Tabak via Unsplash

Worship by Edward Cisneros via Unsplash

Prayer by nega on Unsplash

Prayer by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Night Sky by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash