Atheism why not

A full discussion of this premise is not possible here, but recognition of its plausibility appears to be as old as the problem of evil itself. Consider, for example, the Book of Job, whose protagonist, a righteous man who suffers horrifically, accuses God of lacking sufficient commitment to the moral value of justice. Instead, speaking out of the whirlwind, He describes His design of the cosmos and of the animal kingdom in a way clearly intended to emphasize His power and the grandeur of His creation.

On this interpretation, the creator that confronts Job is not the God he expected and definitely not the God of omni-theism, but rather a being much more like the deity of aesthetic deism. Those who claim that a God might allow evil because it is the inevitable result of the universe being governed by laws of nature also lend support, though unintentionally, to the idea that, if there is an author of nature, then that being is more likely motivated by aesthetic concerns than moral ones.

For example, it may be that producing a universe governed by a few laws expressible as elegant mathematical equations is an impressive accomplishment, not just because of the wisdom and power required for such a task, but also because of the aesthetic value of such a universe. Much of the aesthetic value of the animal kingdom may also depend on its being the result of a long evolutionary process driven by mechanisms like natural selection. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Unfortunately, such a process, if it is to produce sentient life, may also entail much suffering and countless early deaths. It is arguably far more plausible that in such a scenario the value of preventing horrendous suffering would, from a moral point of view, far outweigh the value of regularity, sublimity, and narrative.

If so, then a morally perfect God would not trade the former for the latter though a deity motivated primarily by aesthetic reasons no doubt would.

To summarize, nearly everyone agrees that the world contains both goods and evils. Pleasure and pain, love and hate, achievement and failure, flourishing and languishing, and virtue and vice all exist in great abundance. In spite of that, some see signs of cosmic teleology.

Those who defend the version of the decisive evidence argument stated above need not deny the teleology. Mulgan and Murphy and in particular when it is interpreted as directed towards aesthetic ends instead of towards moral ends.

In this section, an argument for the falsity of a more ambitious form of agnosticism will be examined. Because the sort of agnosticism addressed in this section is more ambitious than the sort defended by Le Poidevin, it is conceivable that both arguments succeed in establishing their conclusions.

This form of agnosticism is more ambitious because knowledge is stronger in the logical sense than rational permissibility: it can be rationally permissible to believe propositions that are not known to be true, but a proposition cannot be known to be true by someone who is not rationally permitted to believe it. Another difference concerns the object of the two forms of agnosticism.

In this section, the target is omni-theism versus the local atheistic position that omni-theism is false. The previous section focused on two arguments for the conclusion that this form of local atheism is very probably true. In this section, the question is whether or not that conclusion, if established, could ground a successful argument against strong agnosticism. This leaves premise 2 , the premise that, if atheism is very probably true, then atheistic belief is rationally permissible.

One might attempt to defend this premise by claiming that the probabilities in premise 2 are rational credences and hence the truth of the so-called Lockean thesis Foley justifies 2 :. The Lockean thesis, however, is itself in need of justification. Fortunately, though, nothing so strong as the Lockean thesis is needed to defend premise 2. Also, the defender of 2 need not equate, as the Lockean thesis does, the attitude of belief with having a high credence.

Even this more modest thesis, however, is controversial, because adopting it commits one to the position that rational i. In other words, it commits one to the position that it is possible for each of a number of beliefs to be rational even though the additional belief that those beliefs are all true is not rational. To see why this is so, imagine that a million lottery tickets have been sold. Each player purchased only a single ticket, and exactly one of the players is certain to win.

Now imagine further that an informed observer has a distinct belief about each of the million individual players that that particular player will lose. According to thesis T , each of those million beliefs is rational. Since, however, it is certain that someone will win, it is also rational for the observer to believe that some player will win. It is not rational, however, to have contradictory beliefs, so it is not rational for the observer to believe that no player will win. This implies, however, that rational belief is not closed under conjunction, for the proposition that no player will win just is the conjunction of all of the propositions that say of some individual player that they will lose.

Defenders of premise 2 will claim, very plausibly, that the implication of T that rational belief is not closed under conjunction is completely innocuous. Others e. They contributed in a variety of ways to making this entry much better than it would otherwise have been. The author is also grateful to Jeanine Diller and Jeffrey Lowder for helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this entry. Atheism and Agnosticism First published Wed Aug 2, Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms 4.

An Argument for Agnosticism 5. An Argument for Global Atheism? Two Arguments for Local Atheism 6. Such an atheist might be sympathetic to the following sentiments: It is an insult to God to believe in God. Strawson By contrast, anti-God atheists like Thomas Nagel — find the whole idea of a God offensive and hence not only believe but also hope very much that no such being exists. Consider, for example, this passage written by the agnostic, Anthony Kenny 84—85 : I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I can find flaws.

Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms Jeanine Diller points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.

It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 There is no firm basis upon which to judge that theism or atheism is more probable than the other. It follows from 3 that 4 Agnosticism is true: neither theism nor atheism is known to be true. It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 There is good reason to believe that God does not exist.

It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 Source physicalism is many times more probable than omni-theism. It follows from 3 that 4 Omni-theism is very probably false. It follows from 4 that 5 Atheism understood here as the denial of omni-theism is very probably true. It follows from 1 , 2 , and 3 that 4 Aesthetic deism is many times more probable than omni-theism.

It follows from 4 that 5 Omni-theism is very probably false. It follows from 5 that 6 Atheism understood here as the denial of omni-theism is very probably true. It follows from 1 and 2 that 3 Atheistic belief is rationally permissible. It follows from 3 and 4 that 5 Strong agnosticism about omni-theism is false. Bishop, John C. Bullivant, Stephen and Michael Ruse eds. French, Peter A. Wettstein eds. Root ed. All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday.

Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause.

They succeeded, albeit at a price: the courts upheld references to God in pledges, oaths, prayers, and anthems on the ground that they were not actually religious.

Not surprisingly, neither believers nor nonbelievers believe this. Every such ruling is a Pyrrhic victory for the devout, for whom invocations of God are sacred, and no victory at all for atheists, for whom invocations of God, when sponsored by the state, are obvious attempts to promote religion.

Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren. David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts.

But are atheists a suspect class, or just a skeptical one? Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice.

Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view. Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise.

The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment.

Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.

The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success. Auguste Comte and his fellow nineteenth-century positivists envisioned a Grand Pontiff of Humanity who would preside alongside scientist-priests; unfortunately, scientists at the time were practicing phrenology.

Today, the voguish version of science as religion is transhumanism, which claims that technology will overcome human limitations both physical and mental, perhaps through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or cyborgs that can carry around the contents of our brains. Supernatural entities like God are often described as having characteristics such as omniscience and omnipotence that make them unfalsifiable and therefore unable to be examined through scientific means Popper, This idea that science cannot be used to prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural has been called the bounded nature of science and assumes that science is limited to investigating natural phenomena using natural explanations Southerland and Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.

Although there are vocal scientists who believe that science can disprove the existence or influence of God Harris, ; Dawkins, ; Coyne, ; Krauss, , the majority of scientists and philosophers of science agree that science does not address supernatural entities Barbour, ; Miller, ; Collins, ; Ecklund and Park, ; Ecklund et al.

To make a claim about the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural entity is unscientific according to the bounded nature of science. Therefore, rather than being anti-theistic, science can be considered non-theistic Nelson et al.

Whether someone understands and accepts the bounded nature of science will determine whether he or she considers interventionist evolution, deistic evolution, and theistic evolution as full acceptance of evolution. If one does not understand or subscribe to the bounded nature of science, then one might conclude that evolution is atheistic, which would exclude these views as acceptance of evolution.

However, if one understands and subscribes to the view of the bounded nature of science, then one may conclude that evolution is agnostic rather than atheistic and thus consider views that both include God and do not include God as acceptance of evolution. According to individuals with these views, acceptance of evolution is not contingent on a view of God, because they have aligned their religious view with science, not the other way around.

Huxley wrote: Agnosticism is of the essence of science … It simply means that [we] shall not say [we] know or believe that which [we] have no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe … Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology … Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena.

Huxley, Considering the bounded nature of science and characterizing evolutionary theory as agnostic rather than atheistic clarifies that a Christian student who believes in God can indeed accept evolution. From our perspective, as well as that of many others, a student who is atheist, agnostic, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist can accept evolution Smith, ; Scott, ; Southerland and Scharmann, However, many students may not be aware of the bounded nature of science, and they may perceive that evolution is atheistic rather than agnostic.

Past qualitative data from several studies indicate that students may have the conception that evolution is atheistic, but we do not know the degree to which this perception exists among biology students. Winslow et al. Many quotes from students who changed from special creationism to acceptance of evolution indicated that they first perceived evolution was atheistic, but then changed to believing that evolution and Christianity could be compatible before they accepted evolution.

In a study by Scharmann and Butler , the researchers asked nonmajor biology students at a community college to journal about their experiences learning evolution. In the paper, the researchers presented many quotes in which students indicated they did not know that they could believe in God and accept evolution. In a past study in which our research team implemented evolution instruction that was designed to be culturally competent for religious students, we asked students what they appreciated about the instruction and many religious and nonreligious students wrote that that they did not previously know that someone could believe in God and accept evolution Barnes et al.

Brem et al. These data warrant exploring the hypothesis that atheistic perceptions of evolution may be prevalent and may influence acceptance of evolution among college biology students. If atheistic perceptions of evolution are prevalent, then this pinpoints a needed area for instructors to address when teaching evolution, particularly if this perception is related to worse affective evolution education outcomes among highly religious students who are most at risk for rejecting evolution.

We conducted an exploratory study to identify what religious ideas students think they have to reject in order to accept evolution and if writing that evolution is atheistic is associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance. Then, in a subsequent study we explored the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution and whether atheistic perceptions were related to lower evolution acceptance, greater perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution, and less comfort learning evolution.

We outline here each of our research questions and hypotheses for each study. Although prior qualitative research has shown that students can have concerns about their ability to maintain their religious beliefs and accept evolution Barnes et al. Thus, in study 1, we asked students to answer an open-ended question about the religious ideas that would have to be rejected for someone to accept evolution.

We hypothesized that some students would say that it is necessary to reject a belief in God in order to accept evolution, and we also hypothesized that highly religious students who wrote that evolution is atheistic would accept evolution less than highly religious students who did not. This exploratory study allowed us to investigate potential student perceptions and their association with student levels of evolution acceptance.

In study 2, we wanted to explore atheistic perceptions of evolution in a large number of biology classes across the nation using a closed-ended survey. The decision to use a closed-ended survey in study 2 was a natural progression of the research aims; in study 1, we were able to identify students who thought to write about an atheistic perception of evolution, but there may have been a greater number of students who had this perception but just did not choose to write about it.

A closed-ended survey allowed us to determine the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution among students in college biology courses, because each student had to choose whether they had an atheistic perception of evolution.

Further, a closed-ended survey allowed us to give students the option to choose between an atheistic perception of evolution and an agnostic perception of evolution, something they were not able to do with the open-ended question in study 1. For study 2, we hypothesized that a significant proportion of students would have an atheistic perception of evolution.

We aimed to explore whether atheistic perceptions of evolution among highly religious students were associated with evolution education variables. In addition to being less accepting of evolution, we hypothesized that highly religious students who have an atheistic perception of evolution would perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution and feel less comfortable while learning evolution.

This is potentially important, because students who are less accepting of evolution and perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution may be unlikely to use evolution in their thinking about science in the future or to pursue further learning about evolution beyond what is required of them in the classroom. Indeed, in group settings, student comfort has been shown to be related to student outcomes such as persistence in a program and final grades in a course Micari and Drane, ; Eddy et al.

We surveyed students from 10 introductory-level majors and nonmajors biology courses at a large public research-intensive university in the southwestern United States in which the population is moderately religious on average Barnes et al. Students were surveyed in the last 2 weeks of their courses and all courses included evolution instruction.

Instructors of the courses offered students extra credit as an incentive to complete the survey. The email recruitment told students that they would be filling out a survey about their conceptions of evolution. Students were surveyed at the end of the semester after most evolution instruction had occurred. We used two separate measures of evolution acceptance that served different purposes. One measure let students define evolution acceptance for themselves self-defined measure and asked students to rate on a scale from 0 to the extent to which they accepted evolution; this is similar to measures used in other foundational studies in evolution education Bishop and Anderson, ; Sinatra et al.

The second measure we used is a published instrument called the Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance I-SEA that predefines evolution acceptance for the respondents as the extent to which they agree with 24 items on a five-point Likert scale Nadelson and Southerland, The I-SEA has three subscales: acceptance of microevolution e.

We chose to use the I-SEA instead of other published instruments e. Further, there are claims that the I-SEA addresses many limitations of other evolution acceptance instruments Barnes et al. We measured student religiosity using a previously published scale Cohen et al. List as many things as you can think of. Inductive methods were used, because this specific question had never been explored among students, and we did not want to bias our findings, so we let themes emerge from the data.

A rubric was created by M. Next, the rubric was used independently by H. We used multiple linear regressions to determine whether writing that evolution is atheistic was related to lower levels of evolution acceptance depending on student religiosity level. After each regression model was fit to the data, we performed full regression diagnostics to make sure the statistical assumptions of this method i.

All results we report in the Results sections have passed the full diagnostics. Seventy-one percent of students were biology majors and the average end-of-semester GPA for these students was 3.

This is similar to the overall student population at this institution, although the Asian students are slightly overrepresented in our sample compared with the broader population at the university, but that may be because Asian students tend to be overrepresented in biology National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Students reported an average of 80 out of on the 0— self-defined evolution acceptance measure.

A list of subthemes and their descriptions can be found in Section 1 of the Supplemental Material. Forty-one percent of students correctly reported that to accept evolution, a person would have to reject a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian religious texts. Most biologists would agree that one would not be able to believe literally in many of the creation stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible to accept evolution. TABLE 1.

Students in this category most often indicated that a person would have to reject the existence of God or reject that God was responsible for the creation of life if that person were to accept evolution Table 1. We call this an atheistic perception of evolution Smith, ; National Academy of Sciences, , ; Gould, ; Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.

This suggests that perceiving evolution as atheistic is prevalent among highly religious students as well as students who score low on religiosity. For instance, the least religious student who is a biology major with a 4. Figure 1 illustrates this interaction effect of student religiosity and writing that evolution is atheistic on evolution acceptance scores from all four evolution acceptance measures.

Unstandardized predicted values from regression models predicting evolution acceptance scores plotted against student religiosity and labeled by whether the student indicated an atheistic perception of evolution. In our exploratory study 1, a large percentage of college biology students wrote that evolution is atheistic, and this was prevalent among both religious and nonreligious students. Further, we found that writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance, particularly among the most religious students.

However, using an open-ended response item may have caused us to misestimate the prevalence of atheistic perceptions. First, students could have had an atheistic perception of evolution but did not think to write about it; this would lead us to underestimate the number of students with an atheistic perception of evolution. Thus, to estimate the rate of atheistic perceptions of evolution, we developed a closed-ended survey in study 2 that asked students to choose whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic.

Students were surveyed at the end of their courses, and all courses included evolution instruction. A summary of the courses recruited for this study can be found in the Results section. The research team sent emails to the instructors of the courses asking them to disseminate the survey link to their students after the students had been taught evolution. Instructors offered extra credit to students who completed the survey. We used similar instruments to measure evolution acceptance in study 2 as in study 1.

Further, we wanted to reduce survey fatigue among students in our studies, and in think-aloud interviews some items on the full religiosity survey were confusing for nonreligious students i. Thus, eliminating these items increased the content validity of the measure for nonreligious students. To determine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we adapted a published instrument originally created to categorize the views that students have on the relationship between religion and evolution Yasri and Mancy, This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected.

The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2.

TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution. The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution.

The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material. We also created two new instruments see Section 4 of the Supplemental Material for development and validation of these measures.

Students were asked to select from 0 none at all to 10 a lot for each of these items. Unlike other instruments in which the respondent can only choose a binary option Nehm et al. The second instrument measures how comfortable students felt while learning evolution and has eight items e.

Students were asked to answer on a six-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Here are just a few things I would like people to know about atheism and being an atheist in the United States. Atheists all believe there is no god that governs the universe, but other than that, nothing necessarily unites us. For some of us, our atheism is central to our self-identity and drives what we do.

Atheists come in all political stripes. Some are Republicans; others are Democrats. Probably some voted for Jill Stein last time around. I voted for Bernie Sanders. It is definitely true that some atheists are angry — at religion, at religious people, at the government — but not all of us are.

Some are fabulously happy, but not all of us are. That sure would be nice! But that is changing. For one thing, I got to know a lot about the Satanic Temple , a nontheistic religion that venerates Satan as a symbol of rebellion against oppressive authority. Similarly, when I attended the annual conference of an organization formed to help nonbelieving high school and college students called the Secular Student Association in July , I learned that getting out and helping people is a key concern for young secularists.