My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

Atheism fills all of these requirements including doctrine (Dawkins, 2008; Harris, 2005; 2008), a moral code (Harris, 2011; 2013), spirituality (Harris, 2012; 2014), recognized leaders of the movement (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens prior to his death, and more), and an elaborate evangelical network encompassing multiple organizations and lobbies. Dawkins’ website even includes a “Convert’s Corner” for recently converted New Atheist disciples, and even sells apparel and lapel pins for “witnessing” modeled after the Campus Crusade for Christ ones I wore during my high school years (www.richarddawkins.net). Nope… no religious activity going on there! Incidentally, the Association of Religion Data Archives cited earlier maintains extensive global demographic data on Atheism (hence the 2% figure cited), as does the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations Human Development Project, and other agencies from whose public datasets and reports it draw raw data. You see, that’s because these institutions recognize what virtually everyone outside of the New Atheist community does—Atheism is in fact, a religion.

If nothing else, equating religion to mythology presumes that it never makes claims about this world or our experience of it. That rules out just about every major religion in existence, and what most of humanity actually believes. The Abrahamic religions (which comprise roughly two thirds of the human race) teach that in the beginning the universe was created (Gen. 1:1). This implies that the universe is not past-eternal—a claim which is physical, well within the purvey of physics and cosmology, and as it turns out, correct (Borde et al., 2003; Craig & Sinclair, 2012).² Christianity claims that Jesus of Nazareth lived, died and was buried, and rose from the dead three days later. These are specific historical claims, the first two of which no historian of any repute would dispute, and for which a considerable case can be made for the latter.³ Countless similar examples could be provided. New Atheists stridently reject these claims of course, but only because most are untrained in physics and/or history.

Myth 2: If it can’t be scientifically verified it isn’t true

This claim is perhaps best seen in practice. A friend recently told me that the difference between he and I was that he “considers all religions to be false” and thus “can just focus on their impact to society” (my emphasis). I informed him that although I believe Atheism to be false (notice the difference in our terminology) my responsibility for self-examination and knowledge-seeking never ends and I am always ready to rethink my worldview in light of any new evidence. In response he said that I don’t understand the meaning of the word false. According to him,

“’True’ is a label which we apply to those things which can be demonstrated to be accurate… All religious claims are based upon the supernatural and often deal with things that are logical or physical impossibilities. Much like flying elephants, these irrational claims are false until they are proven with evidence… This is why I say all religions are false.” - (my emphasis, grammatical errors in the original corrected).

The sweeping generalizations and straw men speak for themselves (notice the obligatory reference to “flying elephants”). Other than that, this is a textbook statement of the foundational idea behind a school of philosophy known as Positivism.

In philosophy one distinguishes between the studies of ontology, which has to do with statements about reality itself, and epistemology, which addresses knowledge of reality and its limitations. An ontological statement would be similar to; “There is an object (or substance) A which has the properties X and Y,” whereas an epistemological one would be of the form; “We know that A with properties X and Y exists because knowledge of it has been apprehended in such and such manner.” In everyday life this distinction might seem like picking the fly droppings out of the pepper. But when ultimate questions are on the table it becomes important very fast, and how we address the two to each other matters. Broadly speaking, philosophical schools have generally fallen into one of two camps: Those that emphasize empirical knowledge (derived from sensory experience), and those that emphasize a’ priori knowledge (innately perceived to be true apart from experience). David Hume and John Locke were representative of the former, and Immanuel Kant of the latter.

Positivism gained prominence during the 19th Century as a byproduct of the growing post-Enlightenment confidence in scientific empiricism. It dealt with these concerns by claiming that all authentic knowledge is based on observational science and mathematics alone, to the exclusion of intuition, emotion and all forms of metaphysics. It reached its apex just prior to World War II in a school of thought known as Logical Positivism, according to which statements that could not be verified were not only false, but meaningless (Logical Positivism is often referred to as Verificationism).

By World War I Positivism had run afoul of numerous rational and practical issues and was increasingly under fire from philosophers. It never recovered from these issues, and by the mid-20th Century it was essentially dead as a viable school of school of philosophy, having been replaced by Antipositivism which struck more of a balance between the objective and subjective in human experience (Wikipedia, 2014b). Logical Positivism in particular was found to be self-refuting and in the end was rejected even by its founders. Today Positivism survives only in the practice of Sociology (as grounded in the 19th Century Positivist works of August Compte and Emile Durkheim), and surprise, surprise… in the beliefs of Atheistic scientists—who cannot seem to resist the temptation to ground all human wisdom in their chosen profession (a view known as Scientism) and few of whom are formally trained in Philosophy.⁴