Atheism

Robin Le Poidevin writes, “An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe. …”

I do not deny the possibility of a transcendent creator nor the possibility of a personal creator, however I find it implausible that there is a transcendent being or force who cares about me personally. Maybe some force (“life”) cares about mankind, but probably not individuals.

“There would have been atheists even if no theists ever existed—they just wouldn’t have been called ‘atheists’.” — SEP entry for Atheism.

More SEP: “Defining ‘atheism’ as the state of lacking belief in God faces similar problems. First, while this definition seems short and simple, which is virtuous, it needs to be expanded to avoid the issue of babies, cats, and rocks counting as atheists by virtue of lacking belief in God.“

More SEP: “A pro-God atheist like John Schellenberg … is someone who in some real sense loves God or at least the idea of God, who tries very hard to imagine what sorts of wonderful worlds such a being might create (instead of just assuming that such a being would create a world something like the world we observe), and who (at least partly) for that very reason believes that God does not exist.”

I would not consider myself an atheist in the sense of “there can be no god(s).” But rather I am an ignostic nontheist: I do not believe any definitions of God I have currently come across are anything but meaningless, and hence I currently do not believe in any of those gods, nor do I live my life as if I should let some man tell me what God supposedly wants me do to on a daily and weekly basis.

Jared’s Atheism*; Or, how to be open to belief in any desperate, plausible fashion.

Ten asterisks: Where can god act? How might god look if we are open, with no agenda?

1. If I am an atheist, then I still would acknowledge that there could be a being or emergent force greater than human beings, somewhere out there, that could have a lot to teach us. (The best of our own humanity I would simply label Humanism, which is all very explainable, debatable, material, reducible, and secular. Projecting virtues onto a being that might not exist is not parsimonious.)
2. However I don’t think this being or alien race or species would achieve any of this by any supernatural or magical, unexplainable means. (Most true believers who claim this “we don’t know but I believe it anyway” hand-waving magical thinking are simply swimming in an ocean of Special Pleading Soup, and like a fish cannot see any of it.)
3. Given this, I do believe that even if such a being exists (honestly quite likely some race or species somewhere in all of those billions of galaxies has to be ahead of us on the technology curve) and could be worth calling them god(s) (relative to us), we will probably never interact with such creatures because of the universal speed of light limit, which makes even finding intelligent beings capable of conversation very difficult, much less inter-stellar and inter-galactic travel.
4. And I do not believe that there is currently any good evidence for a transcendent, ineffable God that operates on our planet, solar system, or galaxy—no evidence that is not patently tainted by man and his hearsay and will-to-dominate. There may be a deistic god who set things in motion “in the beginning” and no longer intervenes non-materially. But this is very similar to there being no god, just material determinism.
5. I believe some very powerful being could defy our understanding of the limits of physics but probably not a lot more than quantum and general relativity already do, and only in increasingly subtle ways, the way the James Webb Space Telescope would blow Galileo’s and Newton’s minds, yet you could sit them down and explain all of it to them in the space of a few months or years. The way the JWST bores 90% of the population, and they are back to TikTok.
6. If I am an atheist or ignostic, it is not because of God, but because of mankind’s weak, illogical or ugly definitions of God. I have nothing against divinity or any actual divine being. I want that being to make itself known to me and help me live my best life. (Why would such a being care about me, again? Amongst 100 billion galaxies, each with an average of 100 million stars in them?)
7. I do however believe that most definitions of God are just illogical, silly, or weak and probably most definitions are man-made. I will never worship a man-made WAG (weak-ass god). Unless it is a heavily caveated and carefully hedged definition that looks nothing like standard theistic notions of God (which caveated definition would also be, by definition, kind of a WAG). Most standard definitions of gods are just special pleading and narcissistic projections, self-contradictory, hand-wavy, contradict each other, etc.
8. I am open to the possibility of some sort of yin-yang (good plus evil) definition of God (like Shiva, the concept of a creator/destroyer) where powers more subtle and greater than humans (or equal to the sum of human activity) are at play. Or that memes or replicating molecules are the new gods or whatnot. Some definition of an alien, uncontrollable, emergent superintelligence is possible too.
9. Panspermian gods are possible, although it would probably be obvious in the fossil record if such a god started with hominids and not with primitive life.
10. Some sort of future god, or god that we are collectively building, or future singularity, or a technodeity, or a concept like Faith in the Earth, are all possible types of “real” gods that I am open to.
11. Also, what about a God that died to save or give birth to mankind, like a deist Christ? But no longer exists or has any power.

If philosophers can lay out a solid case that any typical true believer is worshipping a contradiction or their own ignorance, how are these so-called-theists not denying the actual god or the possibility of a real god, that could even exist? How is theism not just a weird, inside-out, clouded over form of atheism? How is worshipping the wrong god not worse than avoiding worshipping all of mankind’s concocted gods? Don’t almost all religions (besides UUs) believe that worshipping the wrong god is super bad, blasphemous, worthy of hellfire, etc.? When the hell did (just one example) Christians and Mormons decide that they were sort of worshipping the same god? It is all about tribalism and control, and never has been about God, nor about virtue nor ethics for their own sake.