It’s my belief that “atheists” fall into several categories.
- Atheists who are really agnostics; they believe that the question of God’s existance is ultimatly unknowable. They are functional atheists, but strictly speaking are not for they do not pretend to “know” a negative (that God doesn’t exist.)
- Genuine atheists who say “there is no God”, who find there to be a lack of any positive reason to believe there “is a God”, but additionally, believe there are good reasons to assume there in fact is no God. They’re taking a position here, and feel the balance of the evidence is in their favour. Faithless, but will generally be tolerant of others.
- Genuine atheists who do not simply believe there is enough reason to believe God exists (and that there is reason to believe He does not exist), but who believe it is irrational and superstitious to accept the existance of God. The so called “rabid atheist” or “village atheist”; the correspondant to the “religious fanatic.” Like the religious fanatic, obnoxious and self righteous.
However, even within those three “divisions” that I’ve noticed in my own experience, I’ve noticed variation. For example, I’ve noticed that for many “atheists” it’s not so much “deity” they reject, but simply the Judeo-Christian conception of such. Many are, IMHO de facto pantheists, even if they’d never call themselves such (largely because their philosophy/worldview does not involve any sort of “cultus”/formal worship of their pantheistic divinity). If you probe their views deeply enough, they do believe there are “absolutes”, and that there is a “ground of being” as it were - they simply believe it’s substantially the same as the manifest universe. This is not a new perspective, btw. - the Greco-Roman Stoic philosophers were basically the same, though they definately did have “religious sentiments” in the sense that they grafted the Olympian cult and it’s exoteric rituals upon their metaphysical outlook (though they entirely allegorized the mythos - ex. Zeus was the universe, all things were members of Zeus, etc.) When you hear atheistic scientists speak of the universe having “laws” and taking for granted the scientific assumption that the universe works in an ordered, predictable way, what you have (unavoidably) is a form of irreligious pantheism.
My biggest critique of atheism (and most especially the more rabid, insistant varieties) is that they ultimatly rely upon radical philosophical skepticism. The “common sense” of men from all cultures which points to God (however imperfectly) can only be undermined by such a radically skeptical approach, where one ultimatly is told that somehow your senses are fundamentally unreliable, and “normal reasoning” based upon this ought to be picked apart and put into doubt - and if there is “doubt”, then obviously they don’t feel obliged to acknowledge God in any form.
Apart from the problems of such radical skepticism in and of itself, my biggest “beef” is this - that they unfailingly
never apply this standard consistantly in their lives. They seem to limit such radical fault finding to the subject of God, and those areas of morality which
inconvienience them. Historically there were extreme cynics (in Hellenic civilization) that
did attempt to pursue their own extreme forms of skepticism in a practical way; but besides the fact such people no longer exist, the simple truth is that such a lifestyle unfailingly illustrated just how
unnatural this mentality in fact is. It is incapable of fostering civilization in any sense, and makes even the most basic and normal of human interactions impossible. Thus the modern atheistic/skeptical philosophers who have so often lauded “natural man” are really dealing in a profound contradiction, whether they realize it (or will admit it) or not.
). I don’t see how you can say that it is not stupid to believe that 2 contradictory views can be held to be true simultaneously. Someone may be misguided to believe such garbage, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not stupid for questioning it.