Atheism

Atheism is disbelief in the existence of a god or gods, or any supernatural entity.

Some Atheists are tied with Secular Humanism. Popularly-known Atheists include Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Adams, William Borden and Sam Harris.

Atheist morality

Many atheists base their moral code upon emotion, experience and empirically derived ethics, such as those promoted by secular humanism. Atheists hold that neither the Bible, nor the Koran, nor the Torah, nor any religious text can be our only source of morality. This claim is made as all religious texts contain, and often ascribe to God, extremely immoral acts such as the Israelites driving out heathen nations from Canaan (i.e. ethnic cleansing), the stoning of homosexuals and adulterers to death, and the institution of slavery.

Atheists often subscribe to the secular humanist idea that it is far more ethical to do what is right because you believe that it is right, rather than because you fear divine punishment or desire divine reward. One example is illustrated in the following quote from Albert Einstein:

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death”.

Atheists condemn religious desires for exclusive reward (and the punishment of others) such as are found in all religious texts.

Origins

It is difficult to trace the origins of atheism as a result of the incomplete historic record. It is known that ancient Greece produced a theory of materialism as early as the 5th century BC. The materialist world view was essentially mathematical and had no room for gods^{[Citation Needed]}.

The writer of the Book of Psalms knew of atheists and atheism and registered disapproval in Psalm 14: "The Fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." The book of Psalms precedes the 5th century BC by hundreds of years.

The Problem of Evil

A central argument against religious belief in all powerful entities ('gods') is the problem of evil. First identified by the philosopher and materialist Epicurus (341-270 BCE), this problem points out the difficulty created by the mere existence of evil:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

A number of responses to this logical paradox have been put forth including those which assert human ignorance as the culprit, the concept of free will and the specific writings in some faiths which discuss the co-existence of good and evil (such as the book of Job in the Christian and Jewish faiths).[1]

Atheism and Agnosticism

Atheism and agnosticism are logically distinct concepts. Whilst atheist reject the existence of a god or gods, agnostics do not do so. Richard Dawkins has contrasted the two positions as follows:

“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”.

An agnostic is on the fence regarding the truth value of certain unverifiable claims. It can be said that an agnostic thinks that there's about a 50-50 chance of a claim being true. For example, if you asked me if it's going to rain in a week, I'd say I was agnostic. I just don't know, but it's definitely likely and possible. It's rained before and it will probably rain again. I've observed it many times so it's a reasonable conclusion that it may rain next week.

If a claim is arbitrary and has no method of verification, we must be atheistic about it. Anyone can be creative and invent some sort of imaginary circumstance. It doesn't make it true; it just makes it creative. This is excellent for the arts, a field in which subjective flights of fancy are valued and no objective verification is required for a claim to be valuable. If there are fairies at the bottom of the well, a Flying Spaghetti monster, supernatural gods that act as proxies for our human weaknesses, and other creative phenomena, we cannot take them seriously as actually having independent existence. What stops anyone from inventing a religion then which makes that person the center of the universe? How can his be disproved? If that person is emphatic enough, his creativity can morph into dogma due to psychosocial processes that have been observed throughout the history of mass belief. Scientology and Mormonism are only recent examples of this.

For example, even people who ascribe to a religious belief that is premised on faith in facts or events that they have no specific experience with are atheists regarding other religions. They regard the tenets of other religions as if they were arbitrary heresay that could only be believed by a gullible fool. The irony here is striking.

A full on atheist evaluates an individual claims on its face. If it seems arbitrary, then he/she is an atheist about it. If it's likely, but not easily verified, then he/she's agnostic. And if it's based on something that resonates with common sense or has been consistently true in the past, then he/she has faith that it'll probably be true in the future.