When deciding whether or not to call myself an atheist, my first instinct was to look up the definition. The first definition I encountered was:
Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
Disbelief is exactly what I was feeling. Although many religious people associate atheism as the other definition (denial of any god), I don’t think most atheists do.
I found this definition lacking in descriptiveness when I came out as an atheist. It leaves an ambiguity on the table that makes it hard to back it up completely from a scientific perspective.
The other night I was considering this problem, and I realized internally I had already come up with my own explanation of why I’m an atheist. It is displayed at the bottom of every page here:
I am an atheist because I do not believe in any gods and have yet to find a definition of a god that both a) has sufficient empirical evidence and b) would affect my life in any way.
The reason I like this definition or declaration is that it embeds within it the key to attempting to dispute my atheism. To first dispute my atheism, you must present me with a definition of “god” to be examined.
My guess is that most Christians would say, “My God is the god of the Bible.” However, that itself is too vague of a definition and carries a few doctrinal assumptions with it depending on what denomination the person making the claim belongs to. Even as a vague definition, however, it can still be shown to fail the first test of having sufficient empirical evidence. As a former Christian, I watched my doctrinal assertions melt away one by one as I examined the evidence. The bible eventually held no such weight when claiming the existence of a god.
Without the bible, another position is to assume the “God of the Gaps” position. For example my stepfather essentially defined god as “the being that created the big bang.” Without further definition, however, this god has no interaction with our lives, no tie to the bible, and therefore fails the second test because it would not affect my life in any way for believing in this god.
Nevermind that there is no empirical evidence for that position, theists have a hard time accepting the definition of “empirical evidence,” and assume that lack of evidence is a perfect place to put their god at.
Hopefully this declaration of atheism is helpful to someone else. I think it frames the conversation in such a way that it’s hard for the religious to quickly retort, “But atheism is just another religion.”
Tags: atheism
