I believe a lot of things. So do you. For instance, I believe that I believe a lot of things. Some of my beliefs are beliefs in states of affairs: for instance, I believe that my laptop is currently sitting on my lap and I am typing on it. Other beliefs I hold are beliefs that some state of affairs is not the case: I believe that I am not inside the stomach of a dragon while I type this; indeed, I believe that dragons aren’t even real.
My disbelief in the reality of dragons is not the sole cause of my belief that I am not in a dragon stomach, however. Even if someone were to present to me a real live dragon and I changed my belief about their existence, my surroundings right now still fail to comport with any of my ideas about what the inside of a dragon stomach could be like.
Note that this is a sophisticated maneuver that we perform: we imagine the counterfactual scenario “dragons are real”, then imagine as best we can the spectrum of possibilities for the inside of stomachs for these “dragons”, and then compare this conception to actual observations. This sort of thing happens so quickly and effortlessly for most of us that it really goes without saying. But here we need to say it, because we are going to think carefully about different types of belief.
Some of our beliefs are shared: for instance, I imagine (i.e. I believe) that you and I both believe that fire is hot (for conventional definitions of “fire” and “hot”, which we both know plenty well enough so that we can hold such a belief). But some of our beliefs are probably not shared. In that case, you and I could try to align our beliefs more closely via a variety of methods. We could show each other things — for instance, you could introduce me to your pet dragon. We could try to employ emotional salience to trigger a more favorable re-evaluation: you could tell me that you love dragons so much — am I really, really sure they aren’t real? Or we could discuss and reason from beliefs we already share to see if one or the other of us simply haven’t calculated what the natural consequences are of those things we’ve already accepted.
It’s entirely possible for people to do this really badly even if there are pretty good ways to align beliefs. Maybe they have other goals (personal amusement, trolling, etc.) or maybe they just aren’t good at making arguments. Regardless, if someone says, “What idiot thinks dragons aren’t real? Burger King has flame-broiled Whoppers, doesn’t it?”, and you actually have a pet dragon, you might be a little bit peeved if someone thinks dragons aren’t real because they’re able to point out why the Burger King reasoning is flawed. (For instance: “Dragon fire is not the only way to flame-broil things.”)
Maybe the bad reasons are intuitively appealing and catch on and spread. Maybe people create logos and memes and there are echo chambers of people repeating the bad reasons. Killer memes and cute mascots are great for widespread acceptance.
When social consensus becomes decoupled from the truth of the matter, it is advisable to step in. Someone should explain why the bad reasoning is bad.
It is in this vein that Douglas Giles’ appraisal of atheism is valuable. People do, often enough, claim that they are atheists but that atheism “isn’t a belief”. Of course a belief in a lack of God, or dragons, or ripe mangos in your bathtub, is a belief. Those are all truth claims: no God (at all), no dragons (at all), no ripe mangos (in your bathtub). Giles makes it abundantly clear that denying that it’s a belief is a really bad reason for atheism.
However, what Giles fails to do is address the good reasons to be an atheist. He says:
The list of what the atheist cannot prove is identical to the list of atheist beliefs: god does not exist, there is no evidence for god, belief in god is irrational, belief in god is delusional, and so on. The atheist is left with no evidence whatsoever, no rational argument, no position to stand on. Atheism is none other than a subjective belief — mere opinion.
But there are options other than “mere opinion” and “proof”. There can be evidence that is sufficient for one to act as if something were true, sufficient for one to believe it is true, and yet not so comprehensive as to close off any possibility of considering that it might somehow, unexpectedly, turn out to be otherwise.
There is no lack of philosophical writing justifying atheism as a stance. (There’s no lack of writing justifying strong agnosticism either, or weak agnosticism, or idealism, or theism.) The summary in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is pretty good.
If one wants to understand whether atheism is a sensible belief, and whether or not it is pure opinion, one needs to engage with these arguments.
If I claim I actually have a pet dragon, and you want to actually know about the reality of dragons, you’d better take a look. You’d better not just content yourself with debunking the flame-broiled meme. It might turn out that I’m wrong — maybe I have a pet but it isn’t actually a dragon, for instance — but you have to address the evidence!
The most important argument for atheism that Giles fails to address or even acknowledge is that when someone declares that they are an atheist, they mean that they think that if you apply ordinary standards of evidence, theism falls so far short that it need not be considered as a serious alternative.
We don’t actually have any proof that dragons don’t exist. They seem physically extremely implausible (unrealistic strength to weight ratio, biocompatibility issues with protein-based tissue and flame, etc.), but hey, maybe there’s new physics we haven’t discovered. We have no record of dragons (aside from stories, many of which do not appear to be intended to be taken as faithful accounts), but if we haven’t done an exhaustive search of the universe, we can’t technically actually rule them out. But we “believe” that dragons don’t exist. We believe electrons do exist. We believe that Pluto orbits our sun. (Have you checked, in person? For an entire orbit?)
The atheist claim is simply the ordinary one of: I don’t see nearly enough evidence to hold this belief, so I won’t. It’s perfectly sensible to do this without having an iron-clad proof of something not existing. You just decide it’s not worth maintaining the alternative hypothesis as one under serious consideration. I believe that the U.S. government is not run by lizardmen — no incontrovertible proof, but I don’t waste any time thinking about it save when writing examples for Medium stories.
The tricky part about atheism is that a lot of people are theists. If you had 5 billion people saying that there’s a bridge over that river, you’re probably justified in believing there is a bridge over the river. Usually when a lot of people hold the same view, there’s some good reason for it.
So the atheist’s challenge is to explain not only why observations of the natural world are inconsistent with any ordinary idea of there being a “God” (we’ll leave out weird stuff like “God is what we call physics”), but also why so many people report belief in god(s) and other religious experiences.
Atheists — the sensible ones, anyway — certainly don’t doubt that people have religious experiences, any more than they doubt that people get headaches or feel lonely. But if someone were to tell you that they had a headache because they were being tormented by the demon Sehaqeq, you might reasonably ask: well, possibly, but how can we gain additional corroboration aside from the headache itself that Sehaqeq exists, and are there any alternative explanations?
We might ask whether headaches are better treated by things that are thought to affect demons (wards, charms, amulets) or things that are thought to affect the body’s physiology (ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin). We might ask whether things that demons like (saying curses? I don’t know) induce headaches more than things thought to affect the body’s physiology (like not drinking enough water or receiving an impact to the head). We might ask whether the sufferers agree on Sehaqeq’s nature, or whether some people think it’s Zeus, some people think it’s bad ki, and some people think it’s the kids being too loud all the time.
When atheists go through sensible evidentiary processes like these, they judge theism to fall well short of what they’d like to see: the physical world seems to run highly mechanistically, different people have all sorts of different ideas about religions, miracles never seem to hold up under scrutiny, and so on. It looks the way they’d expect as if religiousness was a part of the human condition (of many humans anyway), but the divine part was a human-concocted narrative, not a reflection of its own reality.
“Looks like fairy tales to us,” they say. A belief, but not pure opinion for those who have carefully considered the evidence. They may be wrong in their judgments, but it is not mere whimsy, mere evidence-free opining: atheists do, often enough, take the same sort of evidential approach that we do for other matters like deciding whether a defendant is guilty of murder. “I believe he did it” is beyond a reasonable doubt, but not beyond any possibility of doubt whatsoever.
The challenge for the theist, should one care to change an atheist’s mind, is to show that the evidence is in fact compelling in favor of theism.
The challenge for the agnostic, should one care to change either a theist or atheist’s mind, is to show that the evidence is (or cannot help but be) so inconclusive that it is irresponsible to lean one way or the other for any reason save personal proclivity.
And the challenge for all of us is to debunk bad arguments so that we don’t fall into error through unsound reasoning; but to form our opinions after carefully considering any good arguments, too.