"...actually, you're an atheist."

'You just can't know, though’; ‘Prove there’s no God’, and 'You have faith as well.' To anyone who calls themselves an atheist, these are pretty familiar statements. We've heard it all in YouTube comments, or forum threads, or conversations with friends; pretty much all of us know someone who finds atheism just as unfounded as theism, identifying strictly as an agnostic. Too often, I can't help but think, we let this characterisation go - what we should say is, 'Actually, you're an atheist too.'

Admittedly, it's a widespread notion that atheism is a standpoint of denial, requiring faith in the certainty of there not being a god. The Charles Moores and Stephen Greens of the world haven't helped by calling it hypocritical to say, as an atheist, that 'There's probably no god.' 'They speak with anger and with certainty', Moore said last year, accusing the so-called New Atheists of fundamentalism , and from the vast majority of the ‘not particularly religious’ people I speak to, it seems as if his position’s a popular one. My very first RE lesson at secondary school, I remember, taught me that a theist believed in God, an atheist believed there was no god and an agnostic didn’t know. My RE teacher doesn’t seem in retrospect to have been particularly unusual, because I find myself on at least a weekly basis faced with the argument that since I call myself an atheist, I must myself have an unevidenced belief in the absence of deities which is just as strong a faith as any theist’s.

This of course is the silly and insubstantial accusation that inspired the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorns of Camp Quest and the dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage. To disprove the existence of any of these, we tell the not-particularly-religious person we’re having an argument with, is impossible; but you don’t have to wait until they’re disproven not to believe they exist. All these are sound counter-examples, definitely – but maybe because they spoof the silliness of ‘Atheists have faith’ position so well, I’ve always found them somewhat ineffective rhetorically. Much of their humour is satirical, admittedly – they’re funny because they get the point across so well – but in my experience, all they tend to provoke is a mild chuckle, and perhaps a simmering disapproval at the disrespect of the big-angry-atheist in the room comparing Jehovah to a dragon.

If we want to be a bit more persuasive and a bit less mocking, we might refer to Bertrand Russell’s great celestial teapot. How can we prove, he asked of his critics, that there isn’t a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars? It doesn’t take any faith not to believe it exists, because not believing something until it’s proved is the default setting. Quote this, and the person accusing you of holding hypocritical atheistic faith is usually a bit more impressed than they would be by the flying spaghetti monster – there’s no particular logical reason for this of course, but it comes across as a little less antagonistic. Even then though, I find the accusation of denying (rather than just doubting) a god’s existence still remains in the majority of cases. It doesn’t seem just to be a problem with my communicative skills, because I know people who’ve encountered the same reaction. There just seems to be something very counterintuitive about simply not believing an undemonstrated claim being different from asserting the opposite.

I have encountered one analogy with a somewhat better success rate, at least when I’ve used it in conjunction with the teapot or the spaghetti monster. Matt Dillahunty, presenter of The Atheist Experience and counter-apologetics enthusiast, uses the simply an inoffensive example of a coin toss. ‘Supposing I toss a coin’, we tell whoever accuses us of faithfulness, ‘and I tell you it lands on heads. Do you believe I’m telling the truth?’ Without knowing anything about the motives of whoever tosses the coin, we can’t know whether it’s really a heads or a tails result – so asked whether we’re convinced it’s heads, the answer ought to be ‘No.’ But that isn’t the same, as Dillahunty goes on to say, as asserting without any evidence that it must have landed on a tails. Just as with the spaghetti monster and the dragon and the teapot, we have to be agnostic about the coin toss and admit we can’t really know – but until we can know, the claim of a heads result can’t be bought into.

The RE teachers of the world have a lot to answer for, it would seem. To be an atheist is entirely complementary with being an agnostic, as long as you accept that doubt is the default. Agnostic theists, who think we can’t entirely know there’s a god but who nonetheless believe in one, do of course exist; for them, the existence of a deity is simply to be assumed until it’s proven there isn’t one. But this isn’t consistent with the way most of us live in all other cases. We can’t simply assume the Nigerian businessman e-mailing us is telling the truth, purely because we’ve no way of knowing he’s lying; we can’t expect gold at the end of a rainbow, just because we can’t prove there’s none. As far as skepticism’s concerned, deities always seem to be the exception more than the rule.

Nine times out of ten then, the non-committal and not-particularly-religious people who tell us we’re ‘arrogantly certain’ there isn’t a god are missing the point; as long as nobody proves there is one, we’re perfectly justified not to think so, without denying the possibility for a moment. These people are atheists themselves, the vast majority of the time – and if we want to solve the PR problem we have in much of the world, it’s time we started telling them so.

Alex Gabriel
President, Oxford Atheist Society