NOTE: Today we share a guest post from one of our non-theist commenters, Paul Rimmer.
 

 
Does the world need another article on how to define atheism? Does Strange Notions? These questions had to open the article, in part because there have already been several different Strange Notions articles on how to define atheists, including the most recent article about self-identified atheists who believe in God.

Yet here I am, talking about how to define the terms “atheist”, “theist”, and “agnostic”, in an article that may look at the end like a religiously oriented Cosmopolitan quiz. I write this article anyway, because I believe that there is a good reason for so many articles on this topic.

I don’t think the lines that divide Catholics and atheists are the same lines for every Catholic and every atheist, because Catholicism and atheism are very diverse perspectives, and because it’s not all about belief. If you disagree, if you think the dividing line is all about belief, then read only the next section of this article ("If It’s All About Belief..."). Please skip the rest of the article.

If, however, you agree with me that there are more dimensions to the dividing lines between Catholicism and atheism, you are encouraged read the entire article. You are also encouraged to leave comments. I promise to read them and to adjust my views based on reasonable and convincing argument. As far as this article is concerned, charity is for people, not for ideas. Don’t insult my parentage, but please be as harsh as you will to my ideas. If my ideas are any good, they will stand the heat.

Why should you listen to me? After all, I’m a scientist and not a theologian. I suspect, though, that scientists, rather than theologians, would succeed with this sort of task. A large part of science is categorizing things. The judgment of the reader will determine whether this scientist is any good at categorizing people.

For the purposes of this article, there will be only one deity to consider: The Christian God as described by the Nicene Creed. This is admittedly a vast over-simplification. I will offer some concluding remarks about how the labels introduced here can be broadened in order to account for alternative religions and belief-systems, such as Islam or Buddhism.

If It’s All About Belief...

 
If you think that atheism vs. theism is completely and simply about belief, I won’t fight you on that. Such a fight would likely fail to advance the discussion, even if I were to successfully convince you that there are more dimensions to the question of God’s existence than simply believing or not. What I will do is provide what I think to be the best ways to define atheism, theism, and agnosticism, if the discussion is all about belief. This system has the advantage of being accepted by most atheists and several theists.

In this system, there are two dimensions regarding belief. First is the presence of the belief itself. If I ask you whether you believe that God exists, do you say “yes” or “no”? If you say “yes” then you are a theist. If you say “no” then you are an atheist. That’s it. If you can’t say either “yes” or “no”, then you can come up with a new colorful term for your position, such as igtheist.

The second dimension is the level of confidence in that belief. If you are certain that your belief is correct, then you are a gnostic. If you are uncertain about whether your belief is correct, then you are an agnostic. Thus there are four options:

1. Gnostic Theist: You believe that God exists and are certain in your belief.
2. Agnostic Theist: You believe that God exists but are uncertain in your belief.
3. Agnostic Atheist: You believe that God does not exist but are uncertain in your belief.
4. Gnostic Atheist: You believe that God does not exist and are certain in your belief.

If you think that the only or at least the key division between theism and atheism is along the lines of belief, then this is the system for you. Even if you agree with me that there are more (and maybe more important) dimensions to the issue, you should still find out where you fit in this system, because one of the big advantages of labels is convenience, and as I said, most atheists and several theists know and use this convention for applying the labels atheist, theist, and agnostic.

But Maybe It's Not All About Belief

 
I am going to propose to you now that belief isn’t the only issue, and, even more, that it isn’t the most important. Certainly belief is one important dividing issue between atheists and theists, and it may be the most obvious, but as I listen to various atheists and theists talk about their beliefs, I see signs of other dimensions, other divisions between atheists and theists, and also interesting similarities between the two groups. Most theists I know and count as friends would have more in common with Richard Dawkins than with Bill O’Reilly on the question of truth (see this video, for example). The important dimensions to the question of God’s existence are three, as I count them:

1. Do you believe that God exists?
This is an obvious point of division.

2. Do you want God to exist?
In other words, would you prefer to live in a world where there was an all-powerful, fatherly God who loves us unconditionally and who sent his son to die for us? Do you want to live in a world where you may be held accountable, even eternally accountable, for your beliefs and actions?

3. Do you live as though God existed?
The knowledge that God loves and cares for you, and wants you to enjoy his presence for all eternity, and expects you to live a life in obedience to his authority will entail a way of life that is noticeably and radically distinct from the way many people in the world, including many people who would be theists under the beliefs-only definition, presently live their lives. Now, maybe a die-hard atheist will live a life consistent with the existence of the Christian God. Why not? Maybe she lives this life because of a self-consistent ethics that has nothing to do with God. It just so happens to involve actions that are more-or-less aligned to actions performed by practicing theists. That’s all that’s required. I will say that most atheists I know live lives that closely approximate the ideal Christian life.

These three dimensions leave us eight options, for which I apply various labels already in existence, although I may be using these terms in a manner that somewhat departs from convention. Where possible, I will also provide the name of a prominent philosopher or theologian who seems to fit the particular label. This is the Cosmo Quiz portion of the article, and when you the reader disagree with my assessment, either of the terms used or philosophers assigned, please let me know in the comments.

Satisfied Theist: This is someone who believes that God exists, wishes that God existed, and lives as though God exists. This is the simple Catholic life, portrayed well by many common parishioners and by the present Pope Francis.

Apatheist: Someone who believes that God exists and wishes that God existed, but doesn’t live as though God exists—what the Catechism of the Catholic Church labels “practical atheists” (CCC 2128). These are people for whom religion has no real affect on their public life or on their activity outside of maybe some ritual observance. God is like a sports mascot and religion their sports team. I won’t dare to name anyone who fits this label, although I imagine many Christians do. This is, however, the ideal form of religion as envisioned by Daniel Dennett.

Reluctant Theist: This is someone who believes God exists and lives as though God exists, but she wishes God didn’t exist. Maybe she wishes God were different. She may struggle with divine hiddenness and the problem of evil, not as evidence against God’s existence but as strong arguments against God’s goodness and loving-kindness. A good and loving God would not allow for childhood leukemia and would reveal Himself to those whom He loves, like any kind father. I would tentatively assign Oscar Wilde this label.

Agnostic: Someone who wants God to exist and lives as though God exists, but doesn’t think God exists. People who don’t think God exists may want God to exist and live pretty-much the same way whether God exists or not. Massimo Pigliucci seems to be an agnostic in this sense.

Misotheist: This rare position includes someone who believes God exists but wishes He didn’t, and who doesn’t live as though God existed. This is someone who is opposed to God. The easiest example would be Lucifer. An example closer to home would be Arthur Schopenhauer.

Pessimist: Someone who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t live as though God existed, but wishes He did. The pessimist tends to live out in the bitter cold winds of truth instead of the enclosed and suffocating warmth provided by pious illusion. I would think Bertrand Russell to be a pessimist in this sense.

Atheist: Someone who lives as though God exists, although she doesn’t believe in God and hopes that she’s right. Many people who hold this view can seem God-intoxicated, and anti-theistic, opposed not to God but to theism itself, because theism supports an immoral God. This apparent obsession is often, as I discern, a result of strong moral intuition. It is in fact the atheist’s right moral sense that leads her to deny God’s existence. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are prime examples of atheists.

Nihilist: This person doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t want God, and doesn’t live like God exists. In my opinion, this is at its very heart a hopeless position, but maybe I lack the imagination to see how it would work out. My strong opinion may be due to the fact that I have no friends and know of no philosophers who actually hold to this position. Nietzsche is thought to deserve this label, although I suspect this is a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The closest actual example might be Ayn Rand, a hopeless philosopher if ever there was one.

I speculate that the former way of labeling positions on God, based only on belief, seems a very Protestant way of doing things. Protestants traditionally emphasize faith alone above the other cardinal virtues of hope and love. Giving a place for hope and love seems to be a more universal, or Catholic, approach to the question of theism and atheism. Also, no one is bound to use my terms, although I think that the traditional usage of most of these labels is at least reasonably well approximated by my new descriptions

As promised, I will now show by a single example how these labels can be generalized in order to encapsulate other religions, or at least other theistic religions. Someone might, for example, be a theist with respect to the Christian God, but a nihilist with respect to the Muslim God. She would, in other words, derive her hope and purpose of life from her Christian beliefs, and derive no hope or guidance from Islamic beliefs, except where the two beliefs overlap.

A strong note of warning: Whatever system of labels you accept, respect what other people want to be called. If someone wants to be called an atheist or an agnostic, or doesn’t want labels altogether, respect their choice and abide by it, at least when talking to them.

I will end this article by emphasizing the great overlap between many theists and many atheists, and it is on the most important of all the virtues, that of love. I was a member of the Christian Graduate Student Alliance at Ohio State University, and was also closely involved with the Secular Student Alliance there, a group of atheists and agnostics that had among their number not a few who denied the historicity of Jesus. The Secular Student Alliance at OSU became involved with a Lutheran Church on a trip to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and worked alongside Christians of various denominations to provide relief to fellow humans. This is in my mind a rich picture of the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus said that his true disciples would be known by their love. How interesting, how strangely beautiful, that maybe some of Christ’s truest disciples alive today are not convinced that he even existed.
 
 
(Image credit: Kill ADJ)

NOTE: Today we share a guest post on cosmology from one of our top non-theistic commenters, Paul Rimmer. Tomorrow, we'll post a response from Fr. Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.
 

First things First

 
Many articles about God and cosmology begin with ignorance, and this article will be no different. I'm not a cosmologist. My research involves much of the same mathematical formalism cosmologists use, and I have spent five years interacting with some of the worlds leading cosmologists, but I myself do not research cosmology. The purpose of this article is not to examine small technicalities or still controversial results in modern observational or theoretical cosmology, but rather to discuss a large misconception that many theists and non-theists have about the Big Bang.

The misunderstanding centers around Stephen Hawking's bold claim, “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” If you think this sounds like Hawking is talking nonsense here, I encourage you to read further. I think what Hawking's saying not only makes sense, it could be correct!

This misunderstanding isn't just my opinion. It's a real and serious conceptual error about Big Bang cosmology and it has wide-reaching implications for the cosmological argument. But don't take my word for it. Don't take anyone's word for it. The Big Bang theory is part of science, and science has no authorities. My goals for this article are unambitious. I hope that by the end of this article, you will be encouraged to learn more about Big Bang cosmology before using it in theological arguments. More importantly, I hope this article gets you interested in learning about cosmology for its own sake.

Touching God's Robe

 
The error I'll reveal is not new. In fact, it was first identified by the scientist who came up with the Big Bang theory, the Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaitre. The more elegant name for his theory, “Theory of the Primordial Atom”, was inspired by his 1931 paper in Nature, which is in some sense the first paper on quantum cosmology. In this paper he gives an elegant description of the cosmological origin of the universe:
 

“The beginning of the world [may have] happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant. It may be difficult to follow up the idea in detail as we are not yet able to count the quantum packets in every case. For example, it may be that an atomic nucleus must be counted as a unique quantum, the atomic number acting as a kind of quantum number. If the future development of quantum theory happens to turn in that direction, we could conceive the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe.” (Lemaitre, 1931, Nature, 127, 706)

 
In this paper, Lemaitre also says that space and time themselves are, in the quantum regime, “no more than statistical notions” and “if the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning”, foreshadowing some of the emergent theories in Big Bang cosmology that drive some theists crazy: what Krauss and Hawking refer to as the origin of the universe from “absolutely nothing”.

Sadly, the poetic name “Theory of the Primordial Atom” didn't survive. Thanks to Fred Hoyle, it got the name “Big Bang”. It was a term Hoyle made up during a BBC radio show in order to make fun of Lamaitre's theory, which he found repugnant. The name stuck around and the theory definitely stuck around, in large part because it predicts an afterglow from the first explosion. This afterglow was observed at the predicted frequency, confirming the Big Bang theory.

The Misunderstanding and the Warning

 
After the Big Bang theory started getting traction, Pope Pius XII referred to Lemaitre's result as a “scientific validation of the Catholic Faith”. You might think that Lemaitre, as a Catholic priest, would be pleased with this interpretation. On the contrary, Lemaitre wrote a gentle letter to the Pope, correcting him on his cosmology. Part of the letter reads:
 

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being...For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God...It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”(Selection of Lemaitre's letter to the Pope, as taken from Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, ed. Soter and deGrasse Tyson, 2002)

 
Why isn't the Big Bang “smoking gun” evidence for God? Because it is not the kind of beginning that theologians need. It's the limit of observability. It is the beginning of our current physics. But nothing about the Big Bang necessitates the sort of beginning that begs for a divine cause. That's why Lamaitre talks about the hidden God. If God did set off the Big Bang, evidence of his first creative act is forever shrouded from our instruments and theories.

New Theories and New Theologies

 
So where does this leave the cosmological argument?

If your pet argument for God's existence is the Kalam cosmological argument, I'm sorry to inform you that modern cosmology has rendered it pretty-much useless. If I'm able to write a future article for Strange Notions, I'll write about the Hartle-Hawking model, which gives the universe a definite beginning, but requires no outside efficient cause. Ignore the details for now, though. The implications can be clearly seen already from Lemaitre's Nature paper. If space and time themselves are just emergent properties from nature, nature itself can act as a cause outside space and time.

Now, here's some advice for the apologists and evangelists here who want to engage the scientific community: I think it in your best interest to avoid using the Kalam argument. Stick with arguments that don't rely on scientific misunderstandings. The Leibniz's cosmological argument is a good example.

Let me close this article with two thoughts. First, a Catholic priest came up with these revolutionary scientific theories, and did not find his faith challenged. This is strong evidence that the conflict between science and religion can be resolved, and that good scientists can be people of faith. Second, if you disagree with my conclusions here, remember that you are also disagreeing with a Catholic priest. This shows that not even Catholics need to be on the same side of this issue. The Catholic Church can be a place for considerable freedom of thought.
 
 
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