Why Babies are Right to be Atheists

Exposing William Lane Craig’s confusions about atheism and agnosticism

Have you ever been in such a long argument with someone that you forgot what you were arguing about in the first place?

For centuries, theists and atheists have been arguing about whether God exists, and as late as the atheist Anthony Flew’s contention in 1976 about the logical “presumption” of atheism, there’s been confusion about what atheism is supposed to be. How can there be any resolution here if the two sides can’t agree on what they’re arguing for?

Worse than that, atheists seem to forget their position’s historical origin. It’s no wonder there’s confusion about the logical status of atheism, since “atheism” was originally a pejorative label assigned by proponents of some state religion. Christians were “atheists” relative to the Roman polytheists, and “pagans” and skeptics were “atheists” relative to Christendom.

The early theists’ rigging of the debate

So, imagine the ancient Romans got into a religious debate with the Visigoths who attacked their empire, but the debate was officially billed as being between proud Roman “polytheists” and so-called “barbarians.” That is, the Romans got to set the terms of the debate, so the Visigoths were saddled with the Romans’ pejorative label for them. In that case, we can imagine the Visigoths making the best of this odd situation and construing the meaning of “barbarian” in more neutral or favourable terms.

Still, the Visigoths likely couldn’t alleviate all the confusion because the pejorative connotations would linger and conflict with some more neutral understanding of what Visigoths believe. The source of this confusion would be the Romans’ rigging of the debate with this loaded interpretation of their opponents, and if the debate were to have gone on for centuries, the descendants might have forgotten this origin. Later generations of Visigoths might proudly wear the label “barbarian,” having redefined the word to their satisfaction.

“Barbarian” is like “atheist” in that sense. Educated Western nonbelievers in any religion call themselves “atheists” because that’s the tradition that started from an ancient rigging of the debate. Informally, the word “atheist” might make theism seem like the cognitive default because the word emphasizes theism and only negates it with that prefix “a-.” Linguistically, as it were, atheists, as such, cater to theists, not the other way around.

Suppose you walk into a Star Trek convention even though you’re not a fan of the show. As an outsider the fans might label you a “non-Trekker.” The fans identify personally with Star Trek so that within that environment, a “non-Trekker” is practically a nonentity. Those who aren’t fans are worthy only of a negative label. And if somehow fans of the show acquired the power to set the terms for discussing Star Trek throughout the society, the tradition might arise in which you were either a Trekker or a non-Trekker, there being no third option. And a non-Trekker would struggle to define some alternative identity, one that has nothing to do with the sci-fi television shows.

The presumption of atheism

Western history saddles critics of theistic religions with this loaded label “atheist.” But let’s see if we can clarify the epistemological issues, by interrogating the Christian apologist William Lane Craig’s discussion of atheism.

In “Definition of Atheism,” Craig argues against Flew’s equating of atheism with the logically neutral lack of religious belief that would make atheism like the nonbelief in gold on Mars. According to Craig, there’s no such presumption of atheism since this mixes up atheism with agnosticism:

For the assertion that “There is no God” is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that “There is a God.” Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does. It is the agnostic who makes no knowledge claim at all with respect to God’s existence. He confesses that he doesn’t know whether there is a God or whether there is no God.

When you look more closely at how Flew and his supporters were defining the word, Craig says, ‘you discover that they were defining the word in a non-standard way, synonymous with “non-theist.” So understood the term would encompass agnostics and traditional atheists, along with those who think the question meaningless (verificationists).’ And Craig quotes Flew as stating that this presumption of atheism rests on an “unusual” understanding of the word’s meaning.

In fact, as far as semantics goes, there was no such deviation from the word’s plain meaning since the Greek prefix “a-” means “not” or “without.” Thus, “amoral” means not evil but the lack of morality. A rock would be amoral.

But Craig thinks this neutral understanding of “atheism” that makes atheism a logically default position and that heaps a greater burden of proof on theists has absurd consequences:

Such a re-definition of the word “atheist” trivializes the claim of the presumption of atheism, for on this definition, atheism ceases to be a view. It is merely a psychological state which is shared by people who hold various views or no view at all. On this re-definition, even babies, who hold no opinion at all on the matter, count as atheists! In fact, our cat Muff counts as an atheist on this definition, since she has (to my knowledge) no belief in God.

The problem for Craig is that the prefix “a-” is indifferent to the historical origin of “atheism.” As I pointed out, the powers that prevailed in that earlier context loaded the word with a pejorative and therefore a non-neutral meaning. Atheists were supposed to be anti-Christians, for example, meaning that they were godless, impious, allegedly abandoned by God or misled by “demons,” and were “unsaved” threats to Christendom. The notion that atheists in that pejorative, pro-Christian sense would have the benefit of a presumption of innocence must offend Craig because of his Christian sensibilities.

Yet semantically, “atheism” has just such a neutral, foundational meaning. The trouble, then, is that the state religionists were lazy in the aspersions they cast on their opponents. They merely presupposed the importance of Roman polytheism or of Christianity and slapped a negative prefix on their cherished “theism.” Without thinking through the semantic implications of that word they constructed, being preoccupied with the presupposed negative connotations of being an atheist, those early theists set the stage for this turnaround.

Once the pro-Christian connotations faded into obscurity in the modern period, when Christendom lost its political power to dictate the contents of Western cultures, all that remained officially was the linguistic construct. So, if nature at large is “amoral,” putting the burden of proof on proponents of morality to establish the reality and worthiness of moral distinctions, the same can be said about atheism’s relation to theistic religions.

Need atheism be a view?

As for Craig’s worry that “atheism ceases to be a view” on this interpretation, remember that it’s the state theist who presupposed that atheism should be a view since that theist loaded the word’s meaning with pejorative connotations. For the state theist or propagandist, atheists are “barbarians” or demonically driven opponents of God. The substance of atheism was that atheists are evil, dangerous foreigners.

But of course, those pejorative presuppositions meant nothing to Visigoths or to skeptics or heretics who doubted the merits of official Roman or Chrisitan theologies. Why should a skeptic need a separate viewpoint, called “atheism,” when skepticism, empiricism, naturalism, pantheism, humanism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, or Neoplatonism suffices as an alternative to the one that the state favours?

It’s quite telling, then, that Craig thinks the “atheist” should be fighting to retain the substance of “atheism,” when that unflattering substance was provided by the atheist’s theistic opponents. On the contrary, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out repeatedly, atheism is as substantive a worldview as a-leprechaunism or a-unicornism. The implicit denial of these fictions would matter to the leprechaun or unicorn enthusiasts and their fan clubs, but there’s no reason why it should matter as much to the deniers. Why should those who dismiss the likelihood that leprechauns exist spend as much thought on the matter as the leprechaun enthusiasts?

Craig’s assuming that because God matters so much to theists like him, God ought to matter just as much to those who naturally dismiss nonsense as such. Critics of Christianity needn’t think of themselves as atheists. They can identify more substantively and with less historic bias as secular humanists, naturalists, materialists, skeptics, empiricists, liberals, Wiccans, nihilists, and so on.

But are babies, cats, and rocks sensibly called “atheists,” or would that be a trivialization of the denial of theism? And where does agnosticism fit into this? Let’s look at each of those questions in turn.

Why babies are atheists

Of course, babies are atheists since they’re without theistic beliefs. True, they have hardly any belief to speak of, but technically, according to the literal meaning of “atheist,” babies are plainly atheists. The only shift in meaning here is from the pejorative meaning of “atheist,” which suited ancient and medieval theocratic societies, to the neutral meaning that arose in modern, secular, more tolerant societies.

Presumably, babies aren’t atheists in the Christian’s pejorative sense since they’re not misled by demons, or they don’t consciously reject God out of sinful pride. Alas for Craig, that definition presupposes God’s existence so if that’s the sense of “atheist” Craig wants, he won’t find atheists willing to agree to use that label. Likewise, if the ancient Romans emphasized that barbarians were just the scum of the earth, they couldn’t have had polite debates with Visigoths in which the latter would have agreed to think of themselves as barbarians.

What would be the point of thinking of babies or even rocks as atheists? Granted, this would trivialize “atheism,” to some extent, in that babies and especially rocks might lack theistic beliefs only because they lack beliefs, period. But this broad, neutral sense of “atheism” nevertheless makes an important point, which is that atheism is the default because theistic beliefs are so patently outlandish.

Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, those beliefs were designed to be outlandish to act as tests of members’ loyalty to the religious group. You demonstrated your fealty by voluntarily sabotaging your critical faculties on behalf of the group’s leaders. In other words, you practiced the religion’s bizarre rituals and uttered its incantations, abasing yourself in something like the way initiates are accepted by their peers as fellow gang members or police officers only when the group acquires “dirt” on these prospective members, some incriminatory information with which to blackmail them. The weirder the religion, meaning the more farfetched its message and practices, the more you had to handicap yourself to join the group, and thus the more meaningful your demonstration of loyalty.

Why, then, should babies or cats believe a deity created everything? No such deity makes itself known to babies or to animals in their daily life, and no such concept is even intelligible to someone who isn’t used to fooling herself with casuistic sophistries and shibboleths.

It’s not just that babies have few if any beliefs since they likely have at least some implicit convictions. No, they’re atheists for the same reason they don’t affirm the existence of other kinds of crazy nonsense, which is that they have no social need to abase themselves in that way. They’re accepted into society because they’re adorable, or because humans evolved an instinct to deem their facial structure cute. Only adults with more complex interests could get themselves entangled in something like an organized religion with its self-sacrificial loyalty tests.

Babies are atheists for the same reason they’re a-unicornists. Babies have no occasion to affirm the existence of unicorns since there are plainly no such creatures. If unicorns were prevalent and had been somehow important to our species’ evolution, we might have evolved an instinct for recognizing them, in which case babies might be unicornists, after all. Babies might have been poised to accept that unicorns exist, so we could have said that at least implicitly they have some positive belief about unicorns.

But that’s not the world we live in. There are no unicorns galloping around, just as there’s no deity afoot. That’s partly why babies lack theistic belief, because such a belief is irrelevant to the rudiments of human and animal life. And that’s why adults should be atheists, too, or at least why there’s no logical deficiency in being an atheist. It’s because atheism is just a case of disentangling yourself from something that’s technically a preposterous rigmarole.

Sociologically, we can understand why there are religions; as I said, groups might need to test the members’ loyalty (just as Yahweh wanted to test Job’s faith). But epistemology (the study of knowledge) isn’t so forgiving to theistic religions.

The red herring of agnosticism

There is, therefore, a logical presumption of atheism because of the weird nature of theistic claims. Here there’s an important difference between the nonbelief in gold on Mars and the nonbelief in a deity’s existence. Craig puts the point this way:

If I have no opinion on the matter, then I do not believe that there is gold on Mars, and I do not believe that there is no gold on Mars. There’s a difference between saying, “I do not believe (p)” and “I believe (not-p).” Logically where you place the negation makes a world of difference.

The lack of belief about gods or Martian gold is supposed to amount to agnosticism rather than to atheism.

Elsewhere, I explain why agnosticism is a red herring that arose from Thomas Huxley’s scientistic confusions. But let’s try to assume a more reasonable kind of agnostic, namely one who affirms that some proposition has a 50–50 chance of being true.

Suppose, then, we don’t know whether there’s gold on Mars because we don’t know enough about that planet’s composition, and we haven’t gone out in space to look. Perhaps we could make an educated guess, knowing how gold is formed by rapid neutron capture in supernova nucleosynthesis or in the collision of neutron stars, either of which which distributes such a material more widely in the universe. Mind you, whether all the planets in our solar system have the same ores would depend on the interaction of many factors that would be hard for us to predict.

Yet in a developed society in the twenty-first century, even someone who lacked scientific knowledge would likely know that gold is formed and distributed across the universe in some natural way. So even if such a person wouldn’t know one way or the other whether gold happens specifically to be on Mars, this person wouldn’t be purely agnostic. This is because this person would think that, in principle, we could learn the truth of the matter. The question of gold on Mars is empirical since we understand what gold is, how it forms, and how it’s distributed.

Confessing that you don’t happen to have an answer isn’t the same as saying that no one has or could conceivably have the answer. Maybe you don’t know the name of the song that’s playing on your streaming service, so if someone says the name is “Trees were here first,” you’d have to confess that you’re still unsure. Maybe you’d think it’s a tossup as to whether that’s the song’s name, depending on how much you trust the other person’s knowledge of music. But you wouldn’t be agnostic on the matter since you wouldn’t think that song’s name is unknowable. Someone surely knows the song’s name, and if you had the right app on your phone, you could resolve the matter in the blink of an eye.

None of this is the case with theistic beliefs, however, so Craig’s attempting to stack the deck with his Martian gold analogy. The question of God’s existence isn’t empirical because “God” isn’t such a well-defined concept. If anything, God is explicitly supposed to be beyond science and reason, being an infinite, eternal, transcendent, inherently mysterious entity. So, it’s not just that you or I happen to be ignorant about some theistic issue. No one has those answers about God, nor any reliable method of determining the answers because of the special nature of this subject matter.

Think of Father Damien Karras’s line from the movie “The Exorcist,” about exorcisms: “There are no experts,” he says. Of course, there are no experts on exorcisms since an exorcism is supposed to be the removal of a demon from a person’s body, and “demon” isn’t an empirical concept. Neither is “god.” Clerics may hold themselves up as experts on theology, but that’s a matter of faith or tradition, not of reason.

Thus, ignorance about Martian gold isn’t like ignorance about God. We may happen not to know about the ores on Mars, but there’s a more principled reason for our ignorance about the supposed subject matter of theistic religions. If anything, we’re ignorant about whether God exists because “God” is a nonsensical, farfetched word. Here, then, agnosticism slides into that default of atheism.

We could travel to Mars to learn the truth about its possible gold. By the monotheist’s definition, we can’t travel anywhere in the universe to learn whether God exists. Those are two kinds of nonbelief, the latter being tantamount to atheism.

That is, we hold open the possibility of gold on Mars because we know what we’d be talking about in either scenario, whether gold is there or not. We understand “gold” and “Mars.” But aside from a social principle of charity that avoids offending religious folks with the stark truth, and in so far as we’re epistemologists trying to understand the nature of knowledge, we don’t hold open the possibility of God’s existence in that empirical or rational way.

No one knows what it would mean for a person outside of space or time to “exist” or to “create” a universe from nothing. We should lack beliefs about God for the same reason we should lack beliefs about patent nonsense. We shouldn’t be neutral about either subject because neither is intelligible. We dismiss babbled, harebrained blather just as we should dismiss theism.

And once the blather is duly dismissed, you needn’t think so much about it directly. In that case, you could be mistaken for an agnostic because you wouldn’t be preoccupied with denying that which is preposterous. You could seem open-minded because usually you’d be thinking about other, more realistic possibilities. But this openness would be illusory, and you’d be an atheist rather than a neutral agnostic since if that nonsensical subject of theism were brought up, you’d be quick to assume skeptically that it’s not a live option.

Why atheism is the modern cognitive default

Craig thinks this talk of treating atheism as the default position — of shifting the greater burden of proof to theists, as a punishment, as it were, for wasting outsiders’ time with gibberish — is a “deceptive game.”

If atheism is taken to be a view, namely the view that there is no God, then atheists must shoulder their share of the burden of proof to support this view. But many atheists admit freely that they cannot sustain such a burden of proof. So they try to shirk their epistemic responsibility by re-defining atheism so that it is no longer a view but just a psychological condition which as such makes no assertions. They are really closet agnostics who want to claim the mantle of atheism without shouldering its responsibilities.

But this is the pot calling the kettle black.

First, early theists in theocracies stacked the deck by imposing a pejorative label, “atheists,” on skeptical outsiders. Then, when theocracies turned into liberal republics, theists have tried to befuddle their opponents by alleging that the denial of nonsense requires just as much proof as the advocacy of nonsense. As if the possibility of unicorns, Spiderman, or Harry Potter magic were as reasonable a contender for being actual as the chance of gold being in Mars! And as if theists don’t take themselves out of the running for rational respectability by defining “God” as a giant miracle to insulate their religion by avoiding the possibility of decisive refutation.

No, there’s no unfair presumption of atheism here by treating “God” as nonsensical. The theists themselves treat God as nonsensical, as in supernatural and literally incapable of being sensed — or understood, explained, or controlled. That’s the nature of theism itself, not a pejorative atheistic reading of theistic claims.

As theistic religions evolved, and philosophy and science gained ground, theists had to assume that the gods, angels, and demons had fled nature since they were apparently nowhere to be found. These archaic entities became inherently mysterious, as thinkers realized these entities were evidently beyond nature and our capacity to rationally explain them. Blaming atheists for that eventual dubiousness of theism is like shooting the messenger. It was the discovered nature of outer reality that made theism increasingly improbable and confusing.

And if non-Christians, for example, must mount an elaborate case to justify their rejection of that religion, then no one is rationally justified in rejecting any preposterous gibberish unless they, too, mount a comparable case. That’s false, though, since in the context of the twenty-first century, educated folks are rationally justified in dismissing theism out of hand for the same reason they dismiss farfetched conspiracy theories, childish twaddle, or archaic myths. Theists take their beliefs out of the running by depriving them of empirical content, and by turning them into sheer shibboleths.

Of course, that’s very far from saying, with Craig, that no devastating case for atheism could be launched. Indeed, that case has already been put on the table. In academic circles, it’s known as the history of modernity. The Western case against theistic religions was prosecuted in philosophy, science, art, and politics. Wars were fought over the matter, and the default shifted historically from Christian theism and medieval theocracy to skepticism, scientifically established naturalism, and liberalism (freedom of thought, democracy, and capitalism).

If you want that case for Western atheism, read a standard textbook on the history of European thought that covers the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries CE.

Oh, and if you’re skeptical of theistic religions and you’re weary of the confusions brought on by the fraught word “atheist,” why not dig through that history for more substantive and relevant concepts, such as “skeptic,” “naturalist,” “pantheist,” “humanist,” “existentialist,” “nihilist,” “pragmatist,” or “liberal”?

Problem solved.

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