That Word "Atheism"

Let's face it: for many people the word atheism and related terms are off-putting. It's been freighted with so much baggage over the centuries that for a long time people were reluctant to claim the label. It's understandable, and I'm happy that has changed.

It's been a favorite insult even when it was incorrect. Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, a "filthy little atheist." There was just one three problems: Paine was immaculately clean; he was tall; and he (like many of the founders) was a deist. TR wasn't a stickler for facts apparently.

Since believers from time immemorial have thought that without God morality is impossible, the conclusion followed that atheists were amoralists -- good and bad were not among their concerns. (Of course the error is in thinking that God is or could be the source of objective ethics.) Let's recall the time when atheists couldn't testify in court because no greater power bound them to tell the truth.

Who'd want to be known as an atheist if everyone around you took that to mean amoral libertine?

But that's not the only reason the word was shunned.

Take Benedict Spinoza. He was repeatedly accused of being an atheist. He was excommunicated from the Dutch Jewish community in 1656 apparently for his heretical views. (He did not object.) But he denied the charge of atheism. Now that will seem strange if you ignore the historical context, 17th century Amsterdam, which at the time was the most liberal place in the world. Spinoza equated God with nature. (Deus sive natura is his famous Latin phrase). While Spinoza's Ethics is full of God talk, he makes no secret of believing that God is simply all of natural existence and is not a nonmaterial conscious agent who creates universes, issues commandments, listens to prayers, performs miracles, and otherwise intervenes in human affairs. Spinoza also insisted that man has no immortal soul and showed that the Bible could not have been divinely dictated to Moses or anyone else.

For Spinoza, who was perhaps the first true liberal and a devout advocate of freedom of conscience, God is nothing more than the natural world, full stop. Nature, he said, has this in common with the conventional God: it is eternal, self-sufficient, the uncaused cause of all things, and necessary. But there the resemblance ends. I'll cut him some slack because of his milieu, but it would have been easier on us if he had dropped the God talk.

So, after all that, why didn't Spinoza want to be known as an atheist? Steven Nadler in Spinoza: A Life (2018) explains:

Spinoza was always deeply offended by the accusation that he was an atheist. Responding to Lambert van Velthuysen's attack on the Theological-Political Treatise, and his denunciations of Spinoza as "teaching sheer atheism with furtive and disguised arguments," he accused Van Velthuysen of having "perversely misinterpreted my meaning," and protested that his critic should be ashamed of leveling such a charge again him. "If he had known [what manner of life I pursue] he would not have been so readily convinced I teach atheism. For atheists are usually inordinately fond of honors and riches, which I have always despised, as is known to all who are acquainted with me."

That's his reason! He wasn't a shallow materialist (in the nonphilosophical sense), so how could he be an atheist? But, you ask, what's that got to do with atheism? Good question!

Because of the bad press, many people even in our time try to avoid the word atheist. Nontheist has been tried, and I have no objection to it. More popular, however, is agnostic. Here I do have a problem.

Word of course change, and there are no platonic definitions permanently recorded somewhere in the clouds. But still we know what Thomas Henry Huxley, a promoter of Darwin's work, had in mind when he coined the term. The Gnostics claimed to know the supernatural. Huxley wanted a label to distinguish his position from theirs -- hence, agnosticism. He said:

[Theists and atheists] were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis," [knowledge regarding spiritual mysteries] -- had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. [Emphasis added.]

For Huxley, then, agnosticism referred to knowledge (of the supernatural) and not belief. An agnostic in Huxley's sense says it's impossible to know 1) that God exists and/or 2) what God's nature is. Agnosticism is not a third way between theism and atheism; it's not fence-sitting. In fact, a theist could be agnostic with the respect to the nature, if not the existence, of God; some important Jewish and Christian theologians of the Middle Ages fall into this category. (I see problems with that position, but let's leave it for another day.)

At any rate, atheism is a perfectly good word for anyone who does not believe God exists and for anyone who believes God does not exist.