Why I Am Not An Atheist

I suppose the obvious answer to the question, “why am I not an atheist?” would be, “because I’m a Christian”. That would be perfectly sensible. But the fact is that I was not always a Christian. For the first 23 years of my life I was definitely an unbeliever.

I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, in a culture where everyone went to church, every home had a copy of the Bible, and everyone acknowledged that Christianity was ‘our’ religion, that we lived in a Christian country.

But this did not mean that everyone believed in Jesus, or even that everyone believed in God. Most people paid lip service to Him, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of them that I knew whom I would consider to be true believers, to whom God was real and Jesus was their Saviour.

Society today is, perhaps, more honest, in that no-one pretends to be a Christian if they’re not really – unless they want to get out of jail early, or get a lighter sentence before they go in!

So, I was surrounded by unbelievers, and was one myself, but I couldn’t say that I was ever what you would call an ‘atheist’.

Perhaps I should learn from the philosophers and begin by defining some terms, so that we all know what I’m talking about.

1. DEISM. A ‘deist’ (from the Latin ‘deus’ meaning ‘god’) is someone who believes in the existence of a god, or gods, but not in a revealed religion. There is a ‘higher power’ that created the universe, that created life, but does not interact with their creation in any way. So there is no concept of ‘knowing god’ or ‘learning from god’ in deism.

2. THEISM. A ‘theist’ (from the Greek ‘theos’, meaning ‘god’) is like a deist in that they believe in a god or gods, but, unlike the deist, they believe that god does take an interest in the creation and does interact with it to influence events and even engage with people at some level.

3. POLYTHEISM. A ‘polytheist’ (from the Greek meaning ‘many gods’) believes that there are multiple Gods rather than just one. Hindus are polytheists, having three main gods (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) and a multitude of others. Pagan religions tend to be polytheistic, with a god for just about every aspect of daily life – a god of love, a god of war, a god of communication, a god of thunder, a god of the sea, and so forth.

4. MONOTHEISM. A ‘monotheist’ (from the Greek meaning ‘one god’) believes that there is a single god. The three great monotheistic religions in the world are (in order of age) Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity is a development of Judaism, so the two worship the same God (Jehovah) and share a holy book (the Jewish Torah, which Christians know as the Old Testament). Islam shares some of the stories from the Torah, but its god, Allah, is not Jehovah.

5. ATHEISM. An ‘atheist’ (the Greek ‘a’ prefix indicates negation) believes that there is no god, there never was, and there never will be. Unlike the deist, who believes that the universe was created, the atheist believes that the universe came into being without the involvement of any external force or influence.

   However, there are two different types of atheism.

   The first one I am going to call ‘religious atheism’, which is a belief system which contains a supernatural element of some kind but does not recognise a supreme being as such. The best example of this is Buddhism. Popular Buddhism involves the worship of supernatural beings, but pure Buddhism does not. The ancient Chinese Taoist religion, similarly, acknowledges what we might call spiritual principles which must be observed, but no divinity to be worshipped, feared, or obeyed.

   The second type of atheism I am going to call ‘secular atheism’, which is what we normally think of in our secular, liberal, humanistic, democratic societies. In secular atheism, anything which is not a part of the physical universe does not exist so, by definition, god cannot exist.

6. ANTITHEISM. This is a term which is not often used, but antitheism is quite widespread. An ‘antitheist’ (where the Greek prefix ‘anti’ indicates opposition) is someone who is opposed to the very idea of there being a god. Communism is an antitheist belief system. Many scientists are antitheists, such as Professor Richard Dawkins, who is so opposed to belief in god that he writes books about it.

7. AGNOSTICISM. An ‘agnostic’ (from the Greek ‘gnosis’ meaning ‘knowledge’ with the ‘a’ prefix indicating negation) is someone who maintains that it is not possible to know whether there is or is not a god. The term was coined by T. H. Huxley, who said that it is not possible to know anything except as the result of scientific enquiry. Many people, myself included in days gone by, would claim to be agnostic because they don’t know whether a god, or gods, exist, but true agnosticism means not that you don’t know, but that you cannot know.

8. UNBELIEF. I’m using the term ‘unbeliever’ to mean someone who doesn’t believe in god, and frankly doesn’t much care whether there is one or not, since the existence or non-existence of a higher power, of whatever description, is, to them, an irrelevance.

The belief system that I am addressing in this article is secular atheism, which I will refer to simply as ‘atheism’. If I make reference to religious atheism, I will do so by using both adjective and noun.

So let’s get started by asking, “what’s the problem with atheism?”