{"id":10711,"date":"2011-05-09T19:52:19","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T19:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/09\/are-atheists-theologians\/"},"modified":"2011-05-09T19:52:19","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T19:52:19","slug":"are-atheists-theologians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/05\/09\/are-atheists-theologians\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Atheists Theologians?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This from a reader:<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m e-mailing you with this question because it\u2019s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. \u201cCan atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) of it?\u201d Many atheists think that studying theology would simply waste their time, whereas I now think that no rational person\u2019s atheism is complete without engaging with the best theology on offer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well of course you are right:  any atheist who does not engage with a sophisticated conception of God is simply attacking a straw man and may be ignored for that very reason.  I see little point is discussions with atheists who liken God to a flying spaghetti monster or a celestial teapot<\/a>.  Let them first show that they have mastered the complexities of a sophisticated God conception, and that they have respect for, and some understanding of, the religious sensibility, and then we will talk with them. If they polemicize, or are disrespectful or dismissive, then they are best ignored.<\/span><\/p>\n

My own position is that atheism is a kind of rival theology (atheology?), just as every disbelief is a kind of rival belief, and that no atheist can rationally afford to ignore theology.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here you have to be careful.  Suppose S disbelieves that p.  (For example, Jones disbelieves that Osama is dead.) It does not follow that Jones believes that ~p.  For it may be that S neither believes that p nor believes that ~p.  If one neither accepts nor rejects the proposition that Osama is dead, then one could be said to disbelieve that Osama is dead without believing that he is alive.  So there are two modes of disbelief with respect to a proposition p.  Either one believes that ~p or one suspends judgment with respect to p.  So I don't agree that every disbelief is a kind of rival belief.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, every atheist is implicitly a theologian. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believes that God is simple, and Richard Dawkins believes that God is complex. Dawkins and Aquinas seem to compete in the same arena and talk on the same subject, so aren\u2019t they both theologians, albeit rival ones? Further, every informed atheist must hold that the arguments that are meant to establish the existence of God fail. To think this is to engage positively with theology. Not<\/em> to think this is to fail to rationally found one\u2019s atheism. An atheist who is ignorant of theology, in my view, is rather like someone who disbelieves in the planets but is ignorant of astronomy. Atheists who do not take God and theology seriously do not take their own atheism seriously either.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here again you have to be careful.  It is not as if there exists an x such that x = God and that Aquinas and Dawkins have contradictory beliefs about this one entity, x.  They are not disagreeing in the way two theologians might disagree over say,  divine foreknowledge or the filioque<\/a>, or divine simplicity.   These theologians disagree, not about the existence of God, but about his exact nature.  By contrast, Aquinas and Dawkins are not presupposing a common subject matter about whose attributes they disagree.  So it is highly misleading if not outright wrong to say that Aquinas and Dawkins are rival theologians.  For Aquinas, theology has a subject matter; for Dawkins it does not.  So they do not "talk on the same subject."<\/span><\/p>\n

It helps if you distinguish concepts of God from God.  For Aquinas, there really is an entity which some of those concepts are concepts of, even though no concept could be adequate to the divine reality.  For Dawkins, however, nothing that could reasonably count as a God concept is a concept of anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think you have the right idea, but you are putting it in the wrong way.  You are right that serious and intellectually responsible atheists must address themselves to the most sophisticated conceptions of theists.  In this sense they must "engage positively with theology."  But that is not to say that "every atheist is implicitly a theologian."  Atheists deny the existence of God.  So for them there cannot be any theology, any study of God, as a legitimate inquiry into a domain of reality.  And please note that one can deny the existence of God without in any obvious way presupposing the existence of God.  How?  In the same way one denies the existence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  One cannot predicate nonexistence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  But one can predicate noninstantiation of the concept winged horse of such and such a description<\/em> without presupposing the existence of Pegasus,  And so it is with the denial of God.  The atheist simply claims that no God concept is instantiated.  So I deny that atheism is a species of theology.  It is a rejection of all theology.<\/span><\/p>\n

I also deny here<\/a> and here <\/a>that atheism is a religion, though I grant that it is like a religion in some ways.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This from a reader: I\u2019m e-mailing you with this question because it\u2019s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. \u201cCan atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) … Continue reading “Are Atheists Theologians?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-and-theism","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}