Consequences of Atheism, Part 1

I just thought I would point out some of the effect that atheism has had in terms of committing "any atrocity against humanity you like." ... I am not saying that this sort of thing [Auschwitz, Hitler, Stalin, the "killing fields" of Cambodia is the inevitable outworking of atheism. St Augustine said that it is not wise to judge a philosophy by its abuse.

This is a response to an argument against Christianity which was based upon the connections between Christianity and violence. Very common in such responses is the attempt to portray atheism as being no better than Christianity, thus either demonstrating an essential flaw in such an analysis generally or at least proving that atheists have no "moral highground" from which to criticized Christianity.

The first error in such a rebuttal, and one made here, is the premise that atheism is a "philosophy." Quite simply, atheism is not a philosophy. It is not a theology, it is not a religion, it is not a worldview, it is not a way of life, it is not a metaphysical position, it is not an political position... it is none of the things that it would need to be in order to argue that anything, which human evil or human good, might flow from it. Atheism is merely the absence of belief in gods - whether passive disbelief, active disbelief, or even active denial.

What this means is that nothing in particular necessarily flows from atheism. There are some positions that are commonly associated with atheism, or at least atheists in the West, but that has a lot more to do with the Western culture and traditions behind science, skepticism, and freethought than it does with atheism per se.

The author here, Dean Mischewski, almost acknowledges this when he writes that "I am not saying that this sort of thing is the inevitable outworking of atheism" (where "this sort of thing" is a reference to a list of atrocities committed by people like Hitler and Stalin, but which I have not quoted here), but he should have gone all the way and written that *none of it* is an outworking of atheism, period.

Because atheism is not a philosophy, there is nothing to "abuse." It isn't an abuse of atheism for an atheist to be a mass murderer or a police officer, a con artist or a nurse. The reason is that no particular moral, political, metaphysical, or epistemological positions naturally "flow" from atheism. Every position, every belief, every attitude is compatible with atheism except for the belief in the existence of any gods.

Dean, however, thinks that certain positions naturally "flow" from atheism because of some presumed consequences he attributes to atheism when it comes to ethics and morality, but as I'll show he is wrong on all counts of his attempted analysis of atheism.

This piece is offered as a rebuttal to the "Religion and Atheism" article written by Dean Mischewski. Part 2 will appear tomorrow.

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