Mailbag: Atheism & Rationality

From: "ESSSA"
Subject: Are Atheists Rational?

Are atheists rational and theists irrational? Are atheists open-minded and theists closed-minded, or are there closed-minded atheists and open-minded theists?

Mailbag: Atheism & Rationality

The answer to both of these questions is definitely no: atheists are not necessarily more rational than theists and not all atheists are more open-minded than theists. This is true both generally and when it comes to the more specific issues of theism and religion.

First, it is entirely possible for atheists to hold beliefs for irrational reasons - just because a person is an atheist doesn't mean that they suddenly start being perfectly rational in all spheres of life. Indeed, a theist might have more rational beliefs and be more open-minded when it comes to something like politics or astrology than an atheist.

Second, even if we limit ourselves to the subject of theism and religion it wouldn't be true to assume that atheists are always more rational than theists. We must keep in mind that the label "rational" or "irrational" here is a function of the means by which the belief was arrived at - not the belief itself. A person can arrive at a true belief through irrational means while another person can arrive at a false belief through rational means.

Thus, even if we assume that atheists are all correct and theists are all incorrect, it's entirely possible that a theist has arrived as her position rationally (she may have started with information she didn't know was incorrect) while an atheist has arrived as his position irrationally (he grew up with atheism and simply accepted it because his parents did - he never really thought much about it).

It might be easier to understand this by considering the analogy of a murder. Two detectives might arrive at two different conclusions about the identity of the murder - one is correct and the other is incorrect. The one who is correct arrived at his conclusion without examining the evidence very much and simply jumped at the first suspect whose name came up. The one who is incorrect made a careful examination of the scene and reaches a different conclusion, not realizing that a couple of key pieces of "evidence" were actually dropped earlier by careless police officers. Which of the two is more "rational"?

I'd argue that the second detective is more rational for making more of an effort to examine the evidence. It's not his fault that some key evidence is faulty - and although he is wrong in this case, I think that we'd all feel more comfortable with detectives like this than with detectives like the first one. This first detective may be right, but only by chance - in this case, being correct isn't a function of using the best possible methodology. Given that regardless of the quality of the evidence and reasoning we use, we will sometimes be wrong, our best bet is to insist on the best possible methodology - and it is the use of the best possible methodology which differentiates a person who is being rational from one who is not.

Do some atheists succumb to the same tendencies towards arrogance as theists do? What is the difference between the self-righteousness of a religionist and the feeling of intellectual superiority of an atheist? Isn't it all just a bunch of people up on a high horse?

There are quite a few arrogant, self-righteous atheists out there - and that's really sad because they simply don't have anything to be arrogant and self-righteous about. It's always been my experience that the atheists who are most arrogant are also the one who are most obsessed with atheism itself rather than the reasons why a person might be an atheist or a theist. For them, the only thing that matters is having the "right" conclusion (atheism), regardless of how one gets there.

But "atheism for atheism's sake" is really quite pointless. Atheism, by itself, has no real value - there's nothing about lacking a belief in gods that makes a person superior to others. Atheism only acquires any significance and value when it is embedded within a general philosophical program that promotes reason, skepticism, and critical thinking. There is no sense in promoting atheism outside of skepticism and critical thinking; promoting atheism does not mean also promoting skepticism and critical thinking (it's possible to be an un-skeptical and un-critical atheist).

Note: This message originally appeared in the Agnosticism / Atheism forum. Read the whole thread. More selections from the Agnosticism / Atheism Mailbag...