Atheism Has to be a Creed. It Just Has to Be!

One of the more popular myths about atheism is the idea that it's some sort of ideology, philosophy, religion, or creed. Some religious theists just can't understand how atheism can be anything less than that; in fact, some are so much in denial about what atheism is that they will go to great lengths to insist that it must involve some set of beliefs, assertions, and ideas about the world which is analogous to their own.

Alan Roebuck writes:

...the atheistic apologist says, “Since my position does not posit the existence of anything, it is the default position. The burden of proof falls on the theist to prove a God exists, and if the proof fails, I am justified in my unbelief.” The atheist then finds what he regards as flaws in each theistic proof, and believes his position is justified.

Professional atheistic organizations have apparently deliberately chosen this approach within the last 20 years or so. They presumably do this because they think it makes their job easier, and because the word “atheism” still sounds bad to the public they want to influence.

Here we quickly see one of the main problems that can be found in most of attempts by religious apologists to criticize atheists and atheism: an almost complete lack of familiarity with the subject matter. With a bit a research, Alan Roebuck would have learned that atheists have been defining atheism as simply the absence of belief in gods since at least the mid-18th century and standard dictionaries have reflected this since the late 19th century.

So this conception of atheism is by no means a recent creation; however, it's easier to denigrate atheists by presenting them as doing something unethical in order to achieve a tactical advantage in debates. Of course atheism still sounds "bad to the public" — people like Alan Roebuck continue to influence the public to think badly of atheists and atheism. How ethical is it, though, to raise arguments against atheism which are false and which would be demonstrated as false with just a bit of research on the matter?

Moreover, how ethical is it to presume to instruct atheists on what atheism "must be" in order for it to meet one's own preconceptions:

But atheism has many weaknesses. Its main weakness is that man cannot live by the proposition “no God exists.” Man, being man, needs general principles to guide him, the most important of which are principles that tell him what is real and what is not (metaphysics), what knowledge is and how it is attained (epistemology), and what is morally right and wrong (ethics).

Therefore, atheism requires additional beliefs in order to be a livable creed. In order to avoid blatant irrationality, atheists must be metaphysical naturalists, meaning they believe that only physical objects and their properties really exist. Epistemologically, atheists are empiricists, believing that all knowledge comes to us from our five senses. And in the realm of ethics, atheists believe either that morality is relative to the group (the less popular position, because it discredits atheism by implying, for example that murder would not be wrong if society in general held it to be not wrong), or else that moral principles evolve along with the human race.

Alan Roebuck is correct that people generally need some sort of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. They may not have all this systematically worked out or think about their beliefs in these terms, but they do have such categories of beliefs and attitudes. Where Alan Roebuck goes wrong — and egregiously wrong at that — is his insistence that all this must be subsumed under "atheism." It never seems to occur to him that a person might have a metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics as part of a belief system or ideology which is not "atheism," but which atheism might be part of.

Not only is this possible, it is in fact the reality for all atheists. Atheism is not an ideology or philosophy any more than theism, but like theism it will be found as part of a variety of belief systems. It is the belief systems which must be compared and contrasted because there is so little content to either theism or atheism alone. Just because atheists have various philosophical and ideological beliefs doesn't mean that all of those beliefs are part of atheism itself.

It is not true that "atheism requires additional beliefs in order to be a livable creed" because atheism is not any sort of creed and the only people who try to treat it as such are religious apologists like Alan Roebuck who refuse to engage actual atheistic belief systems like humanism, Objectivism, existentialism, Buddhism, etc. Instead, they only choose to attack "atheism," which I put in quotes because instead of attacking atheism as it really exists, they attack a Straw Man which they create in their minds and invest with all manner of beliefs and attitudes which they find easiest to criticize.