The religion of atheism
There is one tremendous and widespread mistake about atheism: that is, that it is not a religion - that it somehow even opposes religion. Many of us, including many Christians, accept this claim implicitly, using the nouns "atheism" and "religion" as opposites.( Read more... )
However, I disagree with you that there is a difference between your assumption of atheism on the evidence - changeable on the production of more evidence - and faith. Faith does not mean believing the impossible - the proper word for that is "moronism". Faith means overcoming the doubt that is an inevitable concomitant when dealing with ultimate matters; a doubt which is first and foremost a doubt "of the instrument", that is of our own ability to properly assess such things and come to credible conclusions. How could such things as you or I comprehend the meaning of existence? Nonetheless, the question asks itself to us in a hundred different ways each day, and we make our decision based on our best possible understanding. Speaking as a historian, the evidence for Christianity is overwhelming, better than that for almost any historical event before the invention of the press. And if we trusted evidence implicitly, we would all accept the narratives that bring it to us. However, many of us do not; not for the failed nineteenth-century attempts to deny the historicity of the New Testament, but out of something much more basic of which the school of Tubingen is nothing but a modern outgrowth. It is not radical disbelief in God either. Nobody who is not a complete fool would deny that, assuming such a being as God, all sorts of supernatural oddities are perfectly possible, and that, on its own assumptions, the New Testament narrative can make sense. What really defies belief is that the narrators should really have meant what they said. The first recorded opponent of the Gospel narrative, Celsus, did not actually declare that the Gospels were an imposture or a legend; he challenged the witnesses. A Roman court, in his time, would never have accepted the testimony of a bunch of women (he relies pretty heavily on his contempt for female testimony), and it is pretty clear that it was the hysterical stories of the women that set off a firework of delusion and possibly deception among the disciples, deprived as they were of their leader. What this means is that to accept the Gospels as a historical source, as I do because of my work, is not enough: you also have to accept that that source speaks - what we call "Gospel truth". And that means relying on the testimony of other human beings like yourself. It is a "doubt of the instrument".
Oh, and with reference to my original first point - by "decently intelligent", I meant "anyone above the level of a vegetable".
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