Eric writes:

Popular atheism in America celebrates versions of naturalism, materialism, empiricism, and so on, that are often based on weak arguments or even on no arguments at all. Popular atheism in America is already faith – and I’m sympathetic to the Christians who refer to it as such. Unfortunately, popular atheism is often just as scientifically illiterate and closed-minded as the worst Christianity. I love it when an atheist tells me that our universe is all that exists. I like to ask: How do you know? What’s your argument? And I have yet to meet a single atheist who can answer those questions.

Popular atheism is not a faith position.  What Eric is encountering are inarticulate, under-informed, or conceptually confused atheists (or maybe in some cases only atheists who happen to disagree with him).  But none of that amounts to adopting a faith, either implicitly or explicitly.  The salient connotations of the word faith, as it relates to manners of believing among modern Western religious people and as it is denounced by contemporary popular atheism, must be clearly distinguished from other instances of believing with no argument, or based on weak arguments, wrong arguments, or appeals to authority, etc.  Someone can be wrong or argue badly or defer to authorities without having an analogue of the kind of religious faith which is at issue in debates about the justification of religious beliefs and practices.

In this and my next posts, I will lay out some of the relevant features of religious faith which are crucially missing from popular atheist forms of belief  and whose absence makes accusing most atheists of faith a matter of false, unfair, and misleading equivalence.  The first point is simple:  Atheists explicitly reject faith as a source of justification for beliefs.

Now, just because a group denies they do something does not of itself mean they are not guilty of that very thing.  Atheists might still have some kind of implicit faith.  But in the case of robust modern Western religious faith, one of its distinguishing features is that it involves a willingness to explicitly, deliberately, and as a matter of virtue believe things which are under-supported by evidence or counter-indicated by evidence.

Often faith even goes an eggregious step further and involves a commitment to ignore or rationalize away all future counter-evidence.  The chosen nature of religious faith is an essential ingredient distinguishing it from other kinds of unstable beliefs and is one of the most important parts of the atheist critique of it.

Insofar as the contemporary atheist insists that faith is a vice and not a virtue, something to be rooted out of oneself rather than cultivated in oneself, she is already doing something different than the religious faith adherent.  If she is nonetheless guilty of shoddily apportioning her beliefs to evidence you can at least call her on that and by her own avowed principles she will be forced to either come up with better evidence, soften her commitment to her belief, abandon her position outright, or be charged with an intellectual/moral hypocrisy.  By contrast, if you point out that the religious person is not apportioning his belief to evidence properly but rather granting himself whatever beliefs he likes purely on faith his principles allow him to take this as a compliment!

In short faith of the modern religious kind denounced by atheists cannot be had by accident. It involves acts of volition which enable religious people to treat it as a matter of special commendation and justifies atheists in treating it as a morally culpable thing religious people have control to stop doing.  And I don’t know of any representative atheist types who would put volitional faith in the virtue category rather than the vice one.

To elide this fundamental difference in epistemic principles and equivocate by imputing to “faith” to both people is deeply unfair to the atheist.

But even if the atheist’s rejection of explicit faith is significant, might the average contemporary atheist have enough “implicit faith” to nonetheless be guilty of the charge of faith?   I think not.  But I will save my arguments against generally treating wrong, weak, and missing arguments as faith positions for other posts. I will also defend atheists against the charge of holding naturalism, materialism, and empiricism by faith.

Your Thoughts?

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For more on faith, read any or all posts in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion