Atheism, Naturalism, Skepticism, Rationalism, Radicalism, and Inquiry All of these words represent aspects of how I define my orientation to the world, and all of them are consilient to my understanding of the world. Atheism properly refers to the absense of a belief in a deity or deities. It is distinguished from agnosticism—the term “agnostic” was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869—primarily by the concept of “knowability” or “intelligibility.” It is important to realize that agnosticism and atheism are not in any way mutually exclusive. A so-called “negative atheist” may have no positive belief in a deity, and yet still claim that it is “impossible to know” whether or not some sort of deity exists somewhere. Positive atheism, in contrast, usually asserts that the very concept of deity is problematic—that the traditional understanding of what a “god” means embodies ideas which are self-refuting, self-contradicting, confused, absurd, or even ridiculous. Contrary to recent media proclamations about the “new atheists”—usually identified with some or all of the “Four Horsemen”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom have written fairly popular, bestselling, and notorious books on the subject—most atheists historically have been pretty strident in their beliefs, whether or not they have tried to proselytize this fact. The first people to “proudly” (albeit often clandestinely!) call themselves “atheists” were among the radical “philosophes” of the 17th-to-18th centuries in Europe, whom Jonathan Israel has framed in several important books on the subject as “the radical Enlightenment”, as opposed to the “moderate, mainstream Enlightenment”. To the surprise of many, I imagine, Israel’s delineation of the latter group includes many thinkers who have been seen as the very heart of “radicalism” in the Enlightenment traditions: Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant, for example. None of these individuals considered themselves “atheists”. Neither did Spinoza, who was considered for many decades the source and inspiration of atheism itself. What the early self-avowed atheist radicals—notably Diderot, d’Holbach, and Condorcet—had in common was an intimately-coherent worldview which embraced the rejection of all sorts of nonsense: religion in particular, autocracy and arbitrary authority in general, injustice and inequality of any kind, and so forth. Anything which could not be justified by reason and natural morality was to be rejected. Most atheists historically—though not all—have been at least *methodological* naturalists. Naturalism can be the rejection, in principle, of the concept of the supernatural, but the vast majority of naturalists historically have been methodological, not metaphysical, naturalists. As such, methodological naturalists reject nothing in principle, but cleave to the methods of the natural sciences in particular—and, ultimately, to the canons of rational inquiry in general—as being the most firm bases of any sorts of inquiry into the actual existing things which make up the substantive world. Interestingly, anything which appears to be supernatural at first glance, but is substantively demonstrated to exist in some form or manner, ceases to be supernatural in this view. If ghosts (or gods, or leprechauns, or sasquatches, or reptilian extraterrestrials) turn out to be supported by solid evidence, then they would instantly become facets of everything (else) that exists, and therefore parts of nature—perhaps requiring some rethinking of what nature in substance is. In this sense, naturalism is a monistic worldview. Spinoza was in fact considered the archfiend atheist because he was the first person in the radical rational tradition to argue that the entire universe *must* be made of the same sort of stuff. If not, then how could the various parts of alternative natures even interact with one another? Which is where skepticism comes in. Skepticism is the approach which requires all concepts to be supported by evidence. Carl Sagan popularized the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but, honestly, most skeptics would reject any positive concept devoid of evidence. There is, of course, a sort of radical skepticism which has haunted the entire Eurocentric philosophical tradition, calling into question even the bare concept of “evidence”. From ancient Pyrrhonism to once-trendy postmodernism, adherents of this sort of view tend to reject positive concepts, period, asserting instead some form of relativism, subjectivism, or idealism in the place of any substantive realism, and therefore denying that “truth”, “reality”, or “the objective world” actually pertain. This sort of skepticism has been quite common in combination with, and is perhaps necessary to, many different religious and “spiritual” worldviews which may or may not actually have any investment in the concept of a specific deity or deities, including most so-called Eastern and “alternative” approaches to ontology, psychology, and medicine. But it is foreign to many traditions of Confucianism, say, or certain formulations of Buddhism, and perhaps itself can be rejected on empirical grounds. No one in actual practice seems to be skeptical of his or her actual existence, however, so perhaps empiricism is redundant in refuting “radical” skepticism. Arguably, it is self-defeating, as can be seen in a reductio ad absurdum: “Nothing is true.” Is this statement true? “Everything is false.” If so, then . . . not so. Rational inquiry, seems to be the only alternative to what Noam Chomsky has called a reduction to “primal screams.” Without accepting some basis for assertions, all assertions are literally moot (or even pointless), as are all attempts to improve, change, or even survive the ubiquitous antagonisms which arise without prior accedence in our common experience of the universe. I think Conan the Barbarian said it best: “Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.” Not knowing “ultimate” truths and “hidden” realities, we seem to be stuck with muddling through the proximate world that I, at least, believe that we do inhabit. In some fashion or other.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 22:43:15 +0000
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