Conversation on Atheism, Part 4
Today we continue a conversation about atheism. Atheism is burdened by being an idea focused on negation — it doesn’t state what exists but rather what doesn’t. It is an unlikely foundation for community, ideology, or political activism to grow from, yet it seems to have become just that. While freethought has a deep tradition in philosophy, the direct connection between the personal rejection of the divine and social and political change are rarely investigated. In this series Todd and Nathan discuss how they found atheism, what they found when they began to connect with other atheists, and what they think the role of atheism ought to be in the future.
Dr. Nathan Alexander received his Ph.D. in history from the University of St Andrews (UK) where his research focused on the intersection of freethought and the construction of race. His latest book is Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914.
Previously we discussed our religious backgrounds and earlier experiences in the atheist community and the forces that shape a secular society. Below we continue by examining the changes becoming atheist brought to our personal outlooks and how we changed.
Todd: In part three you ended with thoughts about the greater responsibilities atheists might have by expanding from secularization into concepts of social justice, in particular racial inequality. This is also a big part of your work as a scholar. How has atheism shaped your views on matters of inequality? How has becoming an atheist informed your moral or ethical code?
Nathan: The interesting thing is that I don’t think my atheism has actually informed my political/ethical views very much at all. When I was younger and still a Christian, I was fairly conservative politically. Embarrassingly, I was opposed to aborton and same-sex marriage and I supported, for example, the invasion of Iraq (not that it really mattered what I thought as a Canadian teenager!).
Those views became more liberal throughout my time at university, but this came about generally through learning more about history and thinking more about different ethical issues. So I grew more liberal even though I still remained a Christian. The shift to atheism therefore happened after my political shift.
I have moved further to the left — to some kind of social democratic view — since my “deconversion” but I have felt that this was mostly unconnected to atheism. Or, rather, that it’s difficult for me to identify which views, if any, emanate directly from my atheism.
One thing I would say is that my religious shift did involve placing primary importance on reason and science to inform political and ethical views, but again this is somewhat upstream from the views themselves.
How about you? What role has atheism played in shaping your political and ethical views?
Todd: It is amazing that you and I end up in the same place despite traveling in different directions. It seems we have both noticed that atheism doesn’t necessarily dictate left or right politics. I think I was always a leftist politically, but atheism has had a pretty big effect on developing my politics and ethics anyway. One impact would be that the process of becoming an atheist showed me that no one is in charge of the universe. Learning that there is no master plan, that God doesn’t have some great outcome that we are building towards, is difficult and can be scary. But as a result I was better able to accept that the world has randomness and ambiguity, that the world can follow reason and chance and that coincidences can be just that. This definitely helped me wrestle with teenage solipsism and got me to a point where I was comfortable saying “I don’t know,” about world events. If you have talked to anyone about Obamagate, Pizzagate, or the Murder of Jeffrey Epstein, one thing you never hear is “I don’t know.” For the conspiratorially minded everything is knowable and there is always a mastermind at the top pulling strings. Removing an omnipotent being from my worldview pointed me away from seeing mysterious, unseen powers as the force of the universe and towards learning from evidence and reason while accepting contingency and that some things are not or cannot be known.
Morally, I think the first thing I realized was that in the absence of God, the laws of God must have been written by people. That really ruined universal morality for me in the sense that all people do or should recognize the same things as “good”. Although I wouldn’t have any philosophic study of ethics until after undergrad, the groundwork was already there for a worldly ethos. Atheism gave me the understanding that what we are told are eternal truths or moral laws handed down from the heavens are really just rules people made up in a far away land a long time ago. It explained why people were different and made it okay that they were. It also meant that we were responsible for the way we lived, and we have the power and right to change it, something I find religion deprives us of.
Earlier in our conversation it came up that atheism doesn’t have a political program. Above you said that you use science and reason to inform your politics and ethics. How did you come to a different conclusion about abortion and same-sex marriage? I am curious as to how religious thinking differs from using reason and history to allow people to come to new conclusions about morality. Was it difficult to change your mind?
Nathan: It’s a good question and I think maybe one could say that actually these changes on ethical/political issues were part of the same process in which I changed my mind on religious issues.
Let me take the same-sex marriage one, since I really don’t remember my past views on abortion in detail. My past views on the same-sex marriage question are quite embarrassing now, not least because my mom is actually now in a same-sex marriage (with an Anglican priest no less!). But at the time, I can remember writing an essay in university in a political science class arguing against it. My view wasn’t based in any kind of bigotry towards gays and lesbians, but I simply argued that the term “marriage” already had a definition of one man and one woman, and that to alter that definition was wrong. I thought gay and lesbian couples should have exactly the same benefits as any heterosexual married couple, just that it shouldn’t be called “marriage.”
So perhaps this position was not extremely conservative at the time (i.e. I didn’t think gay people were sinners, etc.). But I changed my mind soon afterwards because I realized that I could not never really come up with a good argument why the definition of the word shouldn’t be changed. In the essay, I think I had just argued: you can’t change the definition! Why? Well… you just can’t, okay!? So I began to see the weakness of this argument and I began to see that this only had the practical effect of depriving gay and lesbian couples of full equality. (And in any case, my understanding now is that the definition of marriage was more complicated than just being “one man and one woman” historically.)
So this change on that particular issue happened maybe a few years before I became an atheist. In hindsight, it might therefore be possible to say this was part of the same process of stripping away views informed in some way by religion.
On that issue, like with giving up religion in general, there is that period of cognitive dissonance that you feel when you see some good arguments against your view, but you haven’t fully accepted them yet. And then gradually you begin to recognize that these are serious challenges to your view and then you slowly change your mind.
How about you? Are there any issues where you have changed your mind? And what was the process like?
Todd: I think that is a really rich example. One thing that jumps out to me is the power that was inside the definition of marriage. That definition was largely Christian and groups in society worked incredibly hard to remove the power to define things from church authorities. It is also both a collective struggle and an individual one inside our own heads.
Western society does have a lot of carryover from religious practice that has become so normalized that seems natural. Marriage is a social construct that can and does take many shapes, religious indoctrination made it seem like that is the way it always was and had to be. I think you showed that reason provides a way towards change and new possibilities.
One issue where I have changed my mind is eating meat. I am not a vegan — I will sometimes eat meat if someone offers it, and will very occasionally buy a meat-based meal — but I never eat animal products at home. It’s been a big change. When I lived in Korea I would have Korean barbecue with friends every other week and ate a lot of fried chicken. Since returning to the US meat consumption is something that I have questioned the necessity for and plenty of research and evidence shows that it is not necessary. Research and evidence also show that meat production is inherently harmful to earth and presents plenty of associated risks. But my own response is still loaded with a lot of judgement at guess even though it has been guided by reason and study. It isn’t easy. Mostly it has been a process of figuring out what’s best.
Very often I feel turning down meat is similar to speaking out against the existence of God. People have similar reactions, one as a judgement or moral evaluation against them and another as an assault against tradition. But for me I think that initial move of removing God was what allowed the freedom to make other changes, or even just to contemplate them. Has atheism influenced the way you think about those smaller parts of daily life, habits like diet?
Nathan: As I think about this conversation so far, I’m realizing that it’s really difficult for me to select out a particular view and pinpoint whether or not atheism impacted it. In the case of eating meat, actually I am the same as you. I really enjoyed eating meat (woo, Korean BBQ!!), but now I never cook meat, though once in a while I might order it at a restaurant or eat it at someone else’s house, and in general I would like to reduce my consumption of animal products as much as possible.
This is something that has developed in the past few years for me. Has atheism contributed to this? Directly, I would say no. But then it seems impossible to distinguish atheism from the rest of my worldview, since a worldview is, for the most part, holistic, in that someone’s ideas in one area influence their ideas in another. I definitely think the fact that humans and animals are all related (namely that we all share a common ancestor), that animals can suffer and we should try to reduce that suffering, that it’s important for us to take care of the environment, etc., are in some ways related to an atheistic worldview, at least for me, but they don’t necessarily follow logically from atheism.
As a historical aside, I’m not sure if it’s true that atheists have been vegetarians more often than Christians, but I do think it’s the case that atheists in general have been more willing to experiment with other non-mainstream beliefs/practices. So perhaps a related trait of being an atheist is being less conformist or less attached to tradition than others, and this could, for example, lead one to be more willing to consider something like vegetarianism. (This is something I discuss with regard to race in my book — shameless self-promotion!)
Todd: I think you really hit on something there with the notion that atheism is a holistic worldview. It exists as a worldview that gives us maybe a process, but not dogma. There aren’t any foundational moral texts, there are no shalls and shants, but there is a definition of how the world is, and a method for how we ought to understand and exist in it. When we discuss vegetarianism we aren’t arguing over interpretations of passages from Genesis or whether dominion over the animal kingdom should include factory farms. There is room for discussion and rational discourse inside a religious worldview, but there are limits and usually a clear moral template. Atheists are unbound by such moral restrictions.
It is a good point that atheists develop moral and ethical positions that are less attached to tradition. The inherited foundation of a clear moral program gets potentially washed away once you reject religion unless another can be found through reason. I can see how this would allow us to experiment and find new beliefs without any predetermined outcome. There is a logic that suggests individual atheists would be more likely to investigate ethical eating, but nothing to suggest that all atheists would come to the same conclusion. Atheists could just as easily determine it is more rational to maximize meat consumption. It is almost a freedom limited only by observed outcome. Is that what you found historically in your studies?
Nathan: I think you’re right. An atheistic worldview allows for an exploration of options without predetermined parameters for correct answers, as in for example Christianity. I think this is what we see historically as atheists take a range of different views. On any question, no doubt you can find a diversity of opinions from different atheists. But the fact that atheists are not bound by tradition often leads, I think, to them being able to take positions that were ahead of their times, for example on things like democracy, women’s rights, anti-slavery, and so on.
This was something I found in research for my book on historical atheist attitudes toward race as well. It was true that some atheists expressed conventional views that we would today call racist, but there were also those atheists who pushed back against such ideas, arguing instead for racial equality and cultural pluralism.
Todd: One point you’ve stuck to throughout this conversation is that we need to use reason to come to conclusions about how the world operates and what we should do. In your studies, did you find that freethinkers, even when they came to racist or racialist conclusions, used reason? Did you find other arguments, such as appeals to nature or tradition for instance?
Nathan: Yes, I think even when they came to racist conclusions, they used reason and science, or at least the language of reason and science. One example springs to mind. This was from a 1903 editorial written by Eugene Macdonald, the editor of the Truth Seeker, the major freethought newspaper of the time.
In this editorial, Macdonald criticized the idea of giving blacks the vote and in general equal rights. As he said, “It would be as reasonable to enact a statute against the thunder and lightning as one proclaiming the equality of the white and colored races.” He also said that racial policy should come from the “sociologists” and not from politicians. So, for him, racial inequality was simply a scientific fact that it would be irrational to deny.
This means that using science and reason, or at least thinking one is using science and reason, does not inevitably lead to the “correct” view. There is a difficulty in saying something like, “if you don’t arrive at the same opinion as me, obviously you weren’t being rational.” But I do think there are truths out there that we can at least approach by using science and reason, although maybe that is a topic for another day!
