Defining Atheism.

Today’s news carried a small report on the public debate between Tony Blair and the Canadian atheist Christopher Hitchens. From what I can gather, it seems the main issue was whether religion is a force for good in the world, or a justification for committing every atrocity known to man. This is an interesting point to argue, and I should think the balance of historical fact is very much in Hitchens’ favour. The point I want to make, however, is that it was billed as a ‘debate on atheism,’ and I think it illustrates how vaguely the term ‘atheism’ is used, and how it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of spirituality.

As I understand it, ‘atheism’ literally means ‘declining to acknowledge the existence of God.’ This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable viewpoint, since the existence of God can’t be proved. Indeed, it has to be the default position of science in its present form, even though individual scientists are perfectly free to believe whatever they like. The problem is that people don’t always use it that way. Three other ‘definitions’ spring to mind:

1) The intractable opinion that any belief in God is delusional.

2) The opinion that material reality is the only form of reality, and nothing can exist beyond it.

3) The opinion that organised religion is nothing more than a means of controlling the masses and should be done away with.

These three are widely different concepts and, even though any one or all three of them might be right, they shouldn’t be covered by the use of a single noun. If you do that, the whole issue becomes fudged, there follows confusion and narrow-mindedness, and the result is pointless conflict.

I think the problem stems from the fact that, at least here in the west where we’re taught the simplistic truisms of the Judaic tradition, people fail to make the distinction between three different aspects of the subject: God, religion, and spirituality.

Let’s be clear about something: God and religion are not inseparable. I suppose the best example of this is Buddhism, which does not teach the concept of a single, individualised creator God. When Buddhists use the word ‘God,’ as they occasionally do, they mean something very different from the notion held by Jews, Christians and Muslims. There is no place for the Jewish God in Buddhism, or any other creator God for that matter. This is why I’ve occasionally heard western commentators refer to it as an ‘atheistic’ religion. And yet Buddhism is rightly regarded as one of the world’s major religions because it addresses the issue of what lies beyond the material realm and how we should best prepare for a higher level of existence.

Conversely, it’s perfectly possible to believe in, and pray to, the creator God as taught in the Judaic tradition, and yet have nothing to do with any organised religion. In short, it’s possible to disagree profoundly with the first of my three alternative definitions, whilst totally agreeing with the third.

Spirituality, of course, is something else again. This is a broad concept that isn’t easy to define, and it varies from person to person. To keep it simple, I would say that it is fundamentally the conviction that material existence is only one level of reality, and that there is some point in seeking to discover what the other levels are and how the ‘inner’ aspect of human life relates to them. As such, it’s easy to accept that a person can be highly spiritual, and yet have no truck with either God or religion.

It’s this complexity that so many people fail to understand. For more than fifteen hundred years, Western Europe has been the centre of Christendom, and Christendom has never permitted choices beyond its own narrowly-defined parameters. The issue was simple: you were either a Christian or a heathen. There was no other way, and fifteen hundred years of conditioning can still be discerned in the simplistic view so many people have of the big question: ‘Is there more to being than life?’

Things are changing now, of course. We live in a secular society which brings problems of its own, but at least we don’t burn people to death simply for wanting to take a more fundamental view of Jesus’ supposed teachings. We’re free to choose between atheism, agnosticism, any of the organised religions, or a spiritual path of our own individualised design. And yet I still hear people ask simplistic questions like ‘Do you believe in God?’ and ‘What do you think of atheism?’ I can’t answer those questions in simple terms. All I can do is delve deeper by posing the challenge ‘Define God’ or ‘Define atheism.’ Only when the definitions are cleared up can we begin to get somewhere.