I consider myself an infant when it comes to my philosophical stature, but I continue to find it extremely fascinating. This semester I enrolled in a Philosophy of Religion class because it was obviously a topic that interested me and, to be honest, I wanted to refine my arguments so that I could shame my theistic friends for their beliefs. I felt that religious belief was totally irrational and unreasonable; you could say that I entered the class an unfriendly atheist. What I have taken from the class however has been surprising.

William L. Rowe is one of the authors of the textbook we are using in that class. He is a philosopher and atheist and is a professor emeritus at Purdue University. There is an article of his in the book that discusses a few forms of atheism. Rowe points out that there are three ways that an atheist may view the theist. First, “the atheist may believe that no one is rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “unfriendly atheism.” Second, “the atheist may hold no belief concerning whether any theist is or isn’t rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “indifferent atheism.” And last, “the atheist may believe that some theists are rationally justified in believing that the theistic God exists.” This he calls “friendly atheism.”

To clarify, it may be good to point out that Rowe does not say that the friendly atheist accepts the theistic belief as true, but merely that the theist is not irrational in his or her beliefs. It may also be good to point out that he is discussing the rationality of religious belief and not the reasonableness of theistic belief. A distinction can be seen in an example: an individual may rack up tons of debt because he/she is planning on winning the lottery to pay it off. Yes these thoughts may in the strictest sense of the word be rational, but they are certainly not reasonable.

But here is where it becomes a little tricky. For in this case, both parties are privy to the same information yet they come to different conclusions. Can both be rationally held? Or must one be irrational by necessity? Rowe believes the former. Another author in a separate article in the book uses an example in science. Can two researchers be studying the same scientific question and come to separate conclusions and both be rational in their decisions? It seems that they can.

Rowe then goes on, “What sort of grounds might a theist have for believing that God exists? Well, he might endeavor to justify his belief by appealing to one or more of the traditional arguments: Ontological, Cosmological, Teleological, Moral, etc. Second, he might appeal to certain aspects of religious experience… Third, he might try to justify theism as a plausible theory in terms of which we can account for a variety of phenomena.”

Again, it is irrelevant whether or not you believe these arguments to be true, when considering their rationality. Rowe believes that the arguments put forth by theists are false, but he also thinks the arguments can be rationally held by the believer. He would therefore consider himself a friendly atheist, and I am inclined to agree with him at this point. I am still an atheist, but I no longer look at all religious people as morons. Hopefully I didn’t slaughter Rowe’s argument too much in my interpretation. But anyway, I figured I would toss this out to all of you to see what your thoughts were on the matter.

How do you view religious belief? If you are atheist, are you friendly or unfriendly?

This may well amount to blasphemy on the SHAFT blog, but I have never really found ‘New Atheism,’ as represented by Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., to be very convincing or appealing. To be fair, by many standards, I am a pretty lousy atheist: I have a soft spot for theology; I am skeptical of any attempt to enshrine science or pure rationality as the determiners of truth; and I have doubts about whether rationally proving God’s nonexistence is possible.

But for me, The God Delusion and similar books essentially present atheism as a negation. They leave me feeling like I did when I first abandoned theism: the feeling that something had been lost; that the numinous had been emptied out of the world; that, rather than a newfound freedom to create a new way of living, I now found myself having to conform my beliefs and actions to a strictly rational, materialist worldview, one which seemed little less stifling than the God I had left behind.

It is with that caveat that I mention Hubert Dreyfus’ and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining, published earlier this year. Its project is probably best described as ‘post-theism’: Dreyfus and Kelley attempt to create a secular practice of living—a religion, if you will—where the sacred erupts in moments as diverse as examining an artwork or watching a baseball game.

Part of what makes their argument fascinating is the way it reclaims much of western culture and even religious thinkers for secularism: from Homer to the Gospel of John to Martin Luther, Dreyfus and Kelly draw on theistic thought while giving it a secular, decidedly nontheistic spin—a method I think is preferable and richer than dismissing it all out of hand. The book, based on their popular undergraduate class at Berkeley, is intended for the general readership, and is somewhat cursory in its argument. Despite that limitation, and some quibbles about their interpretations of Nietzsche, I found the book exhilarating—for me, it was the most thought-provoking book I have read on atheism since Martin Hägglund’s.

It also left me wondering, however, if these two strands of atheism—with the ‘post-theism’ of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida on the one hand, and the ‘rational atheism’ of Hume, Russell, and the ‘New Atheists’ on the other—are starry-eyed apples and glowering oranges. Do they merely serving different purposes, or are they actually incommensurable?

What do you think, SHAFT-ers?