29 What IS an Atheist? (Part 2)

The second definition for atheism that we discussed last episode, that atheism is the claim that we do not have sufficient reason or evidence to believe in God, is meant to sidestep the problems we highlighted in the first definition for atheism, the assertion that God does not exist, allowing the atheist to neither assert the non-existence of God (which requires as Hitchens said, an “impossible” burden of proof), nor to acknowledge that atheism is itself a belief, a faith stance. In this episode we argue that the atheist is logically frustrated in BOTH these expectations, that atheism is necessarily a faith-stance, and that if it doesn‘t assert God‘s non-existence it isn‘t atheism at all, but agnosticism. Also, the question of God‘s existence is unlike other questions, as it is, indeed, as the atheist asserts, not provable from any perspective other than God‘s; the finite cannot contain or grasp the infinite. This question also stands at the highest level of explanatory choice. We choose to believe or not to believe in God, and our choice will necessarily affect all our other explanatory choices. For instance, start with the claim that God does not exist, and by logical extension there can be no evidence for God, just as the atheist asserts.