Is Atheism a Religion?
#atheism was trending on Twitter because somebody asked if atheism was a religion.
My response: “Because it’s trending: I don’t think atheism is a religion. It’s just ‘no’ to the question ‘Does God exist?"‘ Naturalism (philosophical atheism) is not a religion either, though it functions as a sort of quasi-religion in attempting to answer many questions that religions do.”
My thought was this should be an easy point of agreement on both sides — but nope.
One response was unexpected: Somebody claimed to be a naturalist but not an atheist. Unusual? Yes. Almost always we hear somebody can be an atheist without being a naturalist, but that nobody can be a naturalist without being an atheist.
After all, if we are taking Graham Oppy’s understanding of the matter, for a worldview to be naturalistic it must satisfy the following criteria:
Natural reality exhausts causal reality.
Mindedness is late and local.
Nothing is divine.
3 commits the naturalist to atheism but arguably 2 does as well, assuming it makes sense to speak of God as minded or mind-like. Naturalism is, what Paul Draper calls, source physicalism; matter before mind, if you like. This is not the major point of this post; it’s just interesting for somebody to call themselves a naturalist but not an atheist.
Back to the point.
Somebody objected to my characterization of naturalism by saying, “Religion involves a communal, transmittable body of teaches and prescribed practices about an ultimate, sacred reality or state of being that calls for reverence or awe, and a body which guides its practitioners into what it describes as a saving, illuminating or emancipatory relationship to this reality through a personally transformative life of prayer, ritualized meditation, and/or moral practices like repentance and personal regeneration.”
But as anybody whose tried to figure out just what religion is, they no doubt have come to appreciate that the term is vague and that definitions like the above are contested and arguably counter-exampled. Hence my qualification of saying it FUNCTIONS as a sort of QUASI-RELIGION.
What interests me is simply this. Naturalism answers similar questions as religious systems. For example: God, life after death, humanity’s place in the grand scheme, etc. The naturalist often answers these questions quite differently than the religious person but they nevertheless overlap. This strikes me as obvious and non-controversial. But to each their own.
Later, somebody else said, “There's more faith to believe in the nothing that created something -- then it takes to put faith in a Creator with intelligence and design evidenced in the something that exists.”
Two problems: Suggestions like these often equivocate on faith (the faith of a Catholic is much more theologically and conceptually rich; it’s not just believing in something under-evidenced or less-evidenced than another position); plus, it’s not clear that religion demands faith as an essential element (back to the definition problem). So, even if this suggestion were correct, I don’t think it’s enough to classify atheism or naturalism as a religion.
I think atheism and naturalism are false. I don’t, however, think they count as a religion.