Note: Once again, I’ve hit the email length limit. Click on the title at the top to read the whole, uninterrupted piece.
In my last post, I talked about the social media META for philosophy of religion and how atheists get more undue criticism than theists. One of these unfair criticisms is lacktheism.
Lacktheism is a kind of atheism where one identifies as an atheist because they merely lack belief in a God or because they suspend judgment over the existence of God due to a lack of good evidence.
Christian apologist YouTube channels like Capturing Christianity really hate lacktheism and will try to get any philosopher of religion they interview on record to disavow it. Heck, even agnostic Joe Schmid and atheist Graham Oppy say it’s bad.
Now, far be it for me to contradict a bunch of thinkers who are smarter than me, especially in the philosophy of religion, but these criticisms came off as elitist.1
Of course the philosophers of religion will reject a philosophical framework that halts discussing specific philosophical claims. It’s their job to discuss specific philosophical claims! Lacktheism, for various reasons, has high standards of evidence, and wants to minimize suspension of disbelief, while the practice of philosophy is about suspending disbelief for as long as possible to examine an entire argument. Of course this perspective would be kicked out of the room of a philosophy conference.2
Having said that, what I want to argue in this post is that lacktheism is a valid perspective to take on religious questions for historical, pragmatic, social, and sociological reasons. If you identify as a lacktheist,3 you can continue to do so and be justified on these grounds. Don’t let obnoxious Christian apologists bully you into taking another position.
Lacktheism Has Historical Legitimacy
Whenever I hear some Christian Apologist or philosopher of religion wag their finger about how lacktheism isn’t a valid philosophical perspective, my subsequent thought is “So we’re just arbitrarily dismissing Greek philosophers such as Pyrrho of Ellis?”
Ancient philosophers had problematic, often false teachings, but you can find plenty of people who identify as Aristotelian or Platonic today. We don’t wag our finger and say “that’s not philosophy!” at Agnes Callard.
Anyway, Pyrrho was a radical skeptic who didn’t believe we could know anything, and rejected the idea of holding beliefs period. The reasons why are interesting and more complicated than what you’ll get from a wikipedia scan, but also too complicated to get into detail here. What’s important is that Pyrrho thought we couldn’t know anything, but holding beliefs was detrimental to our ataraxia or tranquility. Put differently: suspension of belief is a great strategy to not get yourself worked up about something you can’t know for certain either way.
Did Pyrrho run around identifying as an atheist? I don’t think so, but his ideas about suspending judgment on matters we don’t have good evidence for4 is a clear influence on contemporary atheism and skepticism.
Obviously, this isn’t a philosophy to adopt to discover quantum mechanics and it would be more annoying at a philosophy conference than the one time I did Model UN in high school, didn’t prepare, and showed up at the UN Security Council as Cuba and just criticized everything America did. But that doesn’t make lacktheism philosophically invalid! It just doesn’t make it academically interesting. That’s totally fine!
In a social context, you look like a total jerk when you dismiss lacktheism just because it’s not to the level of rigor of academic philosophers, as we don’t smugly reject other ancient philosophies, especially if we consider Chrisitanity an ancient philosophy.5
Do you know how many social and religious philosophies originate from the ancient world and for the most part are unchanged in their general ideas today? Stoicism is a good example. I find many stoic beliefs bad or unreasonable, but enough people hold them that they have social validity. It’s not enough to say “that’s not a serious philosophy.” You have to engage the people who follow it where they are. Saying that these ideas wouldn’t go far at a philosophy conference, and therefore it’s not legitimate, is immaterial.
You don’t have to get your PhD to hold a philosophical position or for it to be considered a valid philosophical position. After all, most people hold positions that philosophers consider uninteresting, wrong, or thought-terminating. Maybe professional philosophers object to lacktheism, but they also object to many things non-philosophers (and other philosophers!) accept as true. I would imagine some of them, out of principle, object to Christian apologetics as good philosophy,6 even if they themselves aren’t rabbid atheists.
If we play this game of “my philosophical expert doesn’t like that,” I would bet you’ll come to find Christianity is a little outgunned in philosophy outside of philosophy of religion. My point here is not to dunk on Christianity, but to say Christianity is still valid! Let’s extend that charity to other schools of thought, especially if they have historical precedent.
There are Pragmatic Reasons to Accept Lacktheism
I can already hear some people typing away that the difference between lacktheist internet commenters and the low philosophical sophistication of religious people is that the former actually claims to be philosophically sophisticated.
That’s fair! But I actually think these lacktheists are more philosophically sophisticated than they’re given credit for, even if that level of sophistication isn’t at a PhD level.
I sense the frustration theists have with the lacktheist approach is that it narrows the scope of conversation and evidence one can use in a discussion. For example, a theist may use a specific miracle as a point of evidence for God’s existence (or something similar), and the lacktheist would retort that they couldn’t prove the miracle and so they reject the evidence.
This is a valid position for the skeptic to take and the theist is just whining. Sorry!
Having said that, lacktheists precluding some data points as valid points of evidence doesn’t shut down the conversation altogether. Most lacktheists I watch online, for instance, do not bring up lacktheist objections to argue against the Kalam, design, and other traditional arguments for theism.
So, contrary to this apologist frustration,7 lacktheism does not prevent you from arguing your case, it just narrows the ways you can argue it. Some would say this is tilting the rules in favor of non-theism or lacktheism, but I disagree. I’d rather have these norms than alternatives when arguing about the existence of God, because I’d rather have them than others in most other domains of my life.
Call it Occam’s Razor or Hitchens’ Razor, I don’t care, I don’t want to accept conclusions without evidence! “Not accepting positions that don’t have good evidence” is actually a good philosophy to live by!
Indeed, if you peruse the musings of physicists like the late Carl Sagan, you’ll find they adopt quasi-Pyrrhonist perspectives, not unlike the lacktheist. Here’s one quote that stuck out to me on a recent re-read of The Demon Haunted World.8
“Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?”
-Carl Sagan
Or this YouTube Short I stumbled upon:
Again, Capturing Christianity or Joe Schmid may not like these epistemological models when it comes to philosophy of religion, and maybe these norms aren’t optimal for fostering maximally productive or interesting conversation in that field.
But still… these models will be useful for pretty much every other aspect of your life! You’ll protect yourself from getting scammed and you’ll make good decisions based on the best available data. Because most decisions and information processing you’ll do in your life will have better, more concrete evidence than the God of classical theism.
Philosophers of religion and Christian Apologists hate it when atheists use this reasoning because it’s “Scientism.” I’m sympathetic to those criticisms, but those criticisms don’t address the point that rigorous scientific methodologies are useful and more applicable than much of the reasoning implemented for classical theism.
In this way, the methodologies of lacktheism are practical. Though lacktheism doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll adopt the scientific method, if you adopt scientific methodologies with rigorous standards of evidence, you’re more likely to accept lacktheism. As I prefer more people accept scientific methodologies with rigorous standards of evidence, I also prefer more people identify as lacktheists.
There are Social Reasons to Accept Lacktheism
Why did so many people, on the internet or otherwise, adopt a lacktheist definition of atheism? To answer this, we have to look at the history of the internet, New Atheism, and the Religious Right.
To start, I’m going to look at Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra, two popularizers of lacktheism, and usually aforementioned in lacktheist discussions. Here are some things they have in common:
They live in deep red, deeply religious Texas,
They’re Gen Xers,
Neither of them has formal philosophical training,
They started commentating on religion when Christianity was much more hegemonic in the culture than it is today
They got popular on the internet during the late Bush and early Obama years.
As far as I can tell, Dillahunty and Ra9 are smugly looked down upon by theist and agnostic content creators who are younger, more philosophically trained, and who grew up in a less religious or fundamentalist political atmosphere. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but I don’t think these young critics realize what the lacktheists really represent.
Namely: religious people used to be much more socially powerful and unhinged than they are today. Lacktheism was as much a social position as it was a philosophical one.10 Everyone seems to think the atheist movement started with a couple Oxford-educated boomers with British accents during the Bush administration, but there have been out atheists in America for decades.
People also tend to think that atheists always want to be debated. That was true when the New Atheists came along, popularized atheist talking points, and when religious influence on public discourse seemed particularly dangerous. The prevailing New Atheist contribution to culture was emboldening atheists to not be shy about what they (didn’t) believe.11 They stood up, spoke up, and flooded the internet with their edginess. In the culture sphere, I think they won, even if they’re hated today. The rest is history.
Still, I suspect that most atheists pre-New-Atheism wanted to be left alone. And when they first voiced their objection to religious norms or religious-based policy being shoved down their throat, they got an abundance of bad arguments.12
Lacktheism thus likely came about when philosophically-adept people were pestered by philosophically ignorant people. The adept wanted to give the ignorant a good enough argument so they could be left alone. It probably worked for a long time, but because atheists themselves were so rare, it didn’t stop the growth of preening religiosity. Eventually, religious people pushed things too far politically with the religious right, the New Atheists came along in response, and lacktheism became popular.
The norms of lacktheism still exist today, and it’s an unmitigated good. Instead of telling millions of people to enroll into a philosophy class to rebut your high school classmate who can barely read, it gives you the tools to signal “leave me alone, you’re likely incapable of changing my mind.” Sure, it comes off as smug, but it serves a vital social and political function, which is to raise the standard of evidence that we make collective decisions.
For instance, if you can’t prove that atheists are evil outside of quoting a scripture and an unhinged theologian, maybe there’s no good reason to support prayer in school, especially if it’s outweighed by the risk inflaming sectarian violence.
Even with the cringeworthy New Atheist memes, the social norms of religious conversation are so much better now and I wouldn’t go back to what they were 15 years ago. You don’t have to explain to anyone why you do or don’t believe in Christianity (or anything!) and it’s great. No one will badger you at community meetings or passive aggressively send you apologist tracts. They just leave you alone! It’s peaceful!
There are Sociological Reasons to Accept Lacktheism
Another reason lacktheism is a valid expression of atheism is because there’s something substantially socially different from agnostics and atheists. We’ve all seen this chart before:
It’s a bad chart because it’s useless. If you think agnosticism is just a measure of certainty, it’s really just a litmus test of one’s humility, and that just so happens to only to measure the atheist’s humility. The proper answer for both theists and non-theists is to be agnostic, as most epistemologically humble people would say we can’t be 100% certain of anything.
But for some reason we only hold atheists to that standard of humility! If someone says they’re a Christian, we don’t ask a follow up question of whether they’re agnostic or not. Their “certainty” is socially permissible. Meanwhile, if an atheist denies being an agnostic, we say the atheist is intellectually arrogant, claiming to know something he likely doesn’t. As a result, many atheists13 back off from the atheist label and just claim that they’re agnostic.14
The problem with this is that it makes it hard to draw sociological differences between atheists and agnostics. You may double count or inflate the number of agnostics, while people who identify as atheist may over-represent the most radically anti-religious.
Lacktheism ameliorates this problem because people’s identity is usually not based on their epistemology, but instead their group affinity. For instance, we wouldn’t say that someone isn’t a Christian just because they don’t have the beliefs that certain Christians say are Christian. We take them at their word. The people who identify as Christian will likely act in a certain way, more in common with Christians who (epistemologically) believe differently in a certain way, than those who don’t identify as Christians at all.
In this way, lacktheism is valid because it helps sociologically categorize the strength of non-theistic conviction and communicates different non-theistic life’s philosophies, while a simple agnostic/atheist paradigm does not.
In my experience, atheists are less likely to pray, identify as spiritual, or engage in any religious practices. That’s because they typically have a philosophy that resembles empiricism, naturalism, or something similar that leads them away from spirituality. They actively won’t do these things because they think they’re a waste of time. They’re more likely to be lacktheists.
Meanwhile, agnostics and religious “nones,” (again, in my experience) will be more open to these spiritual practices, and say something more along the lines of “I believe in God, I’m just not a Christian,” or “I believe in spirits.”
The lacktheist label helps us differentiate between these groups. We can distinguish between someone like Stephen Woodford of Rationality Rules, Joe Schmid of Majesty of Reason, and that chick you went to college with who’s really into crystals and identifies as spiritual, but not religious. Lacktheism elucidates the differences of belief, behavior, and community of these three different people.
Again, it seems really silly to not do this unless you are attached to a narrow, dogmatic definition of atheism. It’s like being a Catholic and saying there are Catholics (who are Christian) and there are non-Christians and there are no other relevant categories. We’d obviously say this is a silly, useless way of categorizing people.
Conclusion:
Lacktheism is fine.
If we say it’s okay for a random person to identify as a Stoic or a Christian on social and historical grounds, we should extend the courtesy to an atheist embracing something resembling Pyrrhonism or Popperian epistemology.15
Pragmatically, we should look at the fruit of people practicing this epistemology in their decision making. If it’s effective for most aspects of life, who cares if its insufficiently curious for a philosopher’s taste?
Socially, the prevalence of lacktheism raises the standards of religious claims and thus shields everyone else from bad social norms informed by religious dogma.
Sociologically, lacktheism as a group category is a great dimension to understand non-religious behavior.
The More Important Question: Are Most People Who Identify As Lacktheists Annoying?
I find many of the most popular proponents like Aron Ra to not be my cup of tea.16 This has nothing to do with his lacktheism, but because there are annoying atheists and theists alike.17
For theists who get frustrated interacting with lacktheists online, I would just recommend not doing it. It’s what atheists have done with the dumbest theist interlocuters for the longest time. It’s a proven strategy! The block button does wonders!
If you’re going to complain that these people are generally philosophically unsophisticated, I would challenge you to change your approach. They have a philosophy, and if you sincerely want to try to change their mind, you need to engage them on their terms.
Maturity in philosophy and life is realizing that everyone has strong beliefs, and sometimes they’re irrational. You can spend your time whining about their irrationality, pushing yourself to meet them on their own terms to persuade them to your position, or just not argue. The first option is the most annoying.
If you think the reason you are annoyed that this person is irrational and has strong belief is that person, you’re wrong. People being silly, stupid, or annoying is a brute fact of humanity. The problem is you! Your expectations of changing everyone’s opinion (and they all clap) are unreasonable!
Change your expectations, accept people where they are, and don’t argue with strangers on the internet, and you’ll go far. That’s not just true in philosophy of religion, but of life in general.
Now, when I say this, I’m not trying to conflate a political argument with a philosophical one. It may be the case that the philosophically correct position is also politically incorrect!
I’m not surprised that philosophers of religion reject lacktheism for the same reason I’m not surprised that most government bureaucrats probably reject libertarianism, that most epistemologists aren’t skeptics, that most theologians are religious, or that most philosophers aren’t theists. These occupations select for the kind of person that pursues particular solutions to specific problems. As they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The subject matter profession is the hammer in search of nails, so the people not looking for nails are going to be less common. But that doesn’t mean that hammers are the only solution!
As I dive back into studying skepticism and epistemology, I’m increasingly sympathetic to lacktheism. I’m not a theist, ut I also don’t buy stronger “there is definitely no God” arguments. I’m also not an agnostic! As we’ll see in this post, these definitions really push practical boundaries.
Admittedly, the skeptic probably thinks the category of “things we don’t have evidence for” is more narrow than Pyrrho did. But still!
Which, by the way, I do!
For example, I don’t think most epistemologists think highly of apologist epistemology or appeals to scripture, nor do philosophers of science with creationism and efforts to discredit naturalistic evolution, etc.
Admittedly, I could be getting this wrong!
Roast me for being a stereotype, I don’t care!
I’ll admit that I like Dillahunty and find Ra cringe. They both have “resist lib” tendencies, but sheesh, Ra is so much worse than Dillahunty. He’s more rhetoric than substance *in my opinion.*
I would not call lacktheism a social movement, but I do think the lacktheist methodology spread throughout culture so pervasively that it may as well have been.
I will die on the hill that this was net positive. Because the atheists have shut up recently! And their norms persist! I’ll take that over bad pro-religious norms and religious people who won’t shut up when it comes to moralizing and proselytizing
You don’t even have to be an atheist to understand this. Just have two relatively prominent religious groups interact with each other. If you’re a minority among the majority, you’re going to be hounded by some quite dog shit arguments and you have to endure them frequently.
Including Richard Dawkins
FWIW: I think the dynamics I’m highlighting here are known by non-believers of a certain age and so people are becoming more likely to drop the agnostic label.
We can be annoyed too! But I don’t think it’s cool to have YouTube videos saying “Hey Christians stop being Christian” or something similar, which is basically what these creators are doing toward atheists/lacktheists.
His video series on creationism is a classic though!
Someone cross-examine how to launch Cross Examined into the sun, somehow
Great post! I still find myself thinking that lacktheists are just confused though. My general diagnosis is that lacktheists implicitly hold to a form of infallibilism but *only* about the religious domain, or closely related examples. The lacktheist will typically think that they can know things like whether their car is in the driveway, but once you turn to religious examples they'll ask for 'proofs' and 'irrefutable demonstrations.' This is also basically why I think the chart that gets circulated that you include here is super confused, because it implies that anyone who is a fallibilst about knowledge is agnostic about almost every proposition which just doesn't align with how the term is used (in my view). Agnosticism normally describes a view that considers the evidence to be, on balance, roughly equally forceful, or the position that one hasn't considered enough evidence to substantially count in favor of either side of the dispute. I don't think either of those characterizations include the implicit infallibilism the lacktheist smuggles in.
Also, I think it's fine for philosophers to be a bit elitist (in the sense that they dismiss rather offhandedly quite confused positions)! There are a lot of 'folk' philosophical positions that are just obviously wrong, and I think philosophers are well within their rights to be dismissive about those views, particularly on their own time or in their own circles. I agree that the philosophers should have good reasons to think that those views are confused, and be able to articulate them, but I don't think that confers an obligation to take the views seriously. I think I have rebuttals I could articulate to someone who believes in unicorns, that doesn't mean I have to take the Unicornians seriously!
The thing thats most annoying about lacktheists is it often feels like a rhetorical move rather than an actual philosophical position. You know the refrain "The one making the positive claim must provide evidence, I merely lack a belief thus make no positive claim thus have no burden of proof, etc." But this move often feels *purely* rhetorical because the lacktheist will often still bring up things like the problem of evil or divine hiddenness when it suits them, so they'll obviously believe there are things that count against the existence of God, but when involved in a discussion they'll pull the escape hatch so even if they flunk out on the positive case the theist still 'loses' but it counts as a win for atheism because we've defined an almost indistinguishable-from-agnostic position as atheistic (to be honest over time I've almost entirely lost the thread on how the lacktheist's doxastic states are supposed to be different from the agnostic, but thats a digression).
I'm sympathetic to a lot of what you say about the sociological and pragmatic reasons for adopting lacktheism, but I don't think those are the axis critiques of lacktheism attack it from, and I don't think those considerations ameliorate the issues the critics are leveling.