We Are All Atheists, Every One of Us
On April 11th, 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to John Adams. In the private correspondence, the man generally regarded to be one of the three most brilliant founding fathers confided to his fellow founder and former President, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”.
The observation is an interesting one because it points out something that many people never consider – a truth they go their entire life without even contemplating. We are all atheists – every single one of us – when it comes to at least 99.99% of the gods mankind has worshiped throughout history. We laugh at the idea a specific god existed even though, had we been born in that time, and that place, we would have been as likely devout. Billions upon billions of men, women, and children throughout history who sacrificed their time and money, who lived in accordance with the teachings of their god, who built temples and seminaries, who got in arguments about theology that tore families apart, only to watch the sands of time tear down the belief and it be replaced by the next derivation, often built upon the remnants and ruins of the first. Some of these ancestors were so devoted to following god’s law they literally sacrificed their children to Tlaloc and Moloch.
With every new god that arises, those who follow say, “This one is the real one, all of those billions of people before us had it wrong, all I have to do is follow this set of rules and I am assured of eternal happiness despite my present suffering” demonstrate the power of what amounts to a form of anxiety management. With the same devotion and conviction, they believe that their particular take on the nature of the universe – which often completely contradicts evidence and is based on what they were taught by their parents and what is common among their specific socio-economic group – will last until the world passes away.
Imagine if a citizen of Ancient Greece could see civilization now. The idea that Zeus is thought of as little more than an interesting historical remnant useful for art and sculpture would cause them to panic and repent. He or she would fall to their knees and beg Zeus to spare the world from his judgment.
It’s an interesting thing; the fact that even the most devout Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu are as atheistic in their convictions as Richard Dawkins.
Reader Comments (2)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
Justin
April 4, 2017
I know this is a very old post. I have been a frequent reader for many years, often consuming and re-visiting articles. You have articulated in this post, a very internal perspective, that I could never put into the right words. I can never thank you enough for the wealth of knowledge, perspective, and content you share with us. Please never think that your posts are not worth the time spent, I can guarantee I am not the only one that follows your work with great interest!
David Evans
October 25, 2023
Joshua, I spent a lot of time reading your blog posts a few years ago and have been going back through them of late. Thanks so much for making them available to us again.
What you say in this short article is certainly true, but with Coleridge, I'm wont to ask "What is the meaning?". I was raised in a very conservative Christian home in the American Midwest, just a short distance down the road from KC, but walked away from all of that and went down a Mo/PoMo new atheist rabbit-hole in adulthood. Along the way, I encountered the argument outlined here and wielded it like a sword, Dawkinsonian style, against members of my family who retained the faith of our fathers and tried to get me to change my mind. However, in my philosophical perambulations, I began to encounter the brick walls of Hume's inductive problem, Munchausen's trilemma and the circularity of reason itself, absent some sort of transcendent grounding...or Grounding. I began to realize how philosophically unsophisticated New Atheism actually is, and realized that I had fallen victim to the mistake of the late enlightenment thinkers and subsequent modernists, who worshiped at the Altar of Reason while denying the Ground upon which it rests. Slowly, incrementally, I began to find my way back around to the faith of my childhood. I discovered that Bacon was right when he said "It is true, that a little Philosophy inclineth Man’s Mind to Atheism; But depth in Philosophy, bringeth Men’s Minds about to Religion." In the process, I also discovered that when you come full circle, and approach the point from which you departed, you view it from a new perspective and with new eyes. For me, that entailed the realization that I had been almost completely blind to half of all metaphysics. In focusing nearly exclusively on epistemology, I had fallen off the ontological cliff into the Groundless abyss. All of which is to say, that it seems to me from where I have landed that if there really is a God (and in the interest of full disclosure, I have taken it as an ontological position that there is), then that God must be something like the Omni-God of the Scholastics, which would set that God apart from most of the other gods worshiped by humans over the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years in which humans and/or hominids have enjoyed the simultaneous blessing and curse of sentience, although it should be noted that a few other religions have gotten pretty close to that understanding of God in many respects, i.e., Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, & etc, sharing at least the commonality of something like Lewis' "Tao" in his "Abolition of Man". So, while we are indeed all atheists with regard to nearly all gods, that truth doesn't seem to entail the absence of any God at all, as the Four Horsemen would like us to believe.