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Atheism is far from new, but the various ways that people say “no thank you” to belief in gods, deities, or particular religions are so diverse that they’ve had a huge impact on world belief systems. In this episode of Crash Course Religions, we break down the different flavors of atheism and nonbelief and ask the question, “Is atheism a religion?”
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00:00Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to Crash Course Religions.
00:02So this one will be fun and not at all stressful.
00:04God is dead and we've killed him.
00:07At least according to 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:10Nietzsche was an atheist, meaning he didn't believe in a deity.
00:14He was also a harsh critic of Christianity and religion in general.
00:19But this wasn't his way of bragging.
00:21It was an alarm bell, a warning that there may be some downsides
00:25to conceiving of a universe governed by physics and not divine will.
00:29Without God, who will we look to for moral guidance?
00:32The death of God could spell the end of European society, of the whole world.
00:38And yet, the world has continued to spin.
00:40So were the rumors of God's death an exaggeration? Maybe.
00:44But Nietzsche's generation wasn't the first to give up their belief in God
00:48and certainly wouldn't be the last either.
00:50Today, we'll talk about what it means to live in a world where more and more people do not believe
00:55in gods and whether approaching those atheistic beliefs through the lens of religion can be
01:01informative. Which won't make anyone mad.
01:13The word atheism comes from the Greek word atheos, meaning without a god.
01:17And that's pretty much what atheism is today, a lack of belief in a higher power.
01:21But the word's meaning, like the folks who identify with it, has changed over time.
01:26Like back in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the word first gained traction in Europe,
01:30the Protestant Reformation was in full swing and people needed a new vocabulary to describe
01:35the splintering of religious beliefs that was happening. The word atheist was originally
01:40coined as an insult, something few people would have identified with.
01:44English dictionaries from the 1600s defined atheism as a quote,
01:47damnable doctrine, and often included quotes meant to discourage people from becoming atheists.
01:53Which, I mean, I guess, dictionaries have never been impartial?
01:56But it didn't stick. French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot in the late 17th
02:00and early 18th centuries made the idea of non-belief a lot more mainstream and visible,
02:05even as they struggled with their own faiths personally.
02:08Similarly, some of the founders of the United States, while not technically atheists, were into deism,
02:13where they thought God technically existed, but after making the universe, he just left it alone,
02:18like a watchmaker, or like my personal hero Charles Alderton, who invented the perfect soda recipe,
02:24Dr. Pepper, and then left it alone to take over the world.
02:28Different deists were more or less prone to reject Christianity, with some interested
02:32in Christianity's moral and ethical teachings while ignoring, like, the God stuff.
02:36Thomas Jefferson, for instance, spent years privately cutting every reference to the supernatural
02:42out of a Bible while pasting and moving around certain teachings on morals and ethics.
02:47Atheism really took off during the 19th century, with the writings of folks like Nietzsche,
02:52Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. While Darwin himself was neither here nor there on the existence of a
02:57god, his theories about human evolution were often seen as in opposition to the Christian creation story.
03:04And Darwin's friend and fellow scientist Thomas Huxley even debated the highly regarded Bishop of Oxford
03:11on the topic and essentially told the Bishop,
03:13I'd rather have an ape for a grandfather than a guy like you.
03:16While atheists are still often stereotyped as immoral or even dangerous, atheism itself continues to grow
03:23in popularity. In 2024, studies showed that roughly 28% of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated.
03:31Of course, all those unaffiliated folks aren't necessarily atheists. Within this category,
03:36there's a pretty big crew of agnostics, which comes from a word that means without knowledge
03:40appropriately. Agnostics say they simply don't know whether there's a god. Many think it's impossible
03:46to prove or disprove god's existence and that there's no point in trying. Then you have your
03:52materialists, who believe that everything that exists can be studied through science, which isn't
03:57an outright denial of god's existence, but a way of saying if a god did exist, it would have to do so
04:02within the laws of physics. And plenty do identify as atheists. But even within atheism, we find
04:08variations in philosophy. There's explicit atheism, which asserts positively that no higher power exists,
04:15and implicit atheism, which is a passive lack of belief in a higher power.
04:20Oh boy, I'm getting a call from a blocked number, which I didn't know was even possible.
04:24Hey, broski, don't hang up. I just got a question. It's one that's been bugging me.
04:29That's what you guys do here, right? You answer questions. I mean, that doesn't even begin to
04:32describe everything we do at Crash Course, but sure, go ahead.
04:35Isn't believing in god just like a better bet than not believing? Like, I mean, if atheists are
04:40right, then believing in god doesn't change anything. But if they're wrong, we lose everything.
04:45Wouldn't it be better to just hedge your bets and believe?
04:47That's actually a pretty popular philosophical argument called Pascal's Wager. It's the idea that
04:52belief in god is like the safer bet. So, I'll bite. Which one do you have your money on?
04:56That's a silly question. God? The Father? Capital G? The one from the Bible?
05:01So, not the West African god Anansi? Or maybe the Egyptian war goddess Nyth?
05:06Don't even get me started listing all the literal millions of Hindu deities. And then,
05:10of course, there's always the possibility that the one true god belongs to a religion
05:14that doesn't even exist yet. Right, but I don't believe in any of those gods. Oh.
05:21What makes Zeus or Demeter untrue but your god the only truth?
05:25Uh, listen man, I gotta make some calls.
05:30You know, I'm starting to think I might actually be getting through to him.
05:34Hold on.
05:36Oh, he just sent me a text message that's a picture of his butt with the caption,
05:39This is you. So that's... that's nice.
05:43But our friend the Devil's Advocate has brought up a good point, just not the one he was trying to make.
05:47Atheism as we know it today is often brought up in opposition to Christianity.
05:52But the idea itself is considerably older and more diverse than that comparison suggests.
05:57In many cultures throughout history, there have been groups who didn't care if the gods and
06:01goddesses of their people were really real, and others who specifically didn't believe in the
06:06popular deities of their day. Up to 20 percent of people who identify as Christian aren't sure
06:12they believe the god of the Bible is really real, and therefore might be classified as agnostic.
06:17And in other religious traditions, including Judaism, it's even more common.
06:22Ancient India saw multiple schools within Hinduism that denied the existence of an eternal
06:27or personal god. Buddhism was founded by a guy who didn't have much use for deities.
06:32Jainism, a religion that was founded in the 5th century and influenced the non-violent ideologies
06:37of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has no rules about believing in a higher power.
06:42In many cases, though, these weren't the atheists we'd think of today. Scholars often used the term
06:48non-theism instead of atheism for ancient traditions. These non-theists were simply concerned
06:54with questions other than, does God exist? Cultures in ancient China, Greece, and Rome
06:59all had their non-theism cliques at various times.
07:02In the last couple centuries, though, especially in the United States, atheism has broadened into a way to
07:08critique religion, society, and politics, especially the places where society is shaped by religious
07:14traditions. The American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved,
07:20criticized the hypocrisy of slave-owning Christians. He once wrote,
07:23I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.
07:29Suffragist Matilda Jocelyn Gage pointed out similar religious hypocrisy when fighting for the rights of
07:35women. And in the 21st century, we've seen the rise of a movement known as New Atheism,
07:40popularized by writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Other writers, like Ta-Nehisi Coates,
07:45have written about civil rights within the framework of a godless universe. In Between the World and Me,
07:51Coates imagines no moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, a response to a famous line from
07:57Martin Luther King. Where Nietzsche warned about the death of God and what it might mean for a moral
08:02society, the New Atheists have advocated explicitly for an ethical obligation to reject the idea of
08:09God centered around the belief that we could solve a lot of our problems if we did away with religion
08:14entirely. The New Atheists have at times been labeled dogmatic and even fundamentalist in their
08:20belief that there's no God, which has led some to wonder if atheism is also a religion. Now, I admitted
08:27in episode one that I don't know what a religion is, which means we're already in dicey territory,
08:33and as we've seen throughout this series, defining a religion can be a bit like trying to guess how
08:37many stars are in the sky, like you could say at least five or at least five million,
08:43and both answers would be right and wrong in their own way. But let's pursue this question by looking
08:49at some common features associated with religions and seeing how they stack up in atheism. Obviously,
08:55the whole supernatural higher power thing is out. But religions also serve as a framework that help
09:01people organize, shape, and make sense of life. For some atheists, the critique of religion fits that
09:07bill. Deconstructing religion and religious power is a moral imperative and an organizing principle in
09:13their lives. Of course, for lots of others, atheism isn't a framework for sense-making. We might also look
09:20for shared practices or gatherings, and there are non-religious communities like the American
09:25atheists and the Sunday Assembly who gather for events and experiences, kinda like churches,
09:31but who specifically don't believe in God. So shared practices are on the table, although only a tiny
09:38percentage of atheists attend such gatherings. And what about shared belief? Well, this one clearly varies,
09:44too. Just like we've discovered the incredible diversity in the beliefs within each religion, atheists share some
09:50beliefs and convictions and also have a lot of different priorities. So this one gets a solid maybe as well.
09:57Finally, there's doubt. Doubt is the foundation of atheism. And it also might be one of the most universal
10:04experiences humans share. We've all experienced doubt in ourselves, in the world, in each other, and yet we
10:12continue to believe in the possibility of a better world, despite our doubts.
10:17Atheism is just another way of contending with reality. It can mean a strong commitment to a
10:22particular kind of ethical thinking and behavior, without the looming judgment of a god to enforce it.
10:28It can also mean simply having too much going on to think about religion, or believing that the
10:32only things that matter are the things we can measure scientifically. Atheism defies broad brush painting.
10:39But perhaps the biggest hallmark of atheism is that it has always existed alongside theism. It's not a
10:45reaction to, but a complement of, the religious frameworks that guide many lives. Whether it can
10:52be called a religion is up for debate. I think it boils down to whether you see religion primarily as
10:58whatever lenses through which you consider moral imperatives and ultimate concerns, in which case
11:03atheism is perhaps, at least for some, a religion. Or whether you see religion primarily as a way of
11:09seeking connection to and understanding of the less empirical parts of consciousness, in which case
11:16atheism is a rejection of religion and best considered outside of it. And if you think I'm going to come
11:22to a firm conclusion here, you haven't been watching the rest of this series. Next time, we're talking about
11:28religious texts, who wrote them, who's equipped to interpret them, and how they influence our lives.
11:34I'll see you then.
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