There's no such thing as atheism

Or objectivity

Many people seem to think that the purpose of an idea is to accept it, or reject it. To believe, or disbelieve. It’s a reflexive knee-jerk of a habit that interferes with the deeper purpose of an idea: to understand it.

For a close-at-hand example, there are a great many self-satisfied individuals who champion the idea of atheism, claiming that this is the rational and logical belief all modern intellectuals ought embrace. Theology aside, the atheist engages a basic logical fallacy, equating the absence of evidence with evidence of absence. It’s fairly hard to support a literal interpretation of religious texts, but that isn’t necessarily the intent of these texts, nor the typical response of those who take them as sacred.

One might dispose of these texts with historical inaccuracies; but are we sure historical accuracy meant the same thing to ancient authors? We might challenge the anthropomorphic presentation of divine figures, but does that also disprove a metaphorical interpretation? What if “God” or “gods” are simply a conceptual expression of the patterns and principles of nature? What if this word simply refers to the mysterious force which powers life, and existence itself? What if the idea is beyond the reach of material, empirical measurement, being a feature of the conceptual realm, affecting the psyche alone?

When all these questions are swept away with a simple denial, based on the lowest-hanging straw man, we’re left with a fairly irrational premise. Reality is reserved for the objectively quantifiable; subjective experiences are simply an aberration. We have rejected the most improbable definition of God/gods, and thus liberated ourselves from the obligation to understand why such ideas exist at all. We become modernist chauvinists, adopting a clinical and empirical standard for truth value, without ever confronting the basic weakness of such a narrow view.

The fundamentalist rationalist believes in a God called “Objective Truth”. No one can prove that this objective truth actually exists, because we cannot normalize for subjectivity. Every possible observer is inside the system, so to speak, with cultural biases, academic dogmas, and the inability to assess the totality of data.

This “objective truth” is omniscient, however, in that it abstractly is able to do all of this, while somehow not interacting with this absolute information or having any compromising stake in the outcome of events. Whether or not “objective truth” exists is not the issue; where is an observer who is capable of objectively assessing it?

If “objective truth” does exist, it must be unknowable, because only subjective observers are evident. We wouldn’t be able to empirically consider the existence of an objective observer, because one cannot logically exist. Consensus reality doesn’t help, since this is a political process reflecting aforementioned dogmas. The conclusions are only as good as the premises in play.

Atheists who pin their argument on the absence of evidence are merely expressing a belief in their own sort of god, a faith that somehow, hashing out reality by excluding subjective conceptions leaves only unvarnished, hard reality. The tragedy is not that they are missing out on the experience of divinity, but that they tyrannize the intellect with such reductionist reasoning. Like most reactionary ideology, atheism partakes of the same error as that which it criticizes, while missing the point entirely.