What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman
and Jonathan Haidt have confirmed, bonding with other humans is the driving engine of increased charity and generosity, not believing in a deity.7
But what all of the above illustrates is an extremely important distinction that we must set forth and fully understand: the difference between religion and theism.
Theism
“Religion” is a notoriously multifaceted concept encompassing a plethora of ideologies, identities, associations, and activities. “Theism,” however, is an extremely narrow term that refers to just one specific thing: belief in God. That’s it. A theist is simply someone who believes in God.
What’s the difference? Doesn’t being religious mean that you believe in God? And doesn’t believing in God make you religious? Yes to the latter, but no to the former.
If you believe in God, then you are certainly religious. But many people are religious without believing in God. For example, there are millions of people who attend religious services, engage in religious rituals, and even identify with a religion—but don’t believe in God. Then why are they religiously involved? For a host of nontheistic reasons: they like the music at church, or they want to keep a spouse happy, or they think it is good for their kids, or they enjoy the rituals and celebrations, or they like taking time for quiet contemplation, or they want to maintain a tradition, or it links them to their heritage, or it increases ties to their ethnic community, and so on. As my father used to like to joke: “Yaacov goes to synagogue to talk to God. I go to synagogue to talk to Yaacov.” The bottom line is that there are many, many reasons that people can be religiously active, and it can have nothing to do with belief in God.
Remember that there are a lot of religions out there that don’t even contain a god in their cosmology. Many animistic indigenous religions all over the world lack any concept of a god, but instead are focused on nature spirits, dead ancestors, and/or other supernatural forces.8 Additionally, some Eastern religions, such as Jainism and Zen Buddhism, do not contain any beliefs in a god at all. But they are still religions. As philosopher André Comte-Sponville notes, “all theisms are religious, but not all religions are theistic.”9
Again, religion and theism are not one and the same. And it is theism—rather than religion, in all its varied manifestations—that comprises the true target of this book. For it is theism’s relationship to morality that will be deconstructed in the chapters ahead. And at the heart of that deconstruction is theism’s obverse: atheism.
Atheism
Atheism refers to the lack or absence of a belief in God. That’s it. An atheist is someone who does not believe in a god; according to the latest tallies, there are over one hundred million atheists in the world today.10
Of course, various individuals have defined atheism more grandly and effusively. For example, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, defined atheism as “the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.”11 While these are strong and impassioned sentiments, they go well beyond the limited confines of the term “atheism.” After all, a- is a prefix meaning “without” or “lacking,” and theos is the Greek term for “god”; so again, atheism refers to nothing more than lacking belief in a god.12 Perhaps this is a god you have heard of or know a lot about, such as the God of Christianity or Allah of Islam, and you have chosen not to believe in this god—an atheism predicated upon dismissal or rejection. Or perhaps it is a god you have never even heard of, such as Perkunas (the Baltic god of thunder) or Mawu (goddess of the Fon people of West Africa) and, given your utter lack of knowledge or even awareness of these gods, you don’t believe in them—an atheism predicated on ignorance. But either way, an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in any gods.
Even though the meaning of atheism is quite simple, things get more complex in the real world; while atheism describes an orientation involving belief (or lack thereof), the term “atheist” is quite a bit more loaded at home, at school, at work, and at the grocery store or softball field. That is, in contemporary society, the designation “atheist” can be, for many people, about identity—and a negative, stigmatized identity at that. For example, according to a 2014 Pew study, when Americans were asked about their feelings about people from various religions on a one-hundred-point “feeling thermometer”—with one hundred being the most warm/positive and zero being the most cold/negative—Jews, Catholics, and Evangelical Christians all rated an average of above sixty, Buddhists came in at fifty-three, Mormons at forty-eight, but atheists were down at forty-one, with only Muslims scoring slightly lower at forty.13 And according to another Pew study from 2014, when Americans were asked how they would feel if a family member were to marry someone with a given trait or identity (would it make them happy, unhappy, or would it not matter?), only 7 percent said that they would be unhappy if a family member married someone who had been born outside of the United States, 9 percent said that they would be unhappy if the marriage was to an Evangelical Christian, 11 percent would be unhappy if the marriage was to someone of a different race, 14 percent would be unhappy if a family member married someone who had not gone to college, 19 percent would be unhappy if the new spouse was a gun owner—but 49 percent of Americans said that they would be unhappy if a family member married someone who did not believe in God, making atheist the worst possibility, by a long shot.14
Certainly, many people who lack a belief in God resist identifying as atheists so as to avoid the negative stigma that comes with the identity.
But there is also the dogmatic nature of atheism at play, which many people find off-putting. Atheists can sometimes come off as closed-minded haters of religion, curmudgeonly types who go out of their way to mock and deride other people’s beliefs.
For those folks who do not believe in God, or rather doubt God’s existence and are simultaneously less staunch in their nontheism, agnosticism is a more comfortable, intellectually sound option.
Agnosticism
Is there a God? Who knows?
Why are we here? Who can say?
What happens after we die? Who knows?
Why does the universe exist? Who can say?
Welcome to agnosticism: the secular orientation that replaces the Christian crucifix, the Jewish star of David, and the Islamic crescent with a hallowed question mark. Like their atheist cousins, agnostics today number over one hundred million globally.15
In its most common usage, agnosticism asserts that maybe there is God, maybe there isn’t, and no one can really say for sure one way or another. Thus, while the theist believes there is a God and the atheist believes there is not, the agnostic isn’t completely convinced by either position.16 As the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras—perhaps the world’s first known agnostic—remarked back in the fifth century B.C.E.: “Concerning the gods, I am unable to discover whether they exist or not . . . for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”17 Or as contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini explains, an agnostic “claims we cannot know whether God exists and so the only rational option is to reserve judgment.”18
The term “agnostic” was famously coined by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley back in the 1860s. Huxley offered up the term—which literally means “without knowledge”—to capture an ideological position expressing the limits of knowledge, and the limits of our ability to know, with empirical certainty. This underlying feel for—and steady sentiment of—existential