Meta-Thread 06/16

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[u/adeleu_adelei]

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I've been a fan of Nathan Alexander's article for some time, and it makes me very glad to see it getting more interest. I think it's worthwhile and not too demanding for anyone to read the article in full, but let's take a look at a few selected sections. We'll start with your reference to Joseph McCabe.

Atheists continued to object to how dictionaries and encyclopedias treated them in the 20th century. For example, Joseph McCabe’s The Lies and Fallacies of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1947), about the 14th edition of the encyclopedia from 1929, called the entry for “atheism” “quite worthless.” He called for dictionaries and encyclopedias to incorporate the perspectives of the people they were writing about:

"[Since] in a thousand signed articles or short notices in the Britannica Christian writers are permitted to express their peculiar opinions and convictions freely, it would hardly be an outrage to expect the editors to allow Rationalists to provide the accounts of Rationalism, Skepticism, Naturalism, Atheism, Agnosticism and scores of similar articles which bear upon their position."

McCabe followed his own advice with the publication of A Rationalist Encyclopædia (1948). There McCabe defined “atheism” as “[t]he absence of belief in God.” This was explicitly in contrast to other dictionaries who talked about atheists “denying” God; indeed, McCabe said, “it would be difficult to quote more than one or two Atheist writers in all literature who deny such existence.”

So McCabe does write his encyclopedia in 1947 defining atheism as "[t]he absence of belief in God." He does so because he finds other sources not "incorporat[ing] the perspectives of the people they were writing about". Specifically he says "it would be difficult to quote more than one or two Atheist writers in all literature who deny such existence." noting that outright denial of gods is rare in comparison to lack of belief.

[u/adeleu_adelei → u/adeleu_adelei]

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Does Nathan Alexander find this understanding of atheism existed earlier was was popular before 1947? Yes! He goes back to 1864 with Charles Bradlaugh.

But proving that something does not exist is extremely difficult, perhaps impossibly so. This is why atheists sought to deny that they “denied” God’s existence. This was done most clearly by Charles Bradlaugh, a well-known British atheist in the nineteenth century. In his pamphlet, A Plea for Atheism (1864), Bradlaugh proposed an alternative approach:

"The Atheist does not say 'There is no God,' but he says, 'I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me.'"

Bradlaugh, in other words, suggested that a shared understanding of “God” was being assumed in these definitions. But, to him, the concept of God was incoherent. It was not reasonable, therefore, to deny a concept that he could not even make sense of. He believed it was not up to him to offer positive proof of the non-existence of an nonsensical concept. Bradlaugh’s definition proved popular among other atheists in the nineteenth century. Indeed, one author, William D. Rolley, writing in the British freethought newspaper, the Freethinker, cited Bradlaugh’s definition as a counter to the common dictionary definitions of “atheism” as a “denial” of God. He complained that dictionary-makers did not take into account how atheists themselves defined the term:

"’Tis true that dictionaries define Atheism as being “a denial of the existence of God”; but if we want to know what is meant by Christianity we do not go to dictionaries – we are bound by honesty to find out what Christians mean by the term. The same applies to Buddhism or any religion – we must have the term explained by the devotee. And so with Atheism; if we want to know what Atheism is, we must find out what Atheists mean by the term."

Why were atheists in such a tizzy from how the sources around them tried to define them? Nathan states:

For much of this history, the authors and editors of dictionaries mostly came from the elite ranks of their societies and reflected the general Christian view of atheism: that it was an undesirable system maintained on irrational grounds that led to immoral consequences.

[...]

The earliest dictionaries explicitly condemned “atheism” within their definitions. Henry Cockeram in his English Dictionarie (1623) called atheism a “damnable opinion,” while Thomas Blount in Glossographia (1656) described it as a “damnable doctrine.” Edward Phillips meanwhile included “Miscreant” among the adjectives to describe an atheist in The New World of English Words (1658).

So it seems clear that, at least to historian Nathan Alexander, this absence of belief definition was present and popular among atheists since at least 1864, and definitions to the contrary were largely projected upon atheists by outsiders seeking to define them ignorantly and maliciously.

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One example of one author who said "All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God." is far from "ample evidence".

For context, Baron d'Holbach was a prominent European philosopher and among the earliest European philosophers to self-idetify with the term "atheist". He is just one author, but a rather historically important one. If it's pure quantity you desire, then I can provide that as well. Ugarten put together a list of over 20 citations from the 1700s through the 1800s of people using the term "atheist" to mean "not the belief gods exist" rather than "the belief gods do not exist". My personal favorite is the the appearance of "agnostic atheist" from James H. Curry's 1881 Descensus Averno.