Tossing Out Just One More God: Atheism, Theism, and Negative Doctrines

A recent and rather lively exchange on my Facebook page reminded me of the following quip from Richard Dawkins:

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” (from The God Delusion)

It's an interesting quip. On the surface it stakes out common ground between theists and atheists: "Hey, we're not that different after all. I toss out all the gods that you reject--the Greek, Roman, Norse, and Hindu pantheons and the like. I just throw out your god, too."

Of course, contemporary theists likely won't find their hearts warmed by Dawkins' surface appeal to common ground. After all, what Dawkins really means to do is gesture to theistic hypocrisy. His not-so-veiled message is this: Theists ought to know that they have no good reason to believe in God, because their reasons for rejecting Zeus and Odin work equally well as reasons for tossing out Yahweh or any other supernatural character.

Since I've had plenty to say about this underlying message before, I don't want to focus on it in this post. But the Facebook exchange I mentioned above did more than just recall Dawkins' quip. It suggested a different way of thinking about it.

Here's the context: The other day I mentioned on Facebook a delightful conversation I'd had with the New Covenant Group, a group that among other things seeks to foster productive religious-nonreligious dialogue. (The exchange was videotaped; I'll announce of this blog when and where it can be viewed). An atheist friend (whom we'll call M) expressed some concern about one of the topics I'd provocatively referenced in my post: Dawkins' prospects for salvation. (Hint: being a universalist, I think those prospects are pretty good).

Among other things, M was concerned about the loaded nature of the question. Aren't we assuming the theistic perspective when we explore a question like this? And isn't doing that an exercise in the kind of privilege that religious people enjoy in our society? In an exchange meant to foster productive dialogue between the religious and the nonreligious, were the assumptions of those on the religious side framing the questions in a way that alienated the nonreligious in advance?

My sense is that, since I was a featured guest on the segment, my views were on the table for that reason as opposed to being because of any religious privilege at work. But another friend, A, chimed in with a third explanation: What happened in the NCG interview wasn't an exercise in religious privilege. It was just the fact that, in a dialogue of this sort, the participants "would need something to discuss, and since atheism is largely a negative doctrine, it would naturally be a religious concept that would be discussed, such as salvation."

M shot back with the following: "As for atheism being a negative doctrine, it only disbelieves in one extra god than the Abrahamic religions, which disbelieve in hundreds. They must be largely negative too."

Taken as an attempt to argue that Abrahamic religions are largely negative (which is not actually what I think M intended), this adaptation of Dawkins' quip doesn't strike me as having much force. To say my eyes are blue amounts to saying they aren't brown, green, black, red, purple, fuchsia, magenta, or puce. Any positive assertion excludes every assertion incompatible with it. This is as true for monotheistic religions as it is for anything else.

But traditional monotheisms are defined by what they affirm, not what, by implication, they negate. The Abrahamic religions are good at affirming stuff--some might argue too good at affirming stuff (or too quick to affirm with confidence). And the more specific and detailed the affirmation, the more that is rendered incompatible with it. The more one affirms, in terms of precision and detail, the more one by implication negates. If one says the earth has a three-dimensional shape, one has affirmed less--and hence negated less--than would be the case were one to say that the earth is a sphere.

We can think about this in terms of the logic of conjunction. I'm thinking about a dog. Is it yours? Probably not, but bear with me. The dog in question is brown. Some of you--but not all--might now be in a position to say, "Well, that's not my dog." But I'm not done. In addition to being brown, the dog is also female. And 15 years old. And largely blind in both eyes.

As we say more about the dog--as we affirm more and more propositions about the dog--there are fewer and fewer dogs in the world to whom the description applies. Cumulative affirmations leads to cumulative exclusions, until every dog but one is ruled out.

A true agnostic affirms nothing about the ultimate nature of the universe--and, for that very reason, negates nothing. A vague monotheist affirms enough to exclude atheism and polytheism and maybe pantheism, but by virtue of affirming less than, say, a conservative Muslim does, ends up affirming something that is consistent with a diversity of monotheistic faiths. By affirming less, one negates less.

But here is the question: Is it possible to negate a claim about how things are without, by implication, moving us closer to a more precise affirmative picture of how things are?

M's modified quip can be--and perhaps should be--understood as a challenge to the idea that atheism lacks any affirmative content. It is true that atheists (at least insofar as they are atheists) approach their worldview via negation. But just as saying my eyes are blue excludes their being brown or green or puce, saying that they are neither brown nor green nor puce narrows the field of possibilities, moving us in the direction of a precise picture (even if it hasn't yet taken us there). It takes longer to get to the affirmative proposition when you get there by negation--but when you negate enough, you might just get there in the end. And Dawkins claims to negate even more than the monotheists!

If, as Dawkins claims to do, you deny "God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented," aren't you thereby drawing a boundary around what you take to be real, a boundary that so clearly and completely excludes the presence of anything on the far side of the boundary that you have, in effect, posited an affirmative shape to the real? One commonly dubbed "metaphysical naturalism"?

In short, sometimes we assert an affirmative doctrine and, by implication, negate everything that conflicts with it. And sometimes we stumble into an affirmative doctrine through a series of negations. Just because a doctrine negates a lot, it doesn't follow that it is mostly negative. In fact, the most affirmative doctrines are those that negate the most. And it may well be that in denying "God, all gods, etc.," Dawkins has taken his professed atheism into just such an affirmative realm.

If so, it means that Dawkins and others like him can't say "I'm just denying things and don't have a metaphysical position to defend" as a way to shift all the critical attention onto theistic metaphysics. But it also means that in efforts to pursue meaningful dialogue, one can't just assume that only the theist has an affirmative view worth considering. Productive dialogue between the religious and the nonreligious means giving substantial space for all parties to share what they think, to discover common ground, and to confront the critical perspective of those who disagree.