Do Atheists Hate God? Do You Hate Dog?

Here's another claim leveled against atheists - we hate God.

Let's say I am walking through the park and we meet, and we say hi. I ask you what you think of my dog. You tell me you don't see any dog. I counter, no, I am walking my dog. You shake your head and say no, there's no dog here. To that, I assert that the dog is invisible. You then tell me you don't believe I have a dog.

When I then moan, "You hate my dog!", am I making any sense? How can you hate a dog you don't even think exists?

Now, plenty of people hate Barney the Dinosaur or Harry Potter. But you can't actually hate them. They are "real" in the imaginations of a lot of people, but they don't actually exist, like a dog does. What you really hate, or love for that matter, is the idea of Barney or Harry, the fictional universe in which they dwell and their unique place in it, and perhaps in the minds of others who also imagine them to be real. You can't really hate Barney; you can only hate the concept of Barney.

To be fair, the concept of the God of the Bible, as one example, is not very appealing to me. I don't think what's written there about God is particularly flattering. I personally wouldn't like the guy if he was my neighbor. But that's one giant "if".

Because I don't have any motivation or reason to believe this, or any, god is real in any sense outside the imagination of numerous people, I don't have any motivation or reason to hate him or her.

I can't hate your god any more than you can hate the Monster In The Closet your child needs you to check before bed. Closet monsters are a pain in the ass, they are not part of how you wish the growing-up process should be, but there's your kid scared to death of something that you know full well is imaginary, and you have to deal with it.

If you believe your child and agree there might be a monster, you might have reason to hate it. But so long as we do not believe in the imaginary thing which another person is so damn sure exists, we are not capable of hating it.

We can hate that the poor tot can't sleep. We can hate that getting from child to adult has to be so hard. But we cannot hate what we believe is not real.

The Man Who Isn't There

Imagine you walk into a room and you see two people in the room with you. One person says to you, "There are three people in this room now." The other person says, "No, there are four. You cannot see or hear the fourth person, but he is here." Let's also assume both these people are being completely serious.

Who are you more likely to believe? Do you feel more likely to believe the first person or the second? Which person requires you to put some faith in them to believe their statement?

Most people would say they believe the first person. One person I asked this question answered that he would consider the second person to possibly be insane. Clearly the first person's statement agrees with your observations, not only in the room but in general. There simply are not invisible, inaudible people (unless they are hiding from you, or ninjas, of course). It requires no faith at all to accept the first person's claim. The second person, however, would seem to be incorrect, but you might take them at their word if you felt faith was warranted.

Some people say atheism requires as much faith as believing in a god. They claim that atheism is a faith no different than belief, that atheists believing in no god is as unknowable as a theist claiming there is one.

However, there is a bit of a mistake here. In the room with the two (or three) men, I really do not know which man is right. It may well be that there is a fourth man hiding behind the sofa. Seems unlikely, but it is possible. Once I make a thorough search of the room and find no hiding person, I would have more reason to say with assuredness that there is definitely no fourth man. But if there was always a place he could be hiding that I could not search, then not only do I not know if he is there, I cannot know he is there.

As such, I am agnostic about the fourth man.

Agnostic is often misused to define a middle ground between atheism and theism. In fact, both atheists and theists can claim to be either agnostic or gnostic. Theism means "belief in the existence of a god or gods" and gnosticism is "knowing something is true". Atheism is the absence of belief, and agnosticism is the absence of knowledge.

A gnostic atheist would assert there is no god or gods, while an agnostic atheist would believe there is not a god, but admit there is no way to disprove the existence. An agnostic theist would believe there is a god or gods but admit they cannot be certain they are right, and a gnostic theist knows without a doubt there is a god or gods.

Having or lacking knowledge does not necessarily change one's beliefs. I do not know for certain that my neighbor is sleeping in his bed at night, but it seems sensible to believe it is true. I do not know for certain whether I am being followed by clever spies, but it seems reasonable to dispense that thought as irrational.

I do not know if there is a fourth man in the room or not, but it makes sense in cases where I know all I can to go with what I see and observe and discount propositions that cannot be supported or proven.

In fact, atheism is the abandonment of faith that the stories we have heard of the invisible man have validity. It is no different than ignoring the lies people tell about us on the playground or dispensing with the childhood fantasies of the Tooth Fairy or the Monster in the Closet. Intelligent people eventually see that reality does not match the stories they are told, or they tell themselves, and as such they brush the nonsense away.

If a god exists, he is either hiding from us, or he is a ninja. But it seems far more plausible that in absence of any possible arguments for the existence of a god or a tooth fairy or a monster in the closet, they must instead be imaginary. And no matter how much a child begs you to check the closet one more time before he goes to sleep, no matter how hard he believes, you know you will find no monster, not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.

When someone claims a man is invisible, it is as close to certain as we can get that the man simply isn't there.