Cap Clueless has a long and interesting discussion on atheism today.

I knocked off a quick email to him, but then decided that it’s worth posting here.

He writes:

“Atheism” isn’t a unitary whole; it’s actually a collection defined by a negative, consisting of all people of all beliefs who do not think that there are any deities.

The wording here is precise, but inaccurate, in my opinion. It should really be “…people of all beliefs who think that there are no deities.”

As he describes it, it’s closer to agnosticism, or skepticism (I consider myself a skeptic, and a provisional transcendental materialistic reductionist).

Consider the two statements:

“I don’t believe there is a God.”

“I believe there is no God.”

One has a belief, the other does not. The latter is the position of what’s thought to be the true atheist (though the nomenclature is screwed up, because atheist should really mean no theistic beliefs, e.g. asexual, or amoral, and antitheist is the word we should use for someone we currently term an atheist).

There are some other interesting points in his post, relating to falsifiability and the utility of scientific models and theories, that I might expand on later, if I find the time.