Two Kinds of Atheism

Abstract

The rationalist atheist—an atheist in the tradition of the atheistic and antireligious thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire—sees religious conceptions essentially in a vacuum. They are just there, and stubbornly so, the result of ignorance and superstition. Religion is not a part of the human condition, it is a deviation from it, an otherworldly escape from reality, an aberration, a revolt against reason. Thus, for the rationalist atheist the methods of combatting religious influence are pedagogical: furthering secular education, training young minds in logic and reasoning, advancing scientific knowledge. The rationalist atheist assumes that the properly educated mind will automatically reject God and his domain, that they remain part of the societal landscape only through the prevalence of ignorance. Give everyone knowledge of science, so the argument goes, and religion will disappear of its own accord.

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