The first known self proclaimed atheist, Baron d'Holbach(1723-1789), predates Charles Darwin's publication of his theory of natural selection(1856) by almost 70 years. There exist atheists even today, who do not really know or understand evolution.
The theory of Evolution by natural selection was the first ever scientific approach in search of a possible naturalistic explanation for the world around us and it's workings. And still stands as one of the most dominant such approach.
Then how did atheists come to be without knowing it? What was their basis for rejecting God, if not science?
In other words, how do atheists ignorant of Evolution tackle the question of 'Why we are here'?
Or are majority of the people who claim to be atheists(which includes many Marxists) actually agnostics?
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8 comments:
if we accept that atheists are those who deny the existence of what someothers beleive to be true i find no surprise in them doing so because
the way of refuting something that has not been thought over is consistent with the process of establishing that something irrationally in the first place.This would logically extend to saying that all theists and atheists are equally either ignonart or umwilling to accept.But atheists win because they deny whereas theists establish.Isnt it so in science where it is easy to disprove than to prove when burdened with the task of explaining things.I think agnostics itself will make a fantastic study in this ironical world...
ille da... disproving something is very very difficult. actually, the fact that the existence of god cannot be disproved is what is often used by theists as one of their major arguments. but it holds for everything- try disproving the existence of Harry Potter's magical world for example... there are certan things (which have no proof or disproof) which we assume don't exist and certain other things for which we have problems making that assumption.
my question here is, when confronted with a question like "how did you come to be?", how would an atheist from 18th century have reacted? what was his basis for denial?
Why would a strong scientific theory be necessary for believing in a certain hypothesis? Did theists need a strong scientific theory for believing in their 'God' hypothesis? Why should atheists need one?
thats wat i am asking... wat IS this non scientific hypothesis which suddenly gave rise to a defiance in 18th century...
besides, i think there is logical reasoning behind why some one should believe in GOD. assume a man was never taught any science or religion all his life... when one fine day if he wakes up thinking as to how he came about, the only plausible conclusion he can come to is that of some religious notion or something very similar (unless of course he is a genius like darwin), thats the basic human trait. thats why theism precedes atheism by many thousands of years.
Rejection of theism did not crop up in the 18th century. These atheists could well have borrowed their ideas from eastern philosophies, which have had a long history of examining man and his relationship to nature without intervention from a deity.
Darwin did not wake up one morning to the sudden realization that there could be an alternate reason for our origin other than those propounded in the Bible. His inquisitiveness was built on the shoulders of philosophers who couldn't be satisfied merely with miracle-mongering and spite-spewing religious discourses.
@Ram: true that many Dharmic philosophies have an atheistic tone or at least room for atheism... but none of them explains some thing as wonderful and mysterious as life in a way Darwin ventured out to do... true the CRAVING for a naturalistic description was always there... but since there was no strong argument for such a thing, wouldn't that have made atheists of that time uncertain about their philosophy (especially living among a multitude of theists who had jolly good arguments against them)... making them agnostics (who resorted to rejecting the RELAVANCE of a deity rather than its EXISTENCE itself)?...
Its not just abt evolution theory. An atheist would be left unanswered for many such questions.
And yeah, its easier to disprove a theory than to stand by it. If a theory stays for a long time without much opposition then there has to be some truth in it.
@theverve: of course there are many answers to which atheists don't have answers. and its justthose dark corners where religion finds refuge and conveniently says, "this is where the greatness of god is REVEALED (revealed???)".
see the point is evolution explains life- by far the best thing religion had to say for itself, because the formation of non living things like rocks and volcanoes and meteors can be easily explained without invoking a divine designer. that's the reason why theists never made any noise when geological theories were proposed. its the theory of evolution which gets so much attention. why? because a naturalistic explanation of life immediately raises another question- if God didn't create life, what WAS is he doing??? and that leads to another immediate question of the existence of that deity itself.
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