Atheism As Faith
Further information: Secular religion and nontheistic religionsAnother criticism of atheism is that it is a faith in itself, as a belief in its own right, with a certainty about the falseness of religious beliefs that is comparable to the certainty about the unknown that is practiced by religions. Journalist Rod Liddle and theologian Aliester McGrath assert that some atheists are dogmatic.
Michael Martin and Paul Edwards have responded to this criticism by emphasizing that atheism can be the rejection of belief, or absence of belief. Don Hirschberg once famously said "calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Atheism
Famous quotes containing the words atheism and/or faith:
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)