The Nomenclature of Disbelief

I'm materialist
Call me a humanist
(physical theorist)
and I guess I'm full of doubt,
but I'll gladly have it out with you
I'm materialist
I ain't no deist
It's there for all to see,
so don't talk of hidden mysteries with me
-Materialist by Bad Religion

I am frequently asked what different terms of disbelief mean. As I am the president of a club called “Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of Waterloo”, I guess it should be expected. Not many people have heard the term freethinker before, and many people are not sure about what exactly an agnostic is.

The unfortunate fact is, we have a hell of a lot of terms for non-believers. Here is a short list of some of the different terms a non-believe might use to describe their religious views:

• Agnostic
  
• Atheist (with possible quantifiers: strong, weak, specific, general, natural, implicit, explicit, agnostic)
  
• Bright
  
• Existentialist
  
• Freethinker
  
• Humanist
  
• Ignostic
  
• Materialist
  
• Naturalist
  
• Non-theist
  
• Objectivist
  
• Pastafarian
  
• Philosophical naturalist
  
• Post-modernist
  
• Rationalist
  
• Secular humanist
  
• Secularist
  
• Skeptic
  

Some of these terms have multiple definitions, and many of these are synonyms. I am going to give very quick and dirty definitions of these terms (grouping together the synonyms, or those with close meanings):

• Naturalist, philosophical naturalist, materialist: Someone who believes the universe is made out of one type of stuff (i.e. only matter, no spiritual matter) and that all causes are natural (i.e. not supernatural).
  
  
• Rationalist, skeptic: In this context, it means someone who thinks beliefs should be based on evidence and reason.
  
  
• Bright, freethinker: Someone who is both a naturalist and a skeptic. The terms emphasize different things, but they pretty much mean the same thing. The reason for the different terms has more to do with the movements they are associated with than with any real definitional differences.
  
  
• Pastafarian: A worshipper and follower of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
  
  
• Secularist: Someone who believes that certain institutions (particularly the government) should be separate from religious belief. More broadly, someone who is concerned with this world and not the spiritual realm.
  
  
• Humanist: One who believes in exploring morality and truth through natural means in order to support human interests.
  
  
• Secular humanist: A humanist who specifically rejects the supernatural (a naturalist and a humanist).
  
  
• Objectivist: A follower of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Objectivists reject the existence of any deity.
  
  
• Post-modernist: Hold that religions (and any gods) are social constructs – along with pretty much everything else.
  
  
• Existentialist: (Roughly) one who believes individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them.
  
  
• Ignostic: One who believes that the other theological positions assume too much about the concept of God, and believes a proper definition of God is required before one can take a position.
  
  
• Non-theist: Simply one who is not a theist.
  
  
• Agnostic (Definition 1): One who believes that, due to the very nature of God, God would be inherently unknowable and therefore one cannot claim to have knowledge of it.
  
  
• Agnostic (Definition 2): A weak atheist who either does not know the different definitions of atheist, or prefers not to call themselves an atheist.
  
  
• Atheist:
  
  
  
  • Weak/agnostic atheist: One who does not believe in a god, either because there is enough evidence to support belief in a god, or because they do not have a concept of that god (see implicit atheist).
    
  • Strong atheist: One who not only does not believe in a god, but believes that that god does not exist.
    
  • Implicit/natural atheist: One who does not believe in a god simply because they have not acquired the concept of that god (i.e. all babies are born implicit/natural atheists).
    
  • Specific atheist: One who is an atheist (either strong or weak) towards a certain god.
    
  • General atheist: One who is an atheist (either strong or weak) towards all gods. One can be both a weak general atheist and a strong specific atheist.
    

Now that we have this list, let’s play pin-the-label-on-the-atheist. Here is the list of terms that I would use to refer to myself:

Explicit atheist, weak/agnostic general atheist, strong specific atheist, agnostic, non-theist, secularist, secular humanist, Pastafarian, skeptic, materialist, philosophical naturalist.

I am a weak general atheist because I don’t think that there is good enough evidence to support the existence of any god (where a god is defined as some sort of super-powerful, transcendental, conscious being), and I am a strong specific atheist towards gods which are self contradictory or which have traits that are mutually exclusive with other beliefs I have good evidence for. I prefer to refer to myself simply as an atheist because it really leaves no room for confusion – people get that I don’t believe in any gods, and given the social climate, I think that is an important point to get across.

Now here are the terms that I fall under the definition of, but would not use to refer to myself:

Bright, freethinker, rationalist.

Out of these three, I like freethinker the most. But it suffers from the same problem as bright – it is just bad public relations. The religious are already hypersensitive, there is no reason to use these terms which make us sound like we think we are superior to them. I understand that they logically shouldn’t – the pro-choice people aren’t anti-life, and the pro-life people aren’t anti-choice (well, that might be arguable) – but the problem is that people take offense to these terms, and as atheists already have bad enough public relations, I think it is best just to stick to terms that everyone knows the definition of and that don’t have superiority overtones.

I hate the term rationalist simply because the meaning of it in this context is so far from the original philosophical meaning – the original rationalists were people who, in direct contrast with empiricists, believed true knowledge could only be arrived at a priori. Now it is almost completely backwards – rationalists are atheists, who are generally empiricists of some flavour.