The Winding Path

Many atheists fiercely argue against any suggestion that atheism is anything like religion. Not only that, many expressive posts have also been written about how atheism is most definitely not an ideology or a philosophy, only to then describe a common set of beliefs, similar principles and values, and a shared outlook.

Atheists do share common beliefs

Some, like Austin Cline in his piece on about.com, do a very good job of explaining why atheism isn’t what many people claim it is. Unfortunately Austin is talking about atheism as a pure concept. He’s not talking about the kind of atheism most atheists actually identify with. He starts by comparing atheism to astigmatism, or metabolism, rightly pointing out that not all “isms” are a set of beliefs. Yet survey a group of atheists and you’ll find that we do have some common beliefs. The obvious rebuttal is that atheism doesn’t require that people hold all those beliefs. And yet of all the arguments against atheism as an ideology I’ve seen, none have accounted for the beliefs atheists actually do share.

Sure, atheism doesn’t require anything other than that you don’t believe in god or gods. Or that you believe gods don’t exist. The problem with this is that when we hold so tightly to a pure definition of atheism and ideology, we ignore the influence atheism has on our lives. We behave like a group of people with a common, social identity. That wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have something more than a lack of a belief to tie us together. No group of people has ever come together because of nothing more than a lack of a particular belief. We do have other common beliefs, as Sam Harris’ survey shows.

Atheism is more than just a definition of a word

Austin Cline says that atheism fails to meet the requirements of an ideology because it doesn’t provide guidance or information. And he’d be right, if atheism was just a word in a dictionary. But it’s not. How could Sam Harris write a manifesto about a concept which lacks the ability to guide? And of course he wasn’t the only one. The truth is an atheist can be confident that other atheists will have a significant number of similar values and beliefs which have (or will) shape their lives in similar ways.

Many atheists argue against religion on the grounds of the many atrocities committed in religion’s name. Yet the counterargument, that religion is not itself responsible for the actions of misguided people, is shot down; if it’s done by religious people, in religion’s name, it’s religion’s fault. In principle that logic is no different from: if it’s atheists, acting under the banner of atheism, then atheism is the guiding force. Yet atheists constantly deny that atheism provides any guiding force. If that’s so, what is it that brings atheists together? Are we really able to accept that we can build these social networks without a common set of beliefs and values? Is there any benefit in getting hung up on exactly which philosophy or ideology those beliefs and values come from?

Atheism isn’t simple. Deal with it.

It would make life a lot easier if concepts like atheism really were as simple as some people say. But the nature of human understanding and human interaction prevents any concept like atheism from being understood in the same way by everyone. We can’t condense everything that atheism means to everyone into one word. Not even a long Wikipedia page is enough.

It’s simply not possible for atheism to be simple.

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What forms our perception of our “self”? A couple of recent experiments (building on some older ones) have shown that it’s relatively simple to fool our awareness of our body, even to the point where we believe a body we see is our real body.

The experiments involved each subject wearing a VR headset which showed an image of themselves as seen from the back. I.e., they were looking at an image of their back which made it look as if a duplicate was standing in front of them. Then the experimenters invoked multisensory conflict, which is a fancy way of saying they confused the subject’s senses. In one experiment they did that by poking the subject’s chest with a plastic rod, while at the same time altering the image they saw on the VR headset to make it look like the person they could see was also being poked. The multisensory conflict arose between the visual image of a body being touched and the sensation on their own chest.

The subjects seemed to resolve this conflict by having their sense of self shift to the body they could see. In other words they felt as if their body was the image they could see, not the body they actually inhabited. This was verified when subjects were blindfolded and moved backwards from the spot they originally stood in. When asked to move towards the original spot, they tended to stop closer to the location at which the image appeared.

These experiments provide a simple, replicable method of investigating how we perceive our sense of self to be located within our body, which is important for understanding self-awareness as a whole.

See the New Scientist article for more details.

While doing some research for an essay on social psychology, I came across a fairly recent article about a paper¹ which reported on a study of how social networks influence obesity. The paper’s authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler found that friends have the greatest influence, followed by siblings, followed by spouses, with neighbours showing no significant effect. They also found that friends and siblings of the same sex seemed to influence each other’s obesity more than did those of the opposite sex. However, spouses did not seem to have as much influence as mutual friends, suggesting that the opposite-sex and friendship influences may cancel each other out.

One conclusion which may be of further interest to you my loyal readers is that, rather than being the result of behavioural imitation, the spread of obesity may be more closely related to the perceived acceptance of obesity in those we hold in high esteem. That is, it seems that your belief about whether or not being obese is ok, is influenced more by your level of esteem for a friend, and how much you think they accept their obesity, than it is by what they actually eat. So it’s not that one obese person eats hamburgers all the time and so their friend starts doing it too. No, it seems that the obese person believes it’s ok to be obese, so the friend’s beliefs shift to be in agreement. They may not eat the same things but they are both likely to put on weight.

Thankfully the study also showed that thinness is contagious too. Perhaps not equally so, but none-the-less the effect is there. So if you want to lose weight the usual good advice still applies, but you’re more likely to be successful if you have healthy skinny friends whom you hold in high esteem.

Amusingly the study shows that distance is irrelevant, so it’s basically a nice piece of evidence in favour of being my friend, where ever in the world you may be.

1: Christakis N. A., Fowler J. H. (2007, July). The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years. The New England Journal of Medicine, 357(4), 370-379