Why is athiesm a religion?

Question

Atheism is an unproven way of thinking that a certain group of individuals have accepted as fact. My friends, if that is not religion then nothing is.

Answer 1

Academics viewing the universe through a narrow scope should rethink assumptions
Dallas Morning News
By Roy Abraham Varghese
December 15, 2004

Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the most famous atheist in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of England's University of Reading, now accepts the existence of God.
Mr. Flew's best-known plaint for atheism, "Theology and Falsification," was delivered in 1950 to the Socratic Club, chaired by none other than C.S. Lewis. This paper went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades and set the agenda for modern atheism.
Now, in a remarkable reversal, Mr. Flew holds that the universe was brought into being by an infinite intelligence.
"What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together," he said. "The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence."
Given the conventional wisdom of some psychologists that people rarely, if ever, change their worldview after the age of 30, this radical new position adopted by an 81-year-old thinker may seem startling.
But Mr. Flew's change was consistent with his career-long principle of following the evidence where it led him. And his newfound theism is the product neither of a Damascus road experience nor of fresh philosophical arguments, but by his sustained analysis of scientific data.
Mr. Flew's conclusion is consistent with the actual beliefs of most modern scientific pioneers, from Albert Einstein to quantum physicists like Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. In their view, the intelligence of the universe - its laws - points to an intelligence that has no limitation - "a superior mind," as Einstein put it.
Not a few of our men and women of letters, it would seem, have been looking for God in all the wrong places. Those who dismiss God as a product of psychological conditioning or pre-scientific myth-making have not come to terms with the essential assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise.
Science assumes that the universe follows laws, which leads to the question of how the laws of nature came into being. How does the electron know what to do? In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks what breathes fire into the equations of science and gives a universe for them to describe. The answer to the question of why the universe exists, he concluded, would reveal to us "the mind of God."
Last May, I helped organize a New York University symposium on religion and science, with the participation of Mr. Flew and others. Our starting point was science's new knowledge that the universe's history is a story of quantum leaps of intelligence, the sudden yet systematic appearance of intrinsically intelligent systems arranged in an ascending order.
Many people assume that the intelligence in the universe somehow evolved out of nonintelligence, given chance and enough time, and in the case of living beings, through natural selection and random mutation. But even in the most hardheadedly materialistic scenario, intelligence and intelligent systems come fully formed from day one.
Matter came with all its ingenious, mathematically precise laws from the time it first appeared. Life came fully formed with the incredibly intelligent symbol processing of DNA, the astonishing phenomenon of protein-folding and the marvel of replication from its very first appearance. Language, the incarnation of conceptual thought with its inexplicable structure of syntax, symbols and semantics, appeared out of the blue, again with its essential infrastructure as is from day one.
The evidence we have shows unmistakably that there was no progressive, gradual evolution of nonintelligence into intelligence in any of the fundamental categories of energy, life or mind. Each one of the three had intrinsically intelligent structures from the time each first appeared. Each, it would seem, proceeds from an infinitely intelligent mind in a precise sequence.
We can, if we want, declare that there is no reason why there are reasonable laws, no explanation for the fact there are explanations, no logic underlying logical processes. But this is manifestly not the conclusion adopted by Einstein, Heisenberg and, most recently, Antony Flew.
Roy Abraham Varghese of Garland is the author of The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God (Tyr Publishing). He helped organize presentations by Antony Flew in Dallas on two occasions. Readers may contact Mr. Varghese through tyrpublishing.com.

Answer 2

Atheism isn't a religon, because by definition, a religion has to believe in a diety.

Check out this Wikipedia definition:

Religion is the adherence to codified beliefs and rituals that generally involve a faith in a spiritual nature and a study of inherited ancestral traditions, knowledge and wisdom related to understanding human life. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to faith as well as to the larger shared systems of belief.

In the larger sense, religion is a communal system for the coherence of belief—typically focused on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth. Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals are often traditionally associated with the core belief, and these may have some overlap with concepts in secular philosophy. Religion can also be described as a way of life.

Now, since atheism has no centralized belief system, diety, or sacredness, how can it be a religion? Atheism is not a religion; it's the belief that there is no god or religion.

Answer 3

No, atheism is just a word that means lacking belief in deities. It is not a collection of beliefs that people who are atheists must hold beyond that. There are religious atheists in religions that don't require deity beliefs. There are atheists that are Humanists and many that are not. There are atheists who believe in other metaphysical or supernatural claims and others that don't. There is no set of beliefs that all atheists must believe or have in common beyond disbelief in deities. To say its a religion would be the same as to say if a group of people built a faith around worshiping leprechauns and called those who didn't believe their claims aleprechaunists the aleprechaunists would be a religion. This is clearly ridiculous as they are merely people who don't accept the claims or share the beliefs of the leprechaun worshipers.

Answer 4

Religion includes a supernatural element.

And do you really want to argue that not believing random claims with no evidence whatsoever is "an unproven way of thinking"?

Answer 5

You are right. Atheism is a religion, but the confusion that clouds the atheist mind does not allow them to see this.

Answer 6

You're welcome to apply your non-proven definition of religion to whatever fairytale you approve of.

Atheists say "if there's evidence, I'll believe it, subject to new evidence coming along. If there's no evidence for something, the default of not believing applies." It's as much a religion as believing that if you flick the switch on your kettle, it will eventually boil. Hope this helps.

Answer 7

atheism just like agnosticism aren't religions as atheism deals with the belief that a higher being or higher power doesn't exist whereas agnosticism deals with the belief that the existence or non existence of a higher being or higher power is unknowable please get this straightened out in your brain so that you don't ask this question ever again

Answer 8

It's not. Religions are to do with God. A group of atheists is a sect.

Answer 9

it isn't a religion, it's a philisophical outlook that happens to replace religious belief.

Answer 10

It isn't a religion, it is a belief.