Donald Berwick explains the Affordable Care Act

Donald Berwick is a highly respected expert on health care who was president Obama’s nominee to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. So of course he was opposed by the Republicans who are determined to block anything that might benefit people under the act. He was forced to serve for just a limited time by means of a recess appointment and has now stepped down from that post.

Chris Hayes had an interview with him that I highly recommended watching, especially his explanation about the important aspects of the Affordable Care Act. That begins at the 9:00 minute mark.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Misconceptions about Nazi ideology

One popular trope is that the Nazi racist ideology was atheistic and Darwinian, and the conclusion is drawn that atheism and evolution are thus responsible for all its evils. This was a central theme in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. But while that argument has always been specious at best, this article by Coel Hellier methodically lays out the case that even the premise is wrong, and that “Nazi racial ideolology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism.”

The main idea of the article is that Hitler was not advocating the creation of a master race by some form of eugenic procedures that originated with Darwin’s idea. Hitler was instead advancing the explicitly creationist case that Aryans were god’s original creation in the Garden of Eden and that this pure creation was being polluted by interbreeding with inferior races and that this needed to be reversed.

It is a long article that goes into great detail in demolishing this argument by tracing the intellectual roots of Nazism. I will quote just a few excerpts to give you a general sense of Hellier’s argument.

Among those who dislike Darwin’s explanation of human beings as the product of evolution a common accusation is that Darwinian thinking has led to horrors such as the Nazi holocaust. For example the American religious commentator Ann Coulter writes: “From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists” (which is wrong on all the others, not just Hitler). So widespread is the claim that even many who accept that Darwinian evolution has been established as true, well beyond any reasonable doubt, also believe that Darwinian ideas were misused to justify Nazi atrocities.
…
Are these claims correct? Remarkably, for a claim so widely accepted, no they aren’t. Indeed, the Nazi ideology underpinning the extermination of the Jews was opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism, instead being a religious and creationist doctrine.
…
They believed that the different human races were distinct and separate, created as God wanted them, and they regarded these permanent racial characteristics as all important to human culture and destiny. Further, they believed that allowing racial inter-mixing had led to the downfall of civilizations, and was a sin against God’s creation. Thus they considered it of overwhelming importance to preserve their own Nordic/Aryan race, which they regarded as superior and created in “God’s own image”, by preventing inter-breeding with “inferior” races which they regarded as literally “sub-human”, being separate creations.

So, yes, the Nazis wanted to use selective breeding, but not to create a “master race”, but to preserve an Aryan master race, preserving the primordial Aryan characteristics which they believed were the “highest image of God”.

This ideology shares one thing with Darwinism, namely the possibility of using selective breeding to achieve a desired end, a possibility mankind had known about since the invention of farming, about 12,000 yrs ago. But in all other respects it is profoundly anti-Darwinian. Whereas in Darwinian evolution all mankind evolved out of a common monkey-like ancestor, with all human races sharing a common origin in the recent past, in Nazi ideology the different human races were distinct and separate creations.

While the mutability of species, with new species evolving out of distant ancestors, is the central theme of Darwinism, the Nazis found that idea anathema, and placed a heavy emphasis on racial purity and the distinctiveness and separateness of different species. Further, the Nazis found abhorrent the materialist notion that man might be just like other animals, and, from their religious and moralistic perspective, they insisted that man had a spiritual soul.

That is why leading Nazi ideologues wrote books explicitly rejecting Darwinism, and why they banned Darwinian works from public libraries. The truth is that nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwin — the slight overlap is only in areas known about long pre-Darwin. Nor are there any quotes of leading Nazis looking to Darwin or pointing to Darwin as justification — if there were the creationists would likely have found them by now. In short, the association of Nazi doctrine with Darwinism is an outright fabrication by those who wish to discredit Darwinism and the scientific account of the origin of man.
…
Mein Kampf does not mention Darwin even once. Where atheism is mentioned (twice) it is pejorative, associating atheism with Jews and Marxism (e.g. “They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation” and “… atheistic Marxist newspapers …”). Instead, Mein Kampf presents a religious, creationist and moralistic argument for removing Jews from German society. That is the major theme of the book, running through it repeatedly.

In line with the above Nazi thinkers, Hitler believed that mankind did not have a common origin, but consisted of several distinct and separately created races. The Aryan race was the superior race, with other races such as Jews and Slavs being literally “sub-human”. Hitler believed that the Aryans had enjoyed a golden past, and that Germany’s current troubles were the result of allowing racial inter-mixing, which was destroying the master race, leading to a degeneration of society. Thus it was morally necessary to prevent racial inter-mixing, if necessary by a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”.
…
In summary, while Nazi racial doctrine and Mein Kampf share one feature with Darwinism, namely competition and selection, the Nazi doctrine is not derived from Darwinism and is fundamentally incompatible with it. Whereas Darwinism says that all humans have a common origin, that species and races are malleable, evolving over time, and that one could (as with all animals, and if one so wished) artificially control breeding to enhance and select desired characteristics, Nazi doctrine says that human races are distinct and primordial, created separately by the Will of God, who desires that they remain separate, that the moral imperative is to preserve the races in their current state by preventing any racial intermixing, which would be both harmful and sinful.

Above all, while any similarity with Darwinism is only in one mechanism, namely competition and selection, the Nazi motivation for keeping the races separate is profoundly anti-Darwinian and instead religious and creationist.
…
Indeed, what records we have show that, far from being inspired by Darwin’s work (which there is no record of Hitler ever having read), Hitler was instead inspired by religious ideology and the Bible. A revealing notebook shows that Hitler’s ideas on race were inspired by his reading of the Old Testament.
…
Thus nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwinism. The few aspects in common were pre-Darwinian; the ideas that originated with Darwin were anathema to and rejected by the Nazis. The widespread blaming of Darwinism as an inspiration for Nazi crimes has no support in historical evidence and instead derives purely from a desire on the part of the religious to smear Darwinism.

Hellier also examines the claim that the Nazi’s were atheistic and finds that too to be also false.

The labelling of the Nazis as “atheistic” is similarly motivated and is also the exact opposite of what the evidence says. The Nazi ideology was theistic and religious and an offshoot of Christianity, merging Christianity with Nazi racial theory. It is true that the Nazified Christianity was opposed to more mainstream Christian views, and thus that the Nazis wanted radical reform of the Christian religion, but in no sense was it “atheistic”.

While the Nazi’s were critical of the current established churches, they considered themselves to be followers of a purer form of Christianity.

Nazi theology, however, departed from mainstream Christianity in regarding the Christian churches as misguided and having been corrupted from the original aims of Jesus by Jewish influence, particularly that of Paul. The Nazis claimed that Jesus was not a Jew, but instead an Aryan (again, to the Nazis these were separately created races).
…
The Nazis thus founded the German Christian movement, mixing Christian theology with Nazi racial ideology, and espousing a “Positive Christianity” which contrasted with what they saw as the “negative Christianity” of the existing Jewish-influenced churches. With Nazi support, the Deutsche Christen won two thirds of the vote in the 1932 church elections, claimed a membership of 600,000 pastors, bishops, professors of theology, religion teachers, and laity, and were aiming to supplant the Catholic and Protestant churches.

This article is a useful reference to those who bring up the tired ‘Hitler was a Darwinian and hence evolution is bad and thus wrong’ argument.

The size of the bailout keeps growing

Last week, I wrote about the revelation that the size of the bailout was $7.77 trillion, much larger than publicly revealed during the time. Via reader Mark, I read this article by former congressman Alan Grayson that says that the audit that was enabled by legislation that he and Ron Paul initiated reveals that the size of the Federal Reserve bailout of the big banks all over the world is now even greater than that, to the tune of $26 trillion, which is almost twice the size of the entire GDP of the US, which is a little over $14 trillion. Grayson explains the key numbers that the audit revealed:

Page 131 – The total lending for the Fed’s “broad-based emergency programs” was $16,115,000,000,000. That’s right, more than $16 trillion. The four largest recipients, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, received more than a trillion dollars each. The 5th largest recipient was Barclays PLC. The 8th was the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, PLC. The 9th was Deutsche Bank AG. The 10th was UBS AG. These four institutions each got between a quarter of a trillion and a trillion dollars. None of them is an American bank.
…
Page 205 – Separate and apart from these “broad-based emergency program” loans were another $10,057,000,000,000 in “currency swaps.” In the “currency swaps,” the Fed handed dollars to foreign central banks, no strings attached, to fund bailouts in other countries. The Fed’s only “collateral” was a corresponding amount of foreign currency, which never left the Fed’s books (even to be deposited to earn interest), plus a promise to repay. But the Fed agreed to give back the foreign currency at the original exchange rate, even if the foreign currency appreciated in value during the period of the swap. These currency swaps and the “broad-based emergency program” loans, together, totaled more than $26 trillion. That’s almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. That’s an amount equal to more than seven years of federal spending — on the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and everything else. And around twice American’s total GNP.

These are staggering amounts. And it was all done under the radar, using the secrecy with which the Federal Reserve and the government use when it comes to serving the oligarchy.

Police brutality as a consequence of the war on terror

In a comment to an earlier post on the increasing paramilitarization of the police, reader Steve raised the question of the connection between the rise of such policing in the US and the work of the ominously named Department of Homeland Security that was formed in the wake of the events of 9/11.

He is of course absolutely right. At the time that the Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act was rushed through in October 2001 with almost unanimous support in Congress (357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate, with Russ Feingold being the lone holdout), many of us warned that this was a Trojan horse that would be used to undermine the rule of law and the constitutional protections that had, with a few exceptions, been followed for much of its history. What exceptions had been made were at times of great stress (the Civil War and World War II) and were seen as temporary measures.

The USA PATRIOT Act institutionalized these abuses and made them part of the new normal. Under the guise of fighting the ‘war on terror’, a threat that is increasingly being revealed as bogus, the DHS was created under the act and has, along with the National Security Agency and the CIA and FBI, been the vehicles that have been used to create a Big Brother state that now routinely violates the rights of Americans in the permanent war on terror.

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi both look at the roots of the increased use of pepper-spraying as standard procedure, even as concerns are being raised about whether they are as non-lethal as claimed.

One consequence has been that the spread of so-called non-lethal weapons, such as the various gases, tasers, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, water cannons, ear-splitting sound emitters, etc., have had the effect of actually increasing the violence used by police, since the innocuous term ‘non-lethal’ for weapons that can still cause serious harm actually encourages their indiscriminate use against people. We seem to have reached the stage where we think that as long as people are not killed or dismembered, then whatever is done to them in the name of law and order is acceptable. This is the same kind of mentality that enables people to condone torture.

Two factors are leading to a proliferation of new anti-civilian weapons. One is that massive funding for the so-called ‘war on terror’ has enabled the DHS to shower military-style equipment on even small police forces that transform them into paramilitary units. While the equipment has been given away freely to local units, the heavy expense of maintaining them is the responsibility of local agencies and is draining police resources away from traditional police work. The other factor at play in driving this is that the huge amounts of money now available for ‘anti-terrorism’ has created an incentive for companies to come up with new ways of disabling and dispersing crowds. As a result, pepper spray may soon become one of the milder forms of brutality.

James Wolcott describes how ear-splitting sound devices known as LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices), more popularly known as ‘sound cannons’ and used on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, can cause severe damage on the human body. He quotes an ACLU report that describes what happened to Karen Piper who was present at the scene of G-20 protests in 2009.

On September 24, 2009, Piper, then a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to observe G-20 protests in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood as research for her book on globalization issues and the responses of bodies like the G-20 to protest activity. She arrived at Arsenal Park around 10 a.m. and saw protestors calmly and peacefully milling around the area. After the protest began, Piper walked on the sidewalk a short distance from the marching protesters, in the company of other curiosity seekers and journalists. When Piper became concerned about rapidly increasing police activity, she tried to leave the area. As she was walking away, police officers activated, suddenly and without warning, an LRAD a short distance away from her. It emitted a continuous piercing sound lasting several minutes.

Piper immediately suffered intense pain as mucus discharged from her ear. She became nauseous and dizzy and developed a severe headache. Since then, Piper has suffered from tinnitus (ringing of the ears), barotrauma, left ear pain and fluid drainage, dizziness, and nausea. She still suffers from permanent nerve damage.

“The intensity of being hit at close range by a high-pitched sound blast designed to deter pirate boats and terrorists at least a quarter mile away is indescribable. The sound vibrates through you and causes pain throughout your body, not only in the ears. I thought I might die,” said Piper, now an English professor at the University of Missouri. “It is shocking that the LRAD device is being promoted for use on American citizens and the general public.”

Now come reports of the development of lasers that ‘temporarily’ blind people being tested as riot control weapons in England. Rest assured that they will come here soon, to be followed by ‘accidents’ in which people end up being permanently blinded because of equipment malfunction or improper use.

We also have the first reports of the predator drones that are being used around the world to spy on and kill people now being deployed in the US.

I remember how, when I first came to the US in 1975, I was unnerved to see police walking around with real guns. Sri Lanka at that time had a civilian unarmed police force, with weapons used only in the most extreme cases. Now it has a highly militarized police with powerful guns, armored vehicles, and checkpoints becoming routine sights. The militarization of the police in the US is now also well underway and soon it will seem normal to see police in riot gear armed to the teeth stationed with armored vehicles at various places in cities.

We should never forget that the prime role of a country’s military nowadays is almost always to protect government leaders and the oligarchy from its own people, not from external threats. The external threat is an excuse to intimidate and cow its own people into acquiescence.

This is going to make Bill O’Reilly cry

Via Pharyngula I learn that the city of Santa Monica this year decided to have a lottery to see who gets to use 14 city park spaces for holiday decorations, instead of awarding them all to Christian groups as in previous years. The result? Christians got three, Jews got one, and atheists got 10.

Now the Christians are miffed, claiming they are being ‘silenced’ and their First Amendment rights are being violated.

Cue Fox News outrage!

Yes sir, that’s my Bibi

As usual, I did not watch last Saturday’s Republican debate, preferring to learn about it from Richard Adams’ always entertaining live blog for The Guardian. One exchange that caught my eye was when Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich fell over themselves trying to show who was more devoted to Israel, repeatedly referring to the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their friend ‘Bibi’.

Romney: Of course you [Gingrich] stand firm and stand for the truth, but you don’t speak for Israel.
Gingrich: I didn’t.
Romney: If Bibi Netanyahu wants to say what you said, let him say it. But our ally, the people of Israel should be able to take their own positions and not have us negotiate for them.
Gingrich: Can I just say one last thing? Because I didn’t speak for the people of Israel. I spoke as a historian who has looked at the world stage for a very long time. I’ve known Bibi [Netanyahu] since 1984. I feel quite confident an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of and the casualties they’re taking and the people who surround them who say, you do not have the right to exist and we want to destroy you.
Romney: I’ve also known Bibi Netanyahu for a long time. We worked together at Boston Consulting Group. And the last thing Bibi Netanyahu needs to have is not just a person who’s a historian, but someone who is also running for president of the United States stand up and say things that create extraordinary tumult in his neighborhood. And if I’m president of the United States, I will exercise sobriety, care, stability and make sure that I don’t say anything like this.

Anything I say that can affect a place with rockets going in, with people dying. I don’t do anything that would harm that process. And, therefore, before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend, Bibi Netanyahu and say, would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do? Let’s work together because we’re partners.

I find it extraordinary that people running for the leadership of one country would so proudly proclaim their undying loyalty to another country, to the extent that they would not say anything without first getting it approved by the head of that country, even though that head is despised by world leaders as a liar.

I would like moderators at these debates to ask the candidates if there is any issue on which the interests of the US and Israel diverge. Except for Ron Paul, I expect them all to answer ‘no’, even though such an answer is patently absurd.

Religion as belief vs practice

Sophisticated apologists for religion will discount almost all the supernatural beliefs of religions because they are incredible and so embarrassing that no one with any pretensions of rational thought can sign on to them. Talking snakes? People dying and coming back to life? Rebirth? Books dictated by god? A supernatural entity who overrides the laws of nature because an individual requests it?

This has led some to try to identify religion with a set of rituals and practices that provide people with a way of viewing the world that does not contradict science and thus can form the basis of common ground between religion and science. In discussions with colleagues, especially in the religious studies department, I am often told that my view of religion is too distorted by fundamentalist Christianity and that most religious people do not concern themselves much with the idea of god at all.

Is that possible? Via Jerry Coyne, I heard of the valiant effort by Julian Baggini in The Guardian to seek the minimal definition of religion would make “religion intellectually respectable, even to the hardest-nosed atheists.” Here are what he calls the four articles of 21st century faith that he has come up with as a result of his search:

Preamble. We acknowledge that religion comes in many shapes and forms and that therefore any attempt to define what religion “really” is would be stipulation, not description. Nevertheless, we have a view of what religion should be, in its best form, and these four articles describe features that a religion fit for the contemporary world needs to have. These features are not meant to be exhaustive and nor do they necessarily capture what is most important for any given individual. They are rather a minimal set of features that we can agree on despite our differences, and believe others can agree on too.

  1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant.
  2. Religious belief does not, and should not, require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers.
  3. Religions are not crypto- or proto-sciences. They should make no claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim, not the religious one, should prevail.
  4. Religious texts are the creation of the human intellect and imagination. None need be taken as expressing the thoughts of a divine or supernatural mind that exists independently of humanity.

He points out, quite correctly, that one cannot be ambivalent about the choice of accepting or rejecting them. If you cannot sign on to any one of them, it means that you agree with its contradiction. He says:

So let us be plain that to reject these articles of faith would mean to maintain their contradictions, namely:

  1. Religious creeds or factual assertions are neither secondary nor irrelevant to religion.
  2. Religious belief requires the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth.
  3. Religions can make claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should not be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail.
  4. Human intellect and imagination are insufficient to explain the existence of religious texts.

The next task he set himself was to see whether atheists and religious people would sign up to them. While I would have no problem with religion as described by his four articles, I was frankly skeptical that religious people would agree. Most ordinary religious people would reject them outright because they rule out the supernatural while the sophisticated religious would be uncomfortable with being forced into accepting any concrete formulation since they like to live in a world of ambiguity where they never actually come out and say what the believe.

And sure enough, Baggini later reported general failure. A very few of the more sophisticated religious apologists were reluctant to reject his articles but were wary because of the absence of anything that could be described as transcendental. Some religious people, including those who are thought of as ‘radicals’, rejected them outright. As Baggini says:

If the articles of faith are to provide any hope of establishing the existence of the kind of reasonable faith I think should be possible, we need to get support for them from people who are actually actively and self-consciously religious.

So far, that has not been forthcoming. Theo Hobson, for example, a self-described “liberal” theologian, says: “I’m afraid I don’t really sympathise with this. Christianity can’t be reformed by the neat excision of the ‘irrational’/supernatural. It is rooted in worship of Jesus as divine – the ‘creed’ side is an expression of this.”

Nick Spencer, research director at the eminently reasonable public theology thinktank Theos, was even clearer in his rejection, saying, for instance: “Although religious texts are indeed created by human intellect and imagination, that doesn’t mean they can’t be taken as expressing the thoughts of the divine … I don’t see what’s left of the Abrahamics if you do take this out of the equation in this way”. Spencer also provides little hope of finding too many other supporters out there, adding that “there would be precious few Christians I know … who could sign up to all your points. To take just the most obvious example: according to mainstream Christian thought, Christianity is founded on a belief in the physical resurrection.”

Baggini concludes:

Hence the rejection of the articles suggests that either most liberal religious commentators and leaders are inconsistent or incoherent; or that they ultimately do believe that when it comes to religion, creeds and factual assertions matter; belief that supernatural events have occurred here on Earth is required; religion can make quasi-scientific claims; and that human intellect and imagination are not enough to explain the existence of religious texts. If that is indeed the case then DiscoveredJoys is right that when it comes to belief: the middle ground is virtual deserted.

Religious people, however sophisticated, are unable to break the grip of wanting to believe in some form of the supernatural, some ineffable mystical presence that transcends the material world. This is why there can be no accommodation between science and religion, and in that conflict religion will lose because there is no evidence that such a presence exists.

Australian to be lashed for blasphemy

A Saudi Arabian court has found an Australian Muslim guilty of committing blasphemy while he was on a pilgrimage to Mecca and sentenced him to 500 lashes for. He could die as a result. (Via Machines Like Us.)

What is the matter with these people? This case is just like the period of the inquisition where people were punished with even death for lack of sufficient piety. This illustrates the problem with religion. It is rigid and backward looking, holding on to medieval ideas and practices, and threatening people with dire punishments if they do not conform to them. Sometimes the punishment is threatened in this world, sometimes in the afterlife in the form of hell.

Religion has no place in the modern world but many people have not yet come to the realization.

A clearer definition of atheist

(This is my article that appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of the New Humanist magazine that appeared there with the title No Doubt.)

Charles Darwin believed that God was not required to explain nature and strongly opposed the later attempts by Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, to argue that some form of divine intervention was necessary to explain human intelligence and consciousness.

From this, one might reasonably conclude that Darwin was an atheist. And yet he firmly rejected efforts by others to stick that label on him and insisted on calling himself an agnostic. Edward Aveling, a self-professed atheist, tried to convince Darwin that “the terms ‘agnostic’ and ‘atheist’ were practically equivalent”. Darwin did not challenge Aveling’s characterization that an “agnostic was but atheist writ respectable and atheist was but agnostic writ aggressive”, but merely questioned why anyone would want to be aggressive.

Darwin’s response highlights the fact that calling oneself an agnostic is much more socially acceptable than saying one is an atheist. As a respectable member of the Victorian establishment he likely did not want to disturb the comfortable social world in which he lived. Religious believers are far more comfortable with agnostics. Atheists appear to directly contradict their views; whereas agnostics seem to allow for the possibility that God might exist and thus confer some intellectual respectability on those with belief.

But what exactly is the difference? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines an atheist as “One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God.” That part of the definition as one who “disbelieves” in God is unexceptional. Atheists say that there is no evidence for the existence of God and so it makes no sense to believe in one. It is the word “denies” that creates problems. If by “denies” we mean a willingness to publicly declare disbelief, then it too is acceptable. But if interpreted as implying that the atheist is certain that there is no God, then it is too strong. Since one cannot prove the non-existence of a god, or anything else, no thoughtful atheist would sign on to such a statement.

The OED definition of an agnostic – as “One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing” – hardly banishes the confusion either.

One problem is that this definition fails to distinguish between not knowing something and there being nothing to know. As Ricky Gervais said in response to a challenge as to what right a mere comedian had to make pronouncements on whether God exists; “Since there is nothing to know about God, a comedian knows as much about God as anyone else.”

It is logically impossible to prove the non-existence of anything, however absurd (whether it be a god or unicorns), so the purely logical answer to whether anything exists, when the answer isn’t “yes”, is “I don’t know”. By this definition we are all agnostic about practically everything.

But there is a difference between saying one is agnostic because of the logical impossibility of proving a negative, and being an agnostic because the evidence is not (as yet, anyway) convincing either way. For example, the currently popular theory of elementary particles postulates the existence of a particle known as the Higgs boson that has as yet not been directly detected. The new Large Hadron Collider at CERN has the detection of this particle as one of its major goals. Until it is detected, it is perfectly reasonable to be agnostic on the question of its existence. If at some point it is detected, agnostics would shift out of the agnostic camp and into the camp of believers. But when would it become possible to say that it does not exist?

A state of permanent agnosticism in such situations seems unwarranted. After all, we are perfectly comfortable in saying that some things simply don’t exist even if we cannot prove it logically. So in the absence of any evidence for existence, what distinguishes those things we can confidently assert don’t exist (like unicorns) from those things (like God or an immaterial soul) whose nonexistence some are loth to proclaim?

Science can help here because in that world, when something becomes unnecessary as an explanatory concept, it is confidently asserted not to exist. For example, take the concept of the ether. This was believed to be a material substance that permeated all of space and was necessary in order to explain the propagation of electromagnetic waves. As more and more experiments failed to detect it, the properties of the ether had to be refined and modified to explain away the negative results. Even though the theory of the ether became quite convoluted, it was still thought to exist because it was necessary as an explanatory concept. When Einstein came along with his theory of relativity, he did not prove that there was no ether. What he did with his alternative theory was make the ether unnecessary as an explanatory concept. As a consequence, scientists now comfortably assert that the ether does not exist, just as they were comfortable thinking earlier that it did exist. We are no longer agnostic on the question of ether’s existence.

So rather than “One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God”, a more accurate definition for atheist would be “One for whom God is unnecessary as an explanatory concept”. This definition leaves little room for agnostics because they will have to answer the question as to whether they think that God is necessary as an explanatory concept for anything. If they say “no”, they are in the same camp as atheists. If they say “yes”, they are effectively religious and would be required to show where the necessity arises.

This proposed definition of atheist may not make agnosticism about God completely redundant, because determined people of a philosophical bent can always find ways to salvage any cherished proposition from being rejected. But it would go a long way towards clarifying what atheism represents.