I put this as the first rea­son for not being an athe­ist, not because itʼs most impor­tant, or because it  is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of how some­one stays out of athe­ism — itʼs not. But because for many athe­ists this is the great explana­tory fac­tor behind my theism.

Only a fool would deny the influence of par­ents and soci­ety. Itʼs a help­ful analy­sis of the way in which we come to believe the things that we believe — the soci­ol­ogy of knowledge.

But is that suf­fi­cient to sink my “non-atheism” right in the beginning?

Well that would only be the case if in fact other forms of knowl­edge were free from the same kind of soci­ol­ogy. But all knowl­edge is soci­o­log­i­cal to one degree or another. Only a  fool would say that every thought he ever had, heʼd come up with him­self. Most of our  thoughts come from oth­ers. We all belong to a com­mu­nity of one sort or another that rein­forces the plau­si­bil­ity of some beliefs  and dis­cour­ages other kinds of beliefs.

The athe­ist PR machine likes to talk as if itʼs the excep­tion — it talks as if athe­ism is the con­vic­tion one arrives at when you start think­ing for yourself.

But the more I look at athe­ism, the more it seems to me that there are plenty of oth­ers to help you do your think­ing. Richard Dawkins writes about the aim of his book like this:

“My dream is that this book may help peo­ple to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay move­ment, the more peo­ple come out, the eas­ier it will be for oth­ers to join them. There may be a crit­i­cal mass for the ini­ti­a­tion of a chain reaction.”

Dawkins aim is not sim­ply to present the argu­ments, and let the argu­ments speak for them­selves. Rather his aim is, one might say, a soci­o­log­i­cal one — he hopes to give peo­ple courage to own their con­vic­tions through the knowl­edge that there are oth­ers who share them. And through that, oth­ers might be encour­aged to join the throng­ing crowd.

But Dawkins is not being decep­tive. Itʼs the way all human knowl­edge works. We are not  just ratio­nal beings — we are also rela­tional beings, who depend on each other for all sorts of things, knowl­edge included. The fact that I depend on some­thing for my knowl­edge does not make me irra­tional, it makes me human.

I talk to a lot of uni­ver­sity stu­dents who are athe­ist or agnos­tic, who all use the same kind  of argu­ments. Did they all really, some­how aston­ish­ingly, come up with the same argu­ments inde­pen­dent of each other? No, the major­ity have just bought into intel­lec­tual trends of the day — they have been ʻindoc­tri­natedʼ, and most donʼt have the sense to see it. (They really think they think for them­selves!) They dis­be­lieve, in other words, because they were born in the West! If theyʼd been born in Iran, odds are, they would believe some­thing com­pletely different.

Luck­ily for athe­ists, their beliefs might still be true irre­spec­tive of the fact that they got them from their cul­ture — but that would need to be demon­strated in some other way. Which is how I treat my Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions — theyʼre not true because my par­ents believed them, but nei­ther are they decep­tive just for that rea­son either.

Author: Dave Walker

Dave is campus director for AFES at James Cook University in Townsville. Before training at Moore Theological College he was a scientist. He has four sons, seven chickens, and one wife.

Read Dave's 4 articles.