I don't think it all adds up to the scare-quote headline that "atheists might not exist", though.
Whether it is a scare quote or not, the line reflects a conflation of atheism and atheists in the perception of the author. It is pretty easy to see, at least insofar as the article leads with Dawkins.
Even here at Sciforums we experience a disconnection between atheism and reality. Atheism, as we encounter it here at Sciforums, is nothing more than an identity politic; it is not uncommon in society, and
this is the context of atheism most apparently considered.
Actual atheism, a mere talking point that God does not exist, a metaphysical counterpoint detached from anything it purports to address, is what it is. Atheists exist inasmuch as Christians do; these are identity politics, mere words that have nothing to do with their actual definitions.
What makes atheism real is the fact of definitions.
What leads us to the notion that "atheists might not exist", or atheism being "psychologically impossible", also has to do with those definitions. Because this mere talking point, this assertion that there is no such thing as God, this has such a specific and self-alienating definition, we need not doubt that it means what it means.
That one rejects the proposition of God means only that, and nothing else:
If the last sentence is supposed to imply that theists are somehow "more aware" than atheists, then I would dispute that. In fact, as a general comment, my impression is that the author has a pro-theism bias; parts of the article read almost like a defence of theistic thinking.
If we start with a basic question, the whole thing falls apart rather quickly:
Why does it matter if God exists?
Ninety-nine days out of ninety-nine, the problem with discussing atheism is that it's only about atheism, and has nothing to do with anything. I don't mean to be glib on this point, but, to the one,
it matters if God exists because otherwise saying God says so about really stupid and illogical stuff is really stupid and illogical. And, to the other,
so gee-dee, effity-eff what if God doesn't exist? At some point, it becomes a futile question.
Once upon a time ... and yes, we are all aware that it is unfair to pin any atheist today with any ostensibly rational thing any atheist in history who isn't them might have said ... part of the argument was that causing harm and calling it necessary because of a faery tale was a really stupid and illogical thing to do.
There
are times when I feel nearly delusional in recalling those days, even if some of them are buried in the archives, here. But this is important, because "Atheism" can easily become, in living practice, just another religion, only even worse because it has no affirmative central principle. The problem is this:
We might in this atheism reject the proposition of God as irrational, but that's only because it's "God", and has nothing to do with "irrational".
The practical effect, compared to once upon a time, is that the problem isn't doing really stupid and illogical things, but, rather, doing them for reasons that do not suit an atheist's personal aesthetics.
But it's true, we're all aware it's unfair to pin the past on people in the present, but of late even that old bit of intellectual sloth has given way to an identity politic by which atheism is pretty much a rejection of perceived religion in which the identifying partisan doesn't really need to understand their own complaint because the point is simply to complain. It's very nearly to the point of street preachers daring people to say something about God in order to tell them they're wrong.
Which brings us 'round to Jan bring a blog post from a "writer on the edge" who, in turn, leads with and circles 'round to Dawkins.
The article is not especially helpful. If we consider identity atheism as a reaction against societal institution, then the problem emerges quite clearly as we go: Vittachi, in reacting to a perceived institutional atheism, concedes the framework as much as so many atheists react within the shape and form of the religion most directly affecting them;
e.g., American atheists have long tended to respond to Christianity when describing religion, and this will change as non-Christian religions grow their share of religious Americans.
One of the hazards of persuasive writing is trying to figure our relationship to rhetorical frameworks. One must acknowledge certain aspects, attributes, or dimensions, but that gets complicated; many atheists describe religious caricatures, and religous people describing atheism generally reminds why we have evangelical atheists. Vittachi is stitching together any number of things various atheists have said, and forgets that none of those statements have any actual relationship to one another.
It's one thing to try to appeal to an abstract average, but the values added up in order to calculate the average do not have any intrinsic relationship to one another even if they all came from one atheist. Ordinarily, the problem of using one atheist to represent them all would be the obvious fallacy. In this case, we must remember that atheism as an identity politic has no obligation to generate or provide rational results. Vittachi's article is shot through with a mistaken pretense that what he intends to address intends, for its own part, to make any sort of rational sense; in formulating an abstract average, he has assigned values inappropriately, and thus pitches to no one.
And that last matters: It addresses both, comparative awareness and what these statements of psychological impossibility or nonexistence actually attend.
Atheists exist. The psychological impossibility has to do with a perception of what the identity politic projects. While Vittachi tries to make some manner of quasi-scientific argument about belief in unreal things or ideas, he is inherently tilting windmills because both his construction and the components from which it is built are fallacious.
In that once upon a time when the question of God as a rational prospect actually counted as something important in the atheistic discourse, the question of rational outcome was itself a matter of aesthetic and sentiment.
That is to say, there is actual atheism, a mere talking point that God does not exist, a metaphysical counterpoint detached from anything it purports to address; the identity politic, however, is a mere prejudice or jealousy.
One might, as such, dispute the existence of God because it is an irrational proposition, but only because one objects to "God", while irrational propositons are, in and of themselves, well enough, and even sometimes desirable.
And this is the range in which the idea that "atheists might not exist" would start to have some effective meaning. Even still, it's a messy phrasing conceding far too much to atheistic identity discourse.
In questions of cause, we can keep asking why until we crawl our way back to the Big Bang. In living experience, concepts like fairness, justice, rights, and even nation, only exist because people say so. This is rather quite like God as a human invention.
The problem with crawling our way back to the Big Bang is that it takes a while, and lots of hard work. If God is the reason why, then we might crawl back to the Big Bang. If there is no God because God is an irrational proposition, then what is the reason why? Well, we don't ask that because it has nothing to do with atheism. The objection that religion causes wars, or disrupts medical research, become nearly meaningless insofar as they don't object to
irrationality as justification, but, rather,
this particular irrationality as justification.
The statement that "atheists might not exist", such as it comes to us, is thus flawed. Atheists exist. It is, rather, an implied, perceived, or projected merit of rationality that does not exist, as such, within atheism.
Atheism, as such, is disconnected, which brings us to something about awareness. Vittachi's concession to the pretense of atheism as symbol of meritorious rationality glares. The implication that "theists are somehow 'more aware' than atheists" has to do with the state of discourse; if religion is a communal expression of mysterium, at least its flawed expressions address something; if we turn to Vittachi's early paragraph about pattern-seeking, the emerging pretense would be that theists, at the very least, are addressing the patterns while atheists are not or cannot. If we seek the certain way in which Vittachi is right, we also find the way in which he is wrong; he is responding to inaccurate presuppositions. We don't actually know, as such, what atheists think on these points because they will not, or cannot, tell anyone, as that has nothing to do with atheism.
We might recall my recent criticism of atheists who seem to know nothing about what they criticize; this ignorance becomes especially important because at some point various implications depend on what we mean when we say God. Vittachi seems to have conceded balbutive, as if pandering to an atheistic projection of God, which seems about right given the Dawkins guideposts. He is, essentially, pitching against a weird nihilism symptomatic of uneducated atheism, and doing so in a patronizing, needling manner rather quite familiar to evangelical atheists.
The interesting thing about "pro-theism bias" is that, well, okay, first,
duh; still, though, this is all fundamentally a
religious discussion, taking place in a manner by which atheism is just another religion. It's all a complete mess, but also squarely within the range of evangelical atheism such as we see from Dawkins and, if we read closely, Maher.