A revisionist account of atheism

The world being complex, understanding it isn't always easy. Still, you can make the task more difficult than it already is. On the strength of a letter of Albert Einstein's coming up for auction in London this week, Andrew Brown starts by telling us that he - Einstein - was a model atheist. Straightforward enough, you might think. In the letter Einstein says that the word 'god' is a 'product of human weaknesses', and he places religion amongst 'the most childish superstitions'. A dictionary definition of atheism gives it as 'a disbelief in the existence of deity' and 'the doctrine that there is no deity'.

By the end of his post, however, Brown has arrived at the conclusion that Einstein 'had rid himself of belief in atheism too'. By what route does he arrive there? He arrives there via the observation that Einstein accepted that devout believers could share the 'striving to make life beautiful and noble'. So to be an atheist, on this revisionist account of what atheism is, you have in fact to be either a fool or someone impervious to empirical evidence: you have not merely not to believe in a deity, you have also to deny that religious believers can work for the good of humankind. The nonsense of Brown's short journey is made more obvious by the clarity with which he traces it out; and that, at least, is to his credit.