I just watched a short presentation by Daniel Dennet on YouTube titled ‘Belief in Belief’ (i, ii, iii). He essentially argues that most people that say they believe in God actually believe in belief but not in God (according to him only the really ‘immature’ do so). He furthermore states several reasons why they do this and dont just give up and join the blessed camp of atheists, such as fear of punishment, social pressure, habit, etc.
What struck me was that this type of thinking is found among believers as well, on more than one occassion I have heard people say that most atheists deep down believe in God and that there are really very few atheists that dont believe in God or some power. The reason however that they dont come out of the closet is because they are afraid how their social environment will react, dont want to give up their immoral lifestyle, etc.
I wonder what stimulates these type of thoughts… Perhaps its caused by the difficulty to label all people who hold opinions other than your own as unreasonable, because given that the ‘truth’ is so obvious to you and your approach is fair, it should follow that any reasonable person, should be able to grasp it as well. And since they are reasonable, they in all likelihood grasp it, so the reason they dont state it must be something else.
Is it possible that the problem is just a poor choice of categories? If we divided between materialists and non-materialists (instead of atheists and believers in God) perhaps the accusations of dishonesty could be avoided? It is one thing to create a caricature of God (or alternatively a caricature of a pure materialist-atheist) and then claim that no person really believes such things. But why must the caricatures be so distorted and extreme?