28 What IS an Atheist? (Part 1)

As I say in my Outro to the Christian Atheist podcast, ”I am a Christian, with the searching and skeptical mind of an atheist. I don‘t want to believe anything that isn‘t true. I know both sides of the looking-glass [i.e., the Christian AND the Atheist], and I know them with open eyes. I choose Christ‘s side. I invite you to join me from wherever you stand before the looking-glass.” When my wife, Jenny, and I decided to launch this podcast, we determined that we would play a straight game. We are Christians, but neither naive nor mindless of the real difficulties involved in being Christians in the modern world. We believe that Christ is the answer to the world‘s ills, but this does not mean that atheists and agnostics are irrational. We try to honestly and rationally confront our problems, and to reason honestly with the opposing view. THIS is a basic commitment to our project, and as I know BOTH sides of the looking-glass, I am in a unique position with a unique responsibility to fairness and probity on both side of the debate. In addition, we believe that God DEMANDS honesty and truth from us, not tricks of logic and rhetoric. For these reasons, I ask in this series of episodes of The Christian Atheist for a stabilization of terms. I would like to be able to confront atheism in its strongest and most robust formulation, which requires that we find a stable definition of the term, or at least a stable understanding of the range of atheistic thought and practice. It seems to me as though atheists constantly vacillate strategically between differing definitions in order to avoid the problems of atheism. I try to pin them down here.