Well, yes, but that’s what I was saying: he hadn’t “done” arriving at atheism well, and was a sloppy thinker. Nothing in this piece suggests an improvement in his quality of work on this. And having witnessed “seekers” and watched them seek for decades, I can personally attest that nothing about the duration of the search provides any assurance of quality.
Surely one CAN be an atheist for terrible reasons. And if one is, one is perhaps likelier to then go on to be something other than an atheist. But he assumes, I think, that others are atheists for reasons which are as poor as his own. He ignores the possibility that others may simply be a bit better at this.
Sure, and the Huxley quote above answers that, I think, better than I could, so here it is again:
It is quite true that the ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination, it is obvious that the axioms, on which it is based, cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination. It is also a trite observation that, in the business of life, we constantly take the most serious action upon evidence of an utterly insufficient character. But it is surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to dispense with ratiocination because ratiocination cannot dispense with faith as a starting-point; and that because we are often obliged, by the pressure of events, to act on very bad evidence, it does not follow that it is proper to act on such evidence when the pressure is absent.
I might add that there are also “assumptions” involved in such things as the belief that sense impressions correspond in some way to some external reality, and that none of us are free from these assumptions because we are utterly adrift without them. But experience does seem to bear these assumptions out. Our sense impressions are at least non-randomly related to aspects of external reality. But beyond these trivial types of assumptions, and the type of “faith” in the value of experience of which Huxley speaks, no others are essential in any way to atheism.
Speaking only for myself, I come from a background where theism is more or less assumed and the only question is what, precisely, the nature of the divine is. My assumptions, as I began to ask these questions, were certainly heavily prejudiced in favor of theistic belief. But I think it would be asinine to mirror Guillen and parade around and act as though my atheism is more credible on that account. Far too many people try to re-write their own “quests” in those terms, asserting that you can really be sure of just how right they are because they started out believing something else. Balderdash. One either deals well with the evidence, or does not; whether one started out as a Methodist, Episcopalian, Baalist, Frugivore or Monetarist doesn’t really matter.
