"Atheists are Arrogant"

Today's post is less of an exposition on atheist thought than it is an open question. A question for which I don't have the answer.

How can atheists ever overcome the accusation of arrogance made by the faithful?

If you've spent any time debating or even talking to people of faith about atheism, you've probably been called arrogant. It goes something like, "How can you not accept that there might be something bigger than yourself?" The implication being that not believing in a deity is prideful or arrogant because it is asserting yourself as the supreme intelligence in your life.

The problem here is that the atheist and the believer are playing by different rules. To the faithful, the idea that god exists is fundamental. It makes perfect sense within that framework to accuse anyone defying the omniscient of arrogance.

The atheist, on the other hand, sees no reason to believe that there is a god, and so it is only reasonable to believe himself to be the final arbiter of his existence. This isn't an act of pride, but of necessity. All philosophy is an internal pursuit if you hold that only shared experience has meaning.

That's the impasse. A faithful person will never see humility in an atheist, because faith is about humbling yourself before a god. I am personally frustrated by this on a regular basis, because I consider my philosophy to be about nothing other than humility.

The important idea here is that I'm not an atheist because I believe there is no god. I'm an atheist because I see no reason to believe that there is one.

Do you see why I would consider that to be "humble"? I've yet to convince a person of faith that it is, but I'll try to state the idea as best I can.

My atheism is an outgrowth of my skepticism (not cynicism, and I'm tired of them being conflated), and my skepticism is rooted in three very key ideas:

1.) Anything I believe or think I know may be wrong.
2.) It is impossible to ever know the full truth of anything.
3.) My senses and cognition are, at best, imperfect.

If you look at those tenets, it's hard to see any arrogance in them. If anything, the opposite is true. What's more humble than accepting that you are flawed, that it is your responsibility to seek what truth you can, and that you ought never accept your own ideas as perfect? To me, that's true humility.

It's claiming that you know the one true answer to everything that's arrogant, and when that one true answer tells you that it's actually humility, then we reach a point where we simply can't debate. The faithful are playing checkers and the atheists are playing Boggle. The same rules just don't apply.