Do atheists believe in hope?

I think of “hope” as just preferring a specific outcome, that doesn’t really require anything more than a preference.
“Why go on” is the sort of question that I don’t understand (but often get) from believers. Why wouldn’t we? I don’t feel hopeless or unhappy or unfulfilled without gods or religion, aren’t there other things that give your life worth? Your friends, family, pets, your career, your hobbies, your passions?

Yes, they have hope but only because atheists can’t really control what they do and don’t believe in. They just kinda go with whatever happens to be believable at the time.. like.. one day they might wake up and believe that they hope their favorite sports team will win. Other times, they don’t even remember to believe that the game is on.

Hope is just a desire for a certain thing to happen. Is there some reason you don’t think that atheists can have future-directed desires?

Second, being an atheist doesn’t mean you think everything is “random and logical.” Sounds like you have only a straw man understanding of the word. Leaving aside the fact that one can be both atheistic and religious (see Jainism), the thing about physics and evolution is that they create order out of chaos. They show how our lives can escape randomness despite our origins being in part matters of chance. As such, secular atheism need not say that everything is random.

And as for everything being logical, there is a difference between there being a rational explanation for things and for the things themselves being logical. Take this question, for instance. There is a logical explanation for why it is so bad (most likely involving how incredibly misinformed you are about atheism). But the question itself is not logical. In fact, it is quite absurd.

Sure. I hope I win the lotto or I hope the weather will be nice on Saturday.

I’m confused by the question. I see no connection between atheism and hope.

I don’t think hope has anything to do with the belief or lack of belief in God. It’s about optimism and the desire for something to happen. As an atheist, I don’t believe there is any higher power that will influence whether something does or does not happen, but I can still wish that something will occur.

I may hope a paper I write is accepted, but whether that happens is mostly to do with my own skill as a researcher/writer. The final hurdle is where the hope really comes in because that’s reliant on the reviewers who read it judging my work as being appropriate and relevant to their journal. That’s out of my hands beyond my initial choice to send it there, but it isn’t anything to do any other higher power than that held by a reviewer.

Similarly, whether my team wins isn’t determined by God. It will be determined by elements such as with how well they trained, their attitude on the day and their opponents preparation/attitude, where they play and whether the ref is wearing his glasses. I can still hope.

I hope the opposition don’t win Government in Australia in September, but I think my hope will be in vain. I don’t think God will have any input.

My take on the initial question is this. Would you rather place your hope in things that exist, or in an imaginary friend?

Of course! I hope it won’t rain on the day of a picnic. I hope my latest project is well received. I hope my new hairdo looks good on me. I hope my guests will like he dinner I am making for them.
I hope people will learn to get along in peace. I hope my injured son will heal well. I hope the plant I planted grows normally and healthily.
What does my lack of belief in a higher power have to do with my hoping for whatever I want to hope for? I don’t see the connection.

Well, sure. Atheists have hopes and wishes, we just don’t pray to a god to make them come true. When I can influence the outcome myself, I do my best to make my hope come true. When I have no influence, when something really is random or is in someone else’s control, I still hope my desired outcome happens.

And why wouldn’t we go on?

@Sunny2 Exactly. If someone truly believes that because they, lucky ducky that they are; genuflex in just the right way to the right one of the 3,000 supreme beings humans have invented to worship; that they can be a lousy cook but the supreme being will overrule cause and effect, and their lousy culinary skills will magically produce a gourmet feast: it is they who are without hope.

Science can’t test to see whether there is or isn’t a being sitting outside the physical universe and beyond our every means of observation. But science can test whether prayer works or not. We can set up well controlled, double-double blind studies and see what happens. In every instance where scientific methods have been used test for the efficacy of prayer for individuals in hospitals, the results have either showed no correlation between prayer and recovery time or a negative correlation. People who knew they were being prayed for, or thought they were even though they were not, took longer to recover. The best guess is that their perception was that when the doctors told them that they were being prayed for, that meant their situation was much worse than medical science could handle, and so worked against their natural healing.

“Atheists” don’t believe any particular thing as a bloc. Atheism is a lack of belief in deity, or sometimes a positive disbelief in the existence of deity. There’s no book all atheists follow, and there’s no atheist dogma.
Atheists are regular people, not aliens. This is only the latest in a long series of “do Atheists so and so” questions which have appeared on Fluther. The tone of most of these questions has made me think they were posed by some theist making a dig at atheists and atheism. I find that behavior pathetic and puerile.

So, NO. Atheists don’t believe nor disbelieve in whatever the thing-of-the-day is. Atheists don’t believe in God. It says so right on the tin- and that’s all it says!

also, there is no hope; we abandoned it when we entered here

“I’m not looking for a, “shootout” or battle at all.”

Too bad. Been a while since fluther had one. Good to get the feathers rustled every now and then.

a = ‘without’ + theos = ‘a god’.

Nothing in there about a = ‘without’ + ‘hopa’, ‘hoop’ or ‘hop’.

I am also confused by the question. Why do you think that religion would be necessary for hope? Do you think that every time you hope for something you are sending a message to God requesting that the thing be done? That would be a different definition of hope from the one I am familiar with. God has nothing to do with it, and even if I was certain that everything is predetermined, it would make no difference, because the world is too complex to know what will happen.

According to Martin Seligman, hope is one of 24 universal virtues and strengths (CSV)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology#Strengths_and_Virtues

“The CSV suggested these 6 virtues have a historical basis in the vast majority of cultures; in addition, these virtues and strengths can lead to increased happiness when built upon. Notwithstanding numerous cautions and caveats, this suggestion of universality hints threefold:
1. The study of positive human qualities broadens the scope of psychological research to include mental wellness,
2. the leaders of the positive psychology movement are challenging moral relativism, suggesting people are “evolutionarily predisposed” toward certain virtues, and
3. virtue has a biological basis.”

So if hope has a biological basis, it doesn’t matter whether people are theists or atheists or agnostics.

I am an atheist and of course I have hope. If my favourite sports team is playing, I hope that they’ve trained hard enough, I hope they’re fit enough, I hope that they perform well on the day. I don’t expect any imaginary deity to intervene in the result, it’s all down to physical real-world factors like the fitness of the players, weather conditions and so forth.

Likewise with anything else, whether it’s a NASA mission, or just me preparing to do some public-speaking; the success or failure of the exercise is down to preparation and confidence. I can hope I’ve done enough, and if I haven’t, I will know that next time I need to do more.

Why do I go on? Because I know that everything I do makes a difference.

I’ve said for years hope is the same as faith. Religious people have faith things will work out and atheists have hope. It’s semantics.

@JLeslie – I don’t think faith is the same as hope.

@mattbrowne It’s used the same. People trust things will work out, have faith things will work out, pray things will work out, hope things will work out. All of it is out of our control.

I hope so.

There are multiple types and degrees of religious belief—why not multiple types and degrees of religious unbelief? In other words, should we generalize about what athetists do not believe? I see no reason why there can’t be room in an atheist’s mindset for hope as much as that of a religious believer. Besides, who says hope and must be necessarily be linked?

@ninjacolin You forgot your “sarcasm symbol”.

My hope is that someday we (as a species) no longer need an imaginary diety in the sky to convince us to do right and be good.

@JLeslie – Well, I have faith, but depending on the subject I have hope or no hope.

@mattbrowne Are you saying you have faith in God specifically?

To me, faith and hope aren’t exactly the same. Faith is trusting that things beyond your control will go your way. Hope is simply wanting them to.

@JLeslie – To me faith has to do with the ability to grow and become a better person. Jesus reminded us that we make ourselves very unhappy when we hate other people. This reminder saves me from living a miserable life. There are other ways to become a good person. Religion is not required. It’s just one option that works for some, but not for others.

Of course, there’s some overlap with the concept of hope, but the semantics is not identical.

I’ll agree the words are not perfectly synonomous, but they are often used similarly.

I don’t use the words “faith” and “hope” the same way. I agree with @DigitalBlue on the meanings/feelings behind them.

Would you say pray and hope are more similar? Praying something will happen and hoping something will happen?

I’m not sure. Maybe? Praying means you’re taking action, while hope doesn’t…it’s just a feeling. Maybe it depends on how the person doing the praying feels about it. If they feel that their prayer will be answered, that would be “faith” to me. If they don’t feel that way, then it might be similar to “hope”. In the latter case, though, why pray?

I hope that @_Whitetigress has not really abandoned this question. As @rexacoracofalipitorius mentioned above, we regularly get questions on Fluther by theists who seem to believe that atheists are somehow “emptier” than theists (which is why this question made me laugh out loud). This is another in that vein. The answers presented here are good ones, and try not only to answer the specific question about hope, but also the faulty premise that underlies it. @_Whitetigress, I hope that you are listening.

Atheists are a diverse group, whose common characteristic is a lack of belief in any god. Atheists are people with emotions, with hopes, with fears, with morals, with empathy, and with so much more – just like theists. These characteristics are human. They are not granted to a select few by a supernatural being.

I don’t see faith and hope as the same. To me faith works in a couple of ways. It indicates believing a higher power has some influence over life generally, your life and events. Faith in that way is related to the belief in God. Or having faith something can be brought about. So I had faith that the Qld State of Origin team could win the second match last night and they did. I was confident in their ability to make that happen.

Hope is the wish or an unfounded desire that things will turn out in a way that you want but without any belief in any supernatural intervention. I hope I win Gold Lotto tonight. I have no faith in a higher power making this happen or that the balls I’ve chosen will drop, but I do hope they will.

Your faithful behavior is identical to your hopeful behavior. If I watched what you did in either case, the only difference that I could observe would be in the words that you use to describe what is happening, as @JLeslie said. In both cases you would carefully monitor what is going on, and do what little you can do to affect the outcome. The only difference is that in the case of faith you would talk about God and in the case of hope you would talk about the natural course of events, purely verbal behavior that makes no difference. If you were a pagan, you might offer an animal sacrifice, perform a ritualistic dance, seek the advice of a shaman or wear a talisman, again none of which makes the slightest difference as to whether the desired outcome is realized.

@LostInParadise To say, “I have faith that X will occur” is to believe that X will occur. It involves a commitment to the truth of “X will occur.” To say, “I hope that X will occur” is merely to desire for X to occur. It does not involve a commitment to the truth of “X will occur.” So there is at least one difference between faithful behavior and hopeful behavior, which means they cannot be identical.

It’s interesting that the authors of the New Testament struggled with the distinction between faith and hope. Consider Epistle to the Hebrews, 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The theist having faith, if we accept that definition, considers it evidence even though it is not yet seen.” Most atheists and agnostics would claim that there is no such thing as evidence not seen. Evidence is things we can observe. As an agnostic atheist, I understand that when I hope for an unlikely outcome like winning the next drawing of the Mega Millions Lottery, it’s not likely to happen. When a Christian theist places their faith in the promise of eternal bliss in heaven for accepting Jesus, they absolutely believe it is going to happen even though there’s not a shred of observable evidence it will. I maintain that faith and hope are quite different phenomena, and that the writer/s of Hebrews knew that and articulated it well.

While I was writing all this, I see @SavoirFaire found a much more succinct way of expressing it.

@JLeslie Would you say pray and hope are more similar?
I think pray is more similar to wish, than to hope. A wish is more like a prayer, except with a wish, there isn’t necessarily a deity involved.

@SavoirFaire, Religious faith regarding observable events in this world (as distinguished from the supposed afterlife) usually has a fail-safe provision. The faith is that God will do the right thing. If the right thing does not coincide with what you believe to be the right thing then in some way beyond your understanding, God chose the best course of events. Since the standard of goodness is known only to God, this is a meaningless statement and faith is not distinguishable from hope.

Faith of the non-religious sort is different from hope. If I have faith that someone will do the right thing and the person fails to do so, then to the extent that I am capable, I may act in such a way as to prevent that person from ever again being able to determine certain outcomes.

Hope doesn’t have to be a religious concept. It is not exclusive to Christianity, or not in my dictionary anyway.

I don’t think faith has to be religious. A person can have faith things will work out and not believe in God.

@LostInParadise I’m afraid I don’t quite get the point of your reply. Your second paragraph concedes that faith is distinct from hope and that faithful behavior is not identical to hopeful behavior. The religious/non-religious distinction is immaterial here since the category “faithful behavior” includes both.

Moreover, the example from your first paragraph doesn’t work. All it shows is that one does not need to know the specific content of “the right thing” to believe that God will do it (and more generally, that one does not need to know the specific content of “X” to believe it will occur). It in no way contradicts my point about faith requiring a belief claim, while hope does not.

What I am trying to say is that typically a theist will say that God does what is best. You can say this is a type of faith, but it is hollow, because the believer will take as best whatever happens. It is circular reasoning. Whatever happens is the best that can happen, because God always does what is best.

@LostInParadise First, that has nothing to do with the topic. It’s about faith, but not at all about hope. Second, it is not circular reasoning. It may seem like an empty sort of comfort, but it is not circular. For there to be circular reasoning, there must be an argument and that argument must assume what it seeks to prove.

It seems that you think the argument is this: “God does whatever is best; therefore, this is the best of all possible worlds.” This is not a circular argument. It may have a mistaken conclusion and there may be many objections to be made to the argument (e.g., maybe not everything that happens is caused by God, which is how the free will theodicy attempts to get around the problem of evil), but that does not mean that the mistake going on here is circularity.

Moreover, the theist typically believes that God does what is best as a matter of definition. God is omnibenevolent, so His actions must be good. Thus all they have to believe is that whatever God allows is allowed for some good reason. It does not follow from this that we must live in the best of all possible worlds. Again, consider the free will theodicy. To adopt this response to the problem of evil is only to say that free will is worth the costs, not to say that there isn’t a better possible world in which people are free and do only good.

Okay, not circular reasoning, but more like truth by assertion. One has faith that the best will happen because God always does what is best.

The existence of evil does not require free will. The assertion is that this is the best of all possible worlds. One would then just have to argue that in any world that could in fact actually exist, there must be some degree of evil. For example, you could argue that suffering builds character, so there must be some amount of suffering. The world created by God would then be the one that minimizes the total amount of evil.

The main point that I was trying to make was that if you assume that everything that happens is the best possible then there is no room for hope or faith. If your team wins then that was the best possible outcome and the same if your team loses. If you live a prosperous life that is for the best and the same if your house is destroyed in a tornado and your life is cut short by some rare disease. It is all part of God’s plan.

@LostInParadise I am well aware that there are other theodicies. I used the free will theodicy as one way of demonstrating how the reasoning you presented was not circular. All you’ve done is mention two more: the contrast theodicy (good and evil cannot exist without each other), and the soul-making theodicy (evil is necessary for full spiritual growth).

Neither of these rule out hope or faith, however, as one can hope that certain evils will not turn out to be necessary and one can have faith that the evils one has seen were necessary. That we may see our hopes dashed does not mean that we cannot have them. It is a feature of hope, after all, that it concerns things that may or may not come to pass. And that we believe in a good God does not mean that we have certain knowledge of such an entity, which is why people are urged to have faith in the first place.

We all believe in something, but the criteria required for believing something to be a likely fact will vary from person to person. There were quite a few atheist philosophers that didn’t believe in hope, and in fact didn’t have great things to say about the term. Friedrich Nietzsche went as far as to say that “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Arthur Schopenhauer didn’t have kind words for hope as well as other atheist pessimistic philosophers. Thomas Ligotti’s recent book Conspiracy against the Human Race didn’t speak too well of hope either.

It appears to me that atheists (and some theists) who consider themselves to be determinists are less likely to ‘believe’ in hope than those people who have a libertarian indeterministic mindset. Atheism can refer to such a varying degree of people who think differently from one another, and believe it or not not all atheists believe in an indeterministic universe.

@Paradox25 You are equivocating on “believe” here. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer clearly believed in hope in the sense relevant to the question. That is, they believed that hope is a real phenomenon in the world and that people do engage in an activity properly described as “hoping.” If they had not so believed, they could not have sensibly produced the quotes you have cited.

But you are confusing this sense of the word “believe” with a more colloquial sense in which “believing in something” involves a sort of confidence in its abilities. Schopenhauer certainly did not believe in hope in this sense. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was less pessimistic. This is clear if you read his work in context. What you have quoted is the last line from his explanation of the Pandora myth (as found in Human, All Too Human §71).

Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, and his early works show quite a bit of agreement with Schopenhauer’s views. But the overall story of Nietzsche’s work includes a progressive rejection of Schopenhauerian pessimism. Nietzsche was one of those determinists who did not reject hope at the end of the day, even if he required it to be more grounded than most people of his time found necessary.

@SavoirFaire Philosophy is something that I’ve recently gotten into over the past five years, especially philosophical pessimism. I never had the chance yet to read much about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer beyond what others have quoted from them. Many of the newer pessimists use older quotes in an attempt to support their own viewpoints. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have their statements scattered throughout much of the newer material that I’ve read as the result of other pessimists/antinatalists using them.

I wanted to use the term ‘hope’ in a different light here rather than the dictionary definition. There’s no realistic way to answer the question the way it was asked, since we all hope whether we’re atheists, antitheists, theists, religionists, agnostics, etc. What are the best books to buy concerning Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and their outlook/philosophy on life?

@Paradox25 I don’t think I would say there’s no realistic way to answer the question so much as I would say that there’s only one way to answer the question: with a resounding “yes.” Given that such a response may not seem terribly informative, however, I can understand why you wanted to take it from a different angle. Fair enough. In any case, we agree that everyone hopes.

When it comes to Schopenhauer, I find Christopher Janaway’s books to be both accessible and insightful. In particular, I would recommend his Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (for a crash course) and his Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (for something more in depth). The first two books I would recommend for better understanding Nietzsche are Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann and The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality by Brian Leiter.

The Schopenhauer books will focus on The World as Will and Representation, that being his best known and most influential work. Nietzsche’s outlook changed over time (his early works being very Schopenhauerian, but his more considered views appearing in his middle and late works). Thus the Nietzsche books tend to focus on Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist.