Lesson video

Oh, hi you again.

How are you doing? Oh, I have just been listening to one of my favourite all time rock band Black Sabbath, heard them? Maybe your parents have.

So I've just been listening to the song "God is Dead" by black Sabbath and it reminded me of a little story about the song.

So I was watching an old anime video the other day, where some of the members of the band were talking about how it came about, how the song came about.

And in fact back even in the 1970s, when the band heard the lead singer was going to call the song, "God is Dead." They said you can't do that, that's going to really offend people.

We can't say God is dead.

And actually right back into the 1970s, it wasn't seem to be acceptable to not have some kind of religious belief.

in the end however, the Ozzy Osbourne the lead singer managed to convince the rest of the band and they carried on with the song, since then atheism has only grown more and more, as a tradition or an idea.

So today's lesson, we're going to unpack.

What is it? What is this idea of atheism? And is God really dead? In this lesson we will describe the key words atheism theism and agnosticism.

We'll be able to explain the history of atheism and we will analyse atheist thinking.

You need two different coloured pens, one to write with and one to make alterations and a piece of paper could be lined or plane It doesn't really matter so long as you're able to work with it.

If you can try and find yourself nice, quiet spot.

And as long as you're not using your phone to get you the lesson then turn your phone off so you don't get distracted.

So some keywords to help our understanding to begin with.

First one is theist or theist depending on how you pronounce it.

So theist is a person who believes in God and I've put a little picture of Ganesh because that's one of the traditional Hindu gods.

Then you've got an agnostic.

So if somebody is agnostic, they aren't sure whether or not God exists.

And finally, the word that we're going to be really looking at today is the word atheist.

An atheist is someone who doesn't believe in God.

So let's check your answers to these and show it.

So some quick check questions.

What are you to do is point to the option that you think is the right one.

So we've got option one, a person who likes everyone.

So an atheist is option one, a person who likes everyone.

Is it option two a person who believes in God? Is it option three, someone who doesn't believe in God, Or is it option four someone who isn't sure of God's existence, point to that screen now, I see some pointing fingers.

Well done your correct, well done, is somebody who does not believe in God.

Let's go to the next slide A theist is, option one, a person who likes everyone two, a person who believes in God, three or four, I'm not going to read the rest of them out because we've got the same options on each side.

So which one is a theist.

Well done again, you are right.

It is a person who believes in God, very good.

And the last one, an agnostic is, option one, option two, option three, option four.

is the option four someone who isn't sure of God's existence.

Now, let's have a go at trying to apply some of these keywords, before we do that In fact, I'm going to get you to copy down these things.

So I'm going to go off.

I'm going to ask you to pause, pause your video and have a go at this task, when you finished unpause it Okay, so by now you should have you should have done the activity on the previous slide.

So we're go through some of the answers.

An atheist might say that if God is meant to be this great being who is all-powerful and all-loving, then why does he even exist? Right, so now you have time to go through the activity.

We're going to go through some of the answers.

So how do you categorise the right statements to right ideas? So to begin with an atheist is someone remember who doesn't believe in God? So an atheist might say God is meant to be this great all-powerful being.

Who's all-loving, cares about everybody.

Then why do bad things happen to good people? Why does evil exist? A theist might say that actually, if you look at the beauty in the world it must have had an intelligent designer.

And if you've looked at my previous lesson, we're doing a whole lesson on the design argument.

If you are any more interested in that idea.

So theist might say that actually beauty and complexity of Nietzsche proves that there's a God that God must be an intelligent designer.

Agnostic, remember isn't quite sure whether there's a God or not.

So most it might say something like there is no way of knowing whether or not God exists.

A lack of evidence doesn't prove anything either way.

It doesn't mean there isn't, that doesn't mean there Isn't.

Okay, now I'm just going to talk to you about a brief history of atheism.

Now, the first time you listened to me describing and explaining what happened.

I'd just like you to listen, when you've gone through it once I'm going to ask you to stop and pause and do an activity while you rewatch the video, okay? So for the first time you can just listen.

So I've got a question here along the side in this picture and this is what is Enlightenment.

I'm going to begin explain that to you in some way.

Atheism looking in history has always been around, there is always been a time When people.

So now we're going to have a look at a brief history.

I'm going to ask you the question while we're doing that of what is Enlightenment.

Now, as you can imagine atheism is actually been around for many years, it's been around as long as people have started having a conscious thought.

So as long as people have been talking about God and religion, there's been somebody somewhere saying, well, I'm really not sure if there is a God.

However, the problem with this is classically.

This would have been called something called heresy, which means essentially it's something that is punishable often by death for essentially saying that God doesn't exist because the laws of countries inextricably linked to a belief in God.

Many monarchs in many countries believed in something called the Divine Right of Kings.

They believed or they at least preached and told everybody that it was God that had put them on the throne.

If you remember back to Henry VIII then and we're going to talk about this a little bit more detail in a minute, here Henry VIII had to ask the pope if he could get a divorce, because actually the religious leaders were still higher up than the Kings and Queens.

So, well atheism has been around forever or certainly as long as humans have existed to think that there's a God at the same time atheism has existed.

But it hasn't really been widely accepted.

Now there was a real change came along in a period of time we called the Protestant Reformation.

You might well have learned a little bit about the Protestant Reformation when you learn about Henry VIII and his six wives.

So I talked about him earlier So if you remember he divorced or he wanted to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, because he was part of the Catholic church, Catholic church didn't except divorce.

So he wasn't able to, now Henry changed and he took on Protestantism and he introduced the church of England so that he no longer had to follow the Pope.

He wasn't the first person to start changing his version of Christianity from Catholicism or being Roman Catholics to Protestantism.

This started happening all over Europe in different places.

When people were starting to quit, look at the Protestant Reformation it made them question the Catholic church.

And this was the first time that it became quite widely spread, that people were questioning religious authority and questioning whether if that is all right.

Now around this time.

Well, when it got to around the late 1700s to early 18 hundreds, we had a time in history called The Enlightenment.

There was a philosopher called Immanuel Kant.

And he said Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

And essentially what he meant by this was that actually we need to start questioning things that you are to be enlightened to have a better understanding and better knowledge of things, is when you stop choosing to just blindly follow religion and blindly follow the rules of the land and kings and people that you're following.

And you start to question things and therefore can also said that the motto of the enlightenment, the separate all day, which means dare to know, dare to know, dare to try and get better knowledge.

And part of that knowledge wasn't just following religious rules anymore.

The Age of Enlightenment was also known as the Age of Reason because it was a time when people started using their reason and using their experience to work out truths of what was right or wrong.

What we call this is Epistemology.

Epistemology is the, a few lessons ago.

I talked about philosophy and it being for search for truth.

Well, epistemology really is a search for truth and knowledge but that's just one branch of philosophy, but we tend to call them core philosophy the search for truth, but it would be more accurate to call epistemology search for truth.

So a lot of the epistemology came around during the Enlightenment period.

Another key important part of this and trying to find this new knowledge and not just blindly follow things, was this idea of empiricism and scepticism.

Empiricism is an idea that nothing is taken as truth unless it can be tested.

And if it can't be tested, then it can't be assumed that is right, or it's true.

So when we talk about something like God, and empiricists would say if we can't test whether or not God exists, then God does not exist.

The French revolution is an example of direct or a direct consequence of Enlightenment thinking This the reason why I have got the picture of a flag during the French revolution, because one of the key principles of the revolution was that they would no longer blindly following the church and blindly following the monarchy, which again, monarchy at the time followed the Divine Right of Kings.

Okay, so moving on to some more modern day atheism, hope you're keeping up.

The philosophy of the Nietzsche famously said that God is dead and that might not necessarily tie in entirely with atheism because if God is dead there is an assumption that God somehow must have existed before.

Nietzsche was well known however, to be an atheist.

And the reason why Nietzsche is believed to have said that God is dead, was meant more of the fact that religion was dead and that people weren't following it anymore.

And that the way of life that many people have lived for centuries and centuries before it was coming to a close.

Not long after Nietzsche, there were some huge developments in the 20th century that really brought about a lot more stronger beliefs in atheism Atrocities of the 20th century led to much more prevalent atheism because how could it have been a benevolent and all-loving God have allowed things like the Holocaust happen to have allowed the first and second world Wars to happen and to allow the genocides in Cambodia to happen.

So they started to bring about more prevalent atheism.

And while at the beginnings of the history of atheism, many atheists' blood was shed for not believing for committing heresy.

By the 20th century, we had a real change where in fact governments were being led by entirely secular organisations.

The communist governance of Russia and China both had strict policies that were antireligious and pro atheist.

And once again, there were examples of people who were in fact religious who were persecuted for their religious beliefs.

Now, in a minute, I'm going to go on to the next slide and it's going to give you some instructions for your next activity.

You'll then be asked to go back through these slides and to write down some key points.

So when you're ready go on to the next slide and then pause and go back through the video.

Hi, I'm back again.

So hopefully you've got five or 10 really good interesting bits of information on the history of atheism for me.

To check out, so how much that you have learned.

We are going to do some true or false questions.

So we're going to have it a thumbs up for true and thumbs down for false.

So true or false, Enlightenment is when someone turns a light on, that would be false.

Enlightened remember is well, it's man's emergence from a self imposed immaturity or you could just say it was a movement during the 1700s and 1800s where people started to question things that had been a standard.

True or false then true or false scepticism is a theory that certain knowledge is not possible.

I briefly talked about scepticism.

That is in fact true.

A sceptic doesn't take anything on face value.

So actually a sceptic is quite interesting, has to have a lot of evidence to believe something.

Empiricism is a theory that's all knowledge comes from experience.

Is that true or is that false? Is it true or is it false? It's true, empiricism is a theory that all knowledge comes from experience.

Or it's not experience it's from, using evidence through experiments.

So we often talk about empirical evidence, we're usually talking about science or something you can experience through your senses.

right? Epistemology is the study of truth and what can be considered as true, that's true epistemology is specifically trying to find objective truth.

So it's to find truth that is universally true.

No matter what perspective you're coming from.

Someone called Nigel said that "God is dead." That is a no, and the reason why you're absolutely right? It's because someone called Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead.

This next activity, I am going to ask you to read through all the different statements in the different boxes.

What you are then going to do all that I would then like you to do is draw a line, which we would call a continuum.

You are going to write out each of these arguments on the continuum, the things that you find aren't so strong.

And aren't so convincing in answering the question, is atheism successful in taking away a need for God and religion? If you think it's not a very good argument, then you can write it down the weak end of your continuum.

If you think it's a strong argument then write it up the top end of your continuum.

A little challenge for you.

If you feel like that isn't challenging enough, then choose your strongest argument, our weakest argument, and explain why you've put that on that continuum.

So now pause the video and take some time to copy out you're continuum put them in the order and then challenge yourself to work out.

Which one is your strongest argument and which one is the least strong argument.

Now you have completed the continuum argument, allow you to use this information to answer this question.

So you're going to pause again to complete this task.

Does atheism disprove God and religion? And I'm going to ask you to use the bullet points to help you answer the question.

Now pause the video, complete the task.

And when you're ready, you can resume.

So how did you do? Here's my answer.

Atheists believe that God does not exist.

They often believe that religion is harmful.

So how did you do? Have a read through my answer.

Say if there's any alterations you can make to your own, remember there's more than just the points that I've made in my answer.

You could use some of the other points from the continuum or other things that you thought of yourself.

When you've had a look through, make your own corrections, and then you've nearly finished the lesson.

Now, before you go, don't forget to complete the quiz.

It's only five questions and you're smash it.

I know you will.

Final thoughts to think about them.

So hey, we've been learning about atheism.

The belief that there is no God.

I always find it interesting how people say that religion causes wars and conflict.

And yet, if you look at many things during the last part of the 20th century, people in fact died for having religious belief.

I think sometimes it's people that cause conflict not just religion.