The concept of “validating atheism” is a very humorous event that is ironic, satiric and sardonic.
Compare, for example, the concept of “validating parking.” The obvious real-world scenario is that someone parks a vehicle at a lot which charges fees. However, if the person who has parked does business at one of the certain places, the restaurant or store or theater, etc., will pay the parking charges. The requirement to get the fee waived is that the business somehow validates or prove to the parking lot operator that the charges will be paid in due course. This is often done by chits, tokens, a stamp, voucher, certificate, etc.
The problem for atheism, then, is it must get some entity to validate its capabilities to occupy space. There needs to be some token or stamp or some such that promises to pay for space to the keeper of that space. The difficulties are insurmountable: atheism has no need for space, there is no keeper of the space and there are no tokens. So it may be very difficult to go about validating atheism.
The concept of “atheism” is an invention.
The Greek root of the word, “aΦeos,” meant “godless” or “without god,” in reference to impious people who did not honor the various deities of Olympus. At various times over the centuries, it has come to mean such things as a heretic or even skeptic in disputes among believers in different, disputative religions. Presently, it mostly means folks who do not believe in one, any or all the entities within the panoply of gods currently available on planet Earth, as specifically described by those who do believe in one or more of those gods. Very loosely used, the term is often applied to people who do not comport themselves with the precepts of religious folk who place their faith in the idea of a god or gods.
Atheism, in most respects, is a sort of intellectual, philosophical ne’er-do-well.
It seems orphaned, perhaps even bastardized, with no legitimate progenitors nor any lineage. It appears as if most people who do not accept the traditional views of deities are quite desultory about their disbelief. After all, non-believers do not get up and start the day with a devotional to the absence of god(s). It’s not as if such folks drive by a church and think how glad they are to not believe. Clearly, the skeptical do not form groups and donate large sums of money and construct large buildings and vigorously avow their lack of faith in the gods.
Oddly, most dis-believers simply go about their daily lives with a quiet sense of not really paying any attention to the gods. It’s certainly not as if there is some need to profess their un-belief. Most of the people who do not accept the existence of god(s) rarely think about themselves as atheists because it almost never comes up in real life. There are some decisions where it matters in a somewhat public sense, such as weddings, funerals, (lack of) christenings or baptisms, Easter and Christmas “stuff,” and the ultimate decisions about the individual’s personal death and its aftermath, i.e. final wishes.
Equally odd, the entire notion normally only comes up in debates, disputes, arguments and harangues involving those who believe in god(s) and are somehow bothered by those who do not. During the recent two centuries, there have been some astonishingly vicious hassles between notable non-believers and their detractors. In almost every such fracas there will be a scientist of some ilk and a group of religious activists (usually supported by a senator or two and several representatives) disputing such things as abiogenesis, evolution, climate change, cosmology or cosmogony. Fortunately, most of these disputes take place in written form, although they have been knowing to spill over into courtrooms and collegiate events.
Under most circumstances, the scientist is astounded that describing the existence of a single self-replicating molecule like a peptide from the Ghadiri group, or some hexanucleotide or an RNA polymerase will be sufficient grounds to enrage the faithful and bring on loud accusations of atheism as the source of such polysyllabic, jargonic mumbo-jumbo.
Validating atheism requires a validator.
One of the most ironic aspects of the belief in god(s) is that the believers place their faith in some omniscient, omnipresent and all-powerful entity. By those very definitions, it is quite clear that their god(s) fostered the humans who do not believe and generated the anti-belief concept known as “atheism.” An all-powerful entity, by definition, would have produced all of the atheists and, subsequently, their form of un-belief.
To the atheist, validation is silly and nonsensical. To not believe in god(s) is self-validating.
For the believers, the powers or capabilities they ascribe to their god(s) generated or created or caused or allowed the non-belief to exist, which results in validating atheism. It is obviously because their god(s) made it so.
