Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods.

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other
question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that
there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be
clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.
Older dictionaries define atheism as “a belief that there is no God.” Clearly, theistic
influence taints these definitions. The fact that dictionaries define Atheism as “there
is no God” betrays the (mono)theistic influence. Without the (mono)theistic
influence, the definition would at least read “there are no gods.”

Atheism is not a belief system nor is it a religion.

While there are some religions that are atheistic (certain sects of Buddhism, for
example), that does not mean that atheism is a religion. To put it in a more
humorous way: If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Despite the fact that atheism is not a religion, atheism is protected by many of the
same Constitutional rights that protect religion. That, however, does not mean that
atheism is itself a religion, only that our sincerely held (lack of) beliefs are protected
in the same way as the religious beliefs of others. Similarly, many “interfaith” groups
will include atheists. This, again, does not mean that atheism is a religious belief.

Some groups will use words like Agnostic, Humanist, Secular, Bright, Freethinker,
or any number of other terms to self identify. Those words are perfectly fine as a
self-identifier, but we strongly advocate using the word that people understand:
Atheist. Don’t use those other terms to disguise your atheism or to shy away from a
word that some think has a negative connotation. We should be using the
terminology that is most accurate and that answers the question that is actually
being asked. We should use the term that binds all of us together.

If you call yourself a humanist, a freethinker, a bright, or even a “cultural Catholic”

and lack belief in a god, you are an atheist. Don’t shy away from the term. Embrace it.
Agnostic isn’t just a “weaker” version of being an atheist. It answers a different
question. Atheism is about what you believe. Agnosticism is about what you know.
Not all non-religious people are atheists, but…
In recent surveys, the Pew Research Center has grouped atheists, agnostics, and the
“unaffiliated” into one category. The so-called “Nones” are the fastest growing
“religious” demographic in the United States. Pew separates out atheists from
agnostics and the non-religious, but that is primarily a function of self-identification.
Only about 5% of people call themselves atheists, but if you ask about belief in
gods, 11% say they do not believe in gods. Those people are atheists, whether they
choose to use the word or not.
A recent survey from University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine
Najle found that as many as 26% of Americans may be atheists. This study was
designed to overcome the stigma associated with atheism and the potential for
closeted atheists to abstain from “outing” themselves even when speaking
anonymously to pollsters. The full study is awaiting publication in Social Psychological
and Personality Science journal but a pre-print version is available here.
Even more people say that their definition of “god” is simply a unifying force
between all people. Or that they aren’t sure what they believe. If you lack an active
belief in gods, you are an atheist.
Being an atheist doesn’t mean you’re sure about every theological question, have
answers to the way the world was created, or how evolution works. It just means
that the assertion that gods exist has left you unconvinced.

Wishing that there was an afterlife, or a creator god, or a specific god doesn’t mean
you’re not an atheist. Being an atheist is about what you believe and don’t believe,
not about what you wish to be true or would find comforting.

All atheists are different

The only common thread that ties all atheists together is a lack of belief in gods.
Some of the best debates we have ever had have been with fellow atheists. This is
because atheists do not have a common belief system, sacred scripture or atheist
Pope. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas. Atheists come
in a variety of shapes, colors, beliefs, convictions, and backgrounds. We are as unique
as our fingerprints.
Atheists exist across the political spectrum. We are members of every race. We are
members of the LGBTQ* community. There are atheists in urban, suburban, and
rural communities and in every state of the nation.

We have more than 170 affiliates and local partners nationwide. If you are looking for a
community, we strongly recommend reaching out to an affiliate in your area.
Atheism is very simple, yet widely misunderstood. The word atheism comprises the
word theism with the prefix ‘a’. So let’s break it down. Theism is the belief in a god or
gods. The prefix ‘a’ means; ‘without’ or ‘lack of’. Therefore, atheism means ‘without a
belief in a god or gods’ or the ‘lack of a belief in a god or gods’.
We often hear theists say, “If you don’t believe in God, you must believe God does not
exist!” but this is simply wrong. Lacking a belief in a god does not entail believing that no
gods exist. A person could reasonably say she doesn’t know if any gods exist, and there
are none that she currently believes in.
This issue is the single biggest misunderstanding about atheism. Fortunately, there is a
neat way to show why it’s wrong. A god either exists, or it doesn’t. There are only two
possibilities.

Now, imagine I’m holding a bag of coins and I claim there’s an even number of coins in
the bag. A bag of coins either has an even number of coins or an odd number. Like a
god’s existence, there are only two possibilities. If you are not able to check my claim by
counting the coins, you won’t know if my claim is true so you should not believe me. But
that does not mean that you must believe there is an odd number of coins in the bag.
You don’t have the evidence to take a view on it, so you shouldn’t believe either
possibility.

It is not necessary for an atheist to claim that no gods exist, nevertheless, some do.
People often call this position hard atheism. Hard atheism is atheism with the additional
conviction that there are no gods anywhere either inside, or outside, of the universe.

Why be an atheist?
Sometimes theists are thoroughly perplexed by atheism. The way they see the world,
not believing in a god is bizarre—bordering on madness. So let’s look at why people are
atheists. There are several reasons people lack a belief in gods; we will discuss just
two.

Some people are atheists simply because they have never been taught to be theists.
People raised by an atheist family in an atheistic society may never be exposed to the
idea of gods (except in history books), so they grow up with no belief in them.
Remember, people do not suddenly become Christians, Muslims, Hindus or whatever.
Children raised in religious families in religious societies are trained to be Christians,
Muslims or Hindus.

A significant proportion of atheists in the world today are atheists because they were not
taught to be anything else.

Other atheists were taught to believe in a god or gods but decided it didn’t make sense
so they abandoned their belief.

Let’s look at one scenario. Arif was born a Muslim but he knows there are around 5
billion people in the world who believe in different religions and, often, in different gods.
He wonders if there is a good reason to be a Muslim rather than something else, but
cannot find anything compelling.

He worries that the arguments Muslims use to ‘prove’ their god exists are the exact
same arguments others use to ‘prove’ their god exists. He knows there are some big
questions that science cannot answer, such as “Where did the universe come from?”
and God is used to answer those questions. But he realizes there is a possibility that
science may answer those questions one day. And even if it never does, an
unanswered question does not mean the particular god Abraham dreamed about 3,500
years ago must be real. Arif knows thousands of people have dreamed of thousands of
gods and created thousands of religions. He knows men invent gods and religions.
What is special about Abraham’s god?

After much thought, Arif sees that his belief is really based on faith, and not on
incontrovertible evidence. And he sees that the Christian’s belief and the Hindu’s belief
is also founded on faith. With a little more thought he concludes that faith is not a way to
distinguish what is true from what is false—it is a way to justify whatever you happen to
believe. Different people believe completely contradictory things on faith, so it has no
value as a way to decide what is true.

At this point Arif has no reasons left to believe in his god, so he becomes an atheist.

This journey of discovery, or something rather like it, is the journey millions of people
have taken to become atheists. If you ask any of these people why they are atheists,
you would get a similar answer, “Because there are no good reasons to believe in gods;
and I won’t believe in them for bad reasons.”

What do atheists believe?

There is nothing you have to believe to be an atheist. Not believing in any god, is the
only qualification required. Beyond that, an atheist can believe in anything at all.

So being an atheist, says nothing about a person’s politics, attitude towards LGBT rights
or views on gun control, abortion, church/state separation or anything else. In principle,
an atheist could believe in fairies, although the thinking that leads to unbelief in gods, in
most cases leads to unbelief in other things that cannot be shown to be real.
Consequently, atheists most likely will not believe in Satan, demons, angels, karma,
heaven, hell or anything else that relies on the supernatural but, in principle, they could.

What is agnosticism?
Theism and atheism tell us about a person’s belief in gods. Agnosticism and Gnosticism
tell us what a person claims to know, not what they believe. Because atheism and
agnosticism are different things, it is possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic. An
agnostic atheist does not believe in any gods but does not claim to know that no gods
exist.
It works the same with theism. It is possible to be an agnostic theist—a person who
believes in God but does not claim to know God exists. In practice though, most
believers are gnostic theists—they believe in God and claim to know God exists.
Interestingly, most atheists are agnostic atheists.

Some people self-describe as agnostic when they cannot decide what to believe. That’s
fine, but if they do not actually believe in a god, they are not theists, so they must be
atheists.

Pride in atheism
Over centuries, theists have denigrated atheists. Stories have circulated that atheists
are immoral, dishonest and untrustworthy, that atheists hate God and love Satan and
that atheists ignore God so they can behave however they like. If we look at countries
where most people are atheists, we can see such allegations are not true.

Atheists are humans and you will find good and bad, but if you compare atheistic
countries with very religious ones, you are likely to see atheistic countries have lower
crimes rates and less dysfunctional behavior. For example, Figure 1 shows the
relationship between religiosity (the percentage of people who say religion is important
in their lives) and intentional homicide rates. All of the high homicide rate countries are
very religious but none of the low homicide rate countries are. (Note that the Y axis –
Homicide Rate is drawn on a logarithmic scale!)

These baseless allegations against atheists have been made for so long that the
word atheism is now seen as tarnished and many people avoid it, even though they
have no belief in gods. Consequently, some atheists self-identify as freethinkers,
skeptics, secularists, agnostics, non-believers and more. That is a pity. Atheism has a
long history and it describes an intellectually honorable viewpoint simply and precisely.
We vote to use it with pride.

Atheism
Atheism - Defining the Terms
There are two basic forms of atheism: "strong" atheism and "weak" atheism. Strong atheism is the
doctrine that there is no God or gods. Weak atheism is the disbelief in or denial of the existence of
God or gods.
Weak atheism is often confused with agnosticism, the lack of belief or disbelief in God or gods, and
skepticism, the doctrine that the absolute knowledge of God's existence is unobtainable by mere
man. Many agnostics and skeptics are "practical atheists" in that they actively pursue an atheistic
lifestyle. The exclusion of God necessitates moral relativism.

Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) declared, and philosophers generally agree,
without God there is no absolute truth and thus no universal moral standard of conduct. Humanist
John Dewey (1859-1952), co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto I (1933), declared, "There
is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With
dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for
fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

Atheism - Strong Atheism

Does "strong" atheism correspond with or contradict objective reality? Let's look at this question
objectively. Suppose someone asks you, "Does God exist?" You could answer in one of three ways:
"I know for certain that God exists" (assured theism), "I don't know whether or not God exists"
(insecure theism, agnosticism, "weak" atheism and/or skepticism), or "I know for certain that God
doesn't exist" ("strong" atheism).

To know for certain that God exists, you don't have to know everything but you do have to know
something - you must either know God personally or you must be aware of some evidence
establishing His existence. To be unsure whether or not God exists, you don't have to know
everything. In fact, by your own admission you don't know everything. However, to claim to know for
certain that God doesn't exist - to positively assert a universal negative - you would have to know
everything. To be absolutely certain that God doesn't exist outside the limits of your knowledge, you
would have to possess all knowledge.

Let's make this practical. Do you know everything? Do you know half of everything? Do you know
1% of everything? Let's be incredibly gracious and suppose that you know 1% of everything there is
to know. Thomas Edison confidently declared, "We do not know a millionth of one percent about
anything." Nevertheless, given the supposition that you know 1% of everything, is it possible that
evidence proving God's existence exists in the 99% of everything you don't know? If you're honest,
you'll have to admit that it's a real possibility. The fact is, since you don't possess all knowledge, you
don't know if such evidence exists or not. Thus, you cannot be a "strong" atheist - you don't know
that God doesn't exist.

Atheism vs. Theism

Strong atheism is a logically flawed position. Weak atheism, agnosticism and skepticism are all "I
don't know" theological positions, with weak atheists subscribing to atheistic presuppositions, true
agnostics "sitting on the fence," and skeptics capitulating to ignorance. Assured theists are the only
ones who claim to know anything. What do they know? In the end it doesn't matter what you believe.
What matters is what's actually true. You might not believe in gravity. Nevertheless, if you step off a
tall building you are going to splat on the ground below. The existence of God has enormous
implications for you and me, and prudence would have us make a full investigation of all the
available data before putting our eternity in the care of any one belief-system. Ask yourself these
types of questions: "How do I know something's true?" "What is the source of my information?" "Is
my source absolutely reliable?" "What if I'm wrong?"

10 facts about atheists

BY MICHAEL LIPKA

Estimating the number of atheists in the U.S. is complicated. Some adults who describe themselves
as atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit. At the same time, some people who
identify with a religion (e.g., say they are Protestant, Catholic or Jewish) also say they do not believe
in God.
But one thing is for sure: Along with the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans (many of whom
believe in God), there has been a corresponding increase in the number of atheists. As nonbelievers
and others gather in Washington, D.C., for the “Reason Rally,” here are key facts about atheists and
their beliefs:

1 The share of Americans who

identify as atheists has roughly doubled in the past several years. Pew Research Center’s 2014
Religious Landscape Study found that 3.1%
of American adults say they are
atheists when asked about their religious identity, up from 1.6% in a
similarly large survey in 2007. An additional 4.0% of Americans call themselves agnostics, up from
2.4% in 2007.

2Atheists, in general, are more likely to be male and younger than the overall population; 68%
are men, and the median age of atheist adults in the U.S. is
34 (compared with 46 for all U.S. adults). Atheists also are more likely to be white (78% are
Caucasian vs. 66% for the general public) and highly educated: About four-in-ten atheists (43%) have
a college degree, compared with 27% of the general public.

3Self-identified atheists tend to be aligned with the Democratic Party and with political
liberalism. About two-thirds of atheists (69%) identify as
Democrats (or lean in that direction), and a majority (56%)
call themselves political liberals (compared with just one-in-ten who say they are
conservatives). Atheists overwhelmingly favor same-sex marriage (92%) and legal abortion (87%). In
addition, three-quarters (74%) say that government aid to the poor does more good than harm.

4Although the literal definition of “atheist” is “a person who does not believe in the existence of a
god or any gods,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 8% of those who call
themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal
spirit. Indeed, 2% say they are “absolutely certain” about the existence of God or a universal spirit.
Alternatively, there are many people who fit the dictionary definition of “atheist” but do not call
themselves atheists. About three times as many Americans say they do not believe in God or a
universal spirit (9%) as say they are atheists (3%).

5Unsurprisingly, more than nine-in-ten self-identified atheists say religion is not too or not at all
important in their lives, and nearly all (97%) say they seldom or never pray. At the same time, many
do not see a contradiction between atheism and pondering their place in the world. Three-in-ten
(31%) say they feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being at least weekly. A similar share
(35%) often thinks about the meaning and purpose of life. And roughly half of all atheists (54%)
frequently feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe, up from 37% in 2007. In fact, atheists
are more likely than U.S. Christians to say they often feel a sense of
wonder about the universe (54% vs. 45%).

6In the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, self-identified atheists were asked how often they share
their views on God and religion with religious people. Only about one-in-ten atheists (9%) say they
do at least weekly, while roughly two-thirds
(65%) say they seldom or
never discuss their views on religion with religious people. By
comparison, 26% of those who have a religious affiliation share their views at least once a week with
those who have other beliefs; 43% say they seldom or never do.

7Virtually no atheists (1%) turn to religion for guidance on questions of right and wrong,
but increasing numbers are turning to science. About
a third of atheists (32%)
say they look primarily to science for guidance on questions of
right and wrong, up from 20% in 2007. A plurality (44%) still cite “practical
experience and common sense” as their primary guide on such questions, but that is down from 52%
in 2007.

8Americans like atheists less than they like members of most

major religious groups. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans to rate
groups on a “feeling thermometer” from zero (as cold and negative as possible) to 100 (the warmest,
most positive possible rating). U.S. adults gave atheists an average rating of 41, comparable to the
rating they gave Muslims (40) and far colder than the average given to Jews (63), Catholics (62) and
evangelical Christians (61).

9 About half of Americans

(51%) say they would be less likely to support an atheist
candidate for president, more than say the same about a candidate with any other
trait mentioned in a Pew Research Center survey – including being Muslim. This figure, while still
high, has declined in recent years – in early 2007, 63% of U.S. adults said they would be less likely to
support an atheist presidential candidate. There are currently no self-described atheists serving in
Congress, although there is one House member, Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who describes herself as
religiously unaffiliated.
10About half of Americans (53%) say it is not necessary to
believe in God to be moral, while 45% say belief in God is
necessary to have good values, according to a 2014 survey. In other wealthy
countries, smaller shares tend to say that a belief in God is essential for good morals, including just
15% in France. But in many other parts of the world, nearly everyone says that a person must believe
in God to be moral, including 99% in Indonesia and Ghana and 98% in Pakistan.

Note: This post was originally published on Nov. 5, 2015, as “7 facts about atheists,” and updated
on June 1, 2016.

Atheism
The term “atheist” describes a person who does not believe that God or a divine being
exists. Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma,
political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult.

For the most part, atheists have presumed that the most reasonable conclusions are the
ones that have the best evidential support. And they have argued that the evidence in
favor of God’s existence is too weak, or the arguments in favor of concluding there is no
God are more compelling. Traditionally the arguments for God’s existence have fallen
into several families: ontological, teleological, and cosmological arguments, miracles,
and prudential justifications. For detailed discussion of those arguments and the major
challenges to them that have motivated the atheist conclusion, the reader is encouraged
to consult the other relevant sections of the encyclopedia.
Arguments for the non-existence of God are deductive or inductive. Deductive arguments
for the non-existence of God are either single or multiple property disproofs that allege
that there are logical or conceptual problems with one or several properties that are
essential to any being worthy of the title “God.” Inductive arguments typically present
empirical evidence that is employed to argue that God’s existence is improbable or
unreasonable. Briefly stated, the main arguments are: God’s non-existence is analogous
to the non-existence of Santa Claus. The existence of widespread human and non-human
suffering is incompatible with an all powerful, all knowing, all good being. Discoveries
about the origins and nature of the universe, and about the evolution of life on Earth make
the God hypothesis an unlikely explanation. Widespread non-belief and the lack of
compelling evidence show that a God who seeks belief in humans does not exist. Broad
considerations from science that support naturalism, or the view that all and only physical
entities and causes exist, have also led many to the atheism conclusion.
The presentation below provides an overview of concepts, arguments, and issues that are
central to work on atheism.

Table of Contents
 1. What is Atheism?
2. The Epistemology of Atheism
3. Deductive Atheology
a. Single Property Disproofs
b. Multiple Property Disproofs
c. Failure of Proof Disproof
4. Inductive Atheology
. The Prospects for Inductive Proof
a. The Santa Claus Argument
b. Problem of Evil
c. Cosmology
d. Teleological Arguments
e. Arguments from Nonbelief
f. Atheistic Naturalism
5. Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism
6. Future Prospects for Atheism
7. References and Further Reading
1. What is Atheism?
Atheism is the view that there is no God. Unless otherwise noted, this article will use the
term “God” to describe the divine entity that is a central tenet of the major monotheistic
religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. At a minimum, this being is
usually understood as having all power, all knowledge, and being infinitely good or
morally perfect. See the article Western Concepts of God for more details. When necessary,
we will use the term “gods” to describe all other lesser or different characterizations of
divine beings, that is, beings that lack some, one, or all of the omni- traits.
There have been many thinkers in history who have lacked a belief in God. Some ancient
Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, sought natural explanations for natural
phenomena. Epicurus was also to first to question the compatibility of God with
suffering. Forms of philosophical naturalism that would replace all supernatural
explanations with natural ones also extend into ancient history. During the
Enlightenment, David Hume and Immanuel Kant give influential critiques of the
traditional arguments for the existence of God in the 18th century. After Darwin (1809-
1882) makes the case for evolution and some modern advancements in science, a fully
articulated philosophical worldview that denies the existence of God gains traction. In
the 19th and 20thcenturies, influential critiques on God, belief in God, and Christianity
by Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Camus set the stage for modern atheism.
It has come to be widely accepted that to be an atheist is to affirm the non-existence of
God. Anthony Flew (1984) called this positive atheism, whereas to lack a belief that God or
gods exist is to be a negative atheist. Parallels for this use of the term would be terms such
as “amoral,” “atypical,” or “asymmetrical.” So negative atheism would includes someone
who has never reflected on the question of whether or not God exists and has no opinion
about the matter and someone who had thought about the matter a great deal and has
concluded either that she has insufficient evidence to decide the question, or that the
question cannot be resolved in principle. Agnosticism is traditionally characterized as
neither believing that God exists nor believing that God does not exist.
Atheism can be narrow or wide in scope. The narrow atheist does not believe in the
existence of God (an omni- being). A wide atheist does not believe that any gods exist,
including but not limited to the traditional omni-God. The wide positive atheist denies
that God exists, and also denies that Zeus, Gefjun, Thor, Sobek, Bakunawa and others
exist. The narrow atheist does not believe that God exists, but need not take a stronger
view about the existence or non-existence of other supernatural beings. One could be a
narrow atheist about God, but still believe in the existence of some other supernatural
entities. (This is one of the reasons that it is a mistake to identify atheism with
materialism or naturalism.)
Separating these different senses of the term allows us to better understand the different
sorts of justification that can be given for varieties of atheism with different scopes. An
argument may serve to justify one form of atheism and not another. For Instance, alleged
contradictions within a Christian conception of God by themselves do not serve as
evidence for wide atheism, but presumably, reasons that are adequate to show that there
is no omni-God would be sufficient to show that there is no Islamic God.

2. The Epistemology of Atheism

We can divide the justifications for atheism into several categories. For the most part,
atheists have taken an evidentialist approach to the question of God’s existence. That is,
atheists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude
of belief towards the proposition, “God exists,” is a function of that person’s
evidence. “Evidence” here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments,
arguments to the best explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive
and conceptual premises. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that
atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not
presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.
Not all theists appeal only to faith, however. Evidentialists theist and evidentialist
atheists may have a number of general epistemological principles concerning evidence,
arguments, and implication in common, but then disagree about what the evidence is,
how it should be understood, and what it implies. They may disagree, for instance, about
whether the values of the physical constants and laws in nature constitute evidence for
intentional fine tuning, but agree at least that whether God exists is a matter that can be
explored empirically or with reason.

Many non-evidentialist theists may deny that the acceptability of particular religious
claim depends upon evidence, reasons, or arguments as they have been classically
understood. Faith or prudential based beliefs in God, for example, will fall into this
category. The evidentialist atheist and the non-evidentialist theist, therefore, may have a
number of more fundamental disagreements about the acceptability of believing, despite
inadequate or contrary evidence, the epistemological status of prudential grounds for
believing, or the nature of God belief. Their disagreement may not be so much about the
evidence, or even about God, but about the legitimate roles that evidence, reason, and
faith should play in human belief structures.

It is not clear that arguments against atheism that appeal to faith have any prescriptive
force the way appeals to evidence do. The general evidentialist view is that when a person
grasps that an argument is sound that imposes an epistemic obligation on her to accept
the conclusion. Insofar as having faith that a claim is true amounts to believing contrary
to or despite a lack of evidence, one person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort
of inter-subjective, epistemological implication. Failing to believe what is clearly
supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim
is true is not similarly culpable.

Justifying atheism, then, can entail several different projects. There are the evidential
disputes over what information we have available to us, how it should be interpreted, and
what it implies. There are also broader meta-epistemological concerns about the roles of
argument, reasoning, belief, and religiousness in human life. The atheist can find herself
not just arguing that the evidence indicates that there is no God, but defending science,
the role of reason, and the necessity of basing beliefs on evidence more generally.

Friendly atheism; William Rowe has introduced an important distinction to modern

discussions of atheism. If someone has arrived at what they take to be a reasonable and
well-justified conclusion that there is no God, then what attitude should she take about
another person’s persistence in believing in God, particularly when that other person
appears to be thoughtful and at least prima facie reasonable? It seems that the atheist
could take one of several views. The theist’s belief, as the atheist sees it, could be rational
or irrational, justified or unjustified. Must the atheist who believes that the evidence
indicates that there is no God conclude that the theist’s believing in God is irrational or
unjustified? Rowe’s answer is no. (Rowe 1979, 2006)
Rowe and most modern epistemologists have said that whether a conclusion C is justified
for a person S will be a function of the information (correct or incorrect) that S possesses
and the principles of inference that S employs in arriving at C. But whether or not C is
justified is not directly tied to its truth, or even to the truth of the evidence concerning
C. That is, a person can have a justified, but false belief. She could arrive at a conclusion
through an epistemically inculpable process and yet get it wrong. Ptolemy, for example,
the greatest astronomer of his day, who had mastered all of the available information and
conducted exhaustive research into the question, was justified in concluding that the Sun
orbits the Earth. A medieval physician in the 1200s who guesses (correctly) that the
bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium yersinia pestiswould not have been
reasonable or justified given his background information and given that the bacterium
would not even be discovered for 600 years.
We can call the view that rational, justified beliefs can be false, as it applies to
atheism, friendly or fallibilist atheism. See the article on Fallibilism. The friendly atheist can
grant that a theist may be justified or reasonable in believing in God, even though the
atheist takes the theist’s conclusion to be false. What could explain their divergence to
the atheist? The believer may not be in possession of all of the relevant information. The
believer may be basing her conclusion on a false premise or premises. The believer may
be implicitly or explicitly employing inference rules that themselves are not reliable or
truth preserving, but the background information she has leads her, reasonably, to trust
the inference rule. The same points can be made for the friendly theist and the view that
he may take about the reasonableness of the atheist’s conclusion. It is also possible, of
course, for both sides to be unfriendly and conclude that anyone who disagrees with what
they take to be justified is being irrational. Given developments in modern epistemology
and Rowe’s argument, however, the unfriendly view is neither correct nor conducive to a
constructive and informed analysis of the question of God.
Atheists have offered a wide range of justifications and accounts for non-belief. A notable
modern view is Antony Flew’s Presumption of Atheism (1984). Flew argues that the default
position for any rational believer should be neutral with regard to the existence of God
and to be neutral is to not have a belief regarding its existence. And not having a belief
with regard to God is to be a negative atheist on Flew’s account. "The onus of proof lies
on the man who affirms, not on the man who denies. . . on the proposition, not on the
opposition,” Flew argues (20). Beyond that, coming to believe that such a thing does or
does not exist will require justification, much as a jury presumes innocence concerning
the accused and requires evidence in order to conclude that he is guilty. Flew’s negative
atheist will presume nothing at the outset, not even the logical coherence of the notion of
God, but her presumption will be defeasible, or revisable in the light of evidence. We shall
call this view atheism by default.
The atheism by default position contrasts with a more permissive attitude that is sometimes
taken regarding religious belief. The notions of religious tolerance and freedom are
sometimes understood to indicate the epistemic permissibility of believing despite a lack
of evidence in favor or even despite evidence to the contrary. One is in violation of no
epistemic duty by believing, even if one lacks conclusive evidence in favor or even if one
has evidence that is on the whole against. In contrast to Flew’s jury model, we can think
of this view as treating religious beliefs as permissible until proven incorrect. Some
aspects of fideistic accounts or Plantinga’s reformed epistemology can be understood in
this light. This sort of epistemic policy about God or any other matter has been
controversial, and a major point of contention between atheists and theists. Atheists have
argued that we typically do not take it to be epistemically inculpable or reasonable for a
person to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or some other supernatural being
merely because they do not possess evidence to the contrary. Nor would we consider it
reasonable for a person to begin believing that they have cancer because they do not have
proof to the contrary. The atheist by default argues that it would be appropriate to not
believe in such circumstances. The epistemic policy here takes its inspiration from an
influential piece by W.K. Clifford (1999) in which he argues that it is wrong, always,
everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything for which there is insufficient reason.
There are several other approaches to the justification of atheism that we will consider
below. There is a family of arguments, sometimes known as exercises in deductive
atheology, for the conclusion that the existence of God is impossible. Another large group
of important and influential arguments can be gathered under the heading inductive
atheology. These probabilistic arguments invoke considerations about the natural world
such as widespread suffering, nonbelief, or findings from biology or cosmology. Another
approach, atheistic noncognitivism, denies that God talk is even meaningful or has any
propositional content that can be evaluated in terms of truth or falsity. Rather, religious
speech acts are better viewed as a complicated sort of emoting or expression of spiritual
passion. Inductive and deductive approaches are cognitivistic in that they accept that
claims about God have meaningful content and can be determined to be true or false.
3. Deductive Atheology
Many discussions about the nature and existence of God have either implicitly or
explicitly accepted that the concept of God is logically coherent. That is, for many
believers and non-believers the assumption has been that such a being as God could
possibly exist but they have disagreed about whether there actually is one. Atheists within
the deductive atheology tradition, however, have not even granted that God, as he is
typically described, is possible. The first question we should ask, argues the deductive
atheist, is whether the description or the concept is logically consistent. If it is not, then
no such being could possibly exist. The deductive atheist argues that some, one, or all of
God’s essential properties are logically contradictory. Since logical impossibilities are not
and cannot be real, God does not and cannot exist. Consider a putative description of an
object as a four-sided triangle, a married bachelor, or prime number with more than 2
factors. We can be certain that no such thing fitting that description exists because what
they describe is demonstrably impossible.

If deductive atheological proofs are successful, the results will be epistemically

significant. Many people have doubts that the view that there is no God can be rationally
justified. But if deductive disproofs show that there can exist no being with a certain
property or properties and those properties figure essentially in the characterization of
God, then we will have the strongest possible justification for concluding that there is no
being fitting any of those characterizations. If God is impossible, then God does not exist.

It may be possible at this point to re-engineer the description of God so that it avoids the
difficulties, but now the theist faces several challenges according to the deductive
atheologist. First, if the traditional description of God is logically incoherent, then what
is the relationship between a theist’s belief and some revised, more sophisticated account
that allegedly does not suffer from those problems? Is that the God that she believed in
all along? Before the account of God was improved by consideration of the atheological
arguments, what were the reasons that led her to believe in that conception of
God? Secondly, if the classical characterizations of God are shown to be logically
impossible, then there is a legitimate question as whether any new description that avoids
those problems describes a being that is worthy of the label. It will not do, in the eyes of
many theists and atheists, to retreat to the view that God is merely a somewhat powerful,
partially-knowing, and partly-good being, for example. Thirdly, the atheist will still want
to know on the basis of what evidence or arguments should we conclude that a being as
described by this modified account exists? Fourthly, there is no question that there exist
less than omni-beings in the world. We possess less than infinite power, knowledge and
goodness, as do many other creatures and objects in our experience. What is the
philosophical importance or metaphysical significance of arguing for the existence of
those sorts of beings and advocating belief in them? Fifthly, and most importantly, if it
has been argued that God’s essential properties are impossible, then any move to another
description seems to be a concession that positive atheism about God is justified.
Another possible response that the theist may take in response to deductive atheological
arguments is to assert that God is something beyond proper description with any of the
concepts or properties that we can or do employ as suggested in Kierkegaard or Tillich. So
complications from incompatibilities among properties of God indicate problems for our
descriptions, not the impossibility of a divine being worthy of the label. Many atheists
have not been satisfied with this response. The theist has now asserted the existence of
and attempted to argue in favor of believing in a being that we cannot form a proper idea
of, one that does not have properties that we can acknowledge; it is a being that defies
comprehension. It is not clear how we could have reasons or justifications for believing
in the existence of such a thing. It is not clear how it could be an existing thing in any
familiar sense of the term in that it lacks comprehensible properties. Or put another way,
as Patrick Grim notes, “If a believer’s notion of God remains so vague as to
escape all impossibility arguments, it can be argued, it cannot be clear to even him what
he believes—or whether what he takes for pious belief has any content at all,” (2007, p.
200). It is not clear how it could be reasonable to believe in such a thing, and it is even
more doubtful that it is epistemically unjustified or irresponsible to deny that such a thing
is exists. It is clear, however, that the deductive atheologist must acknowledge the growth
and development of our concepts and descriptions of reality over time, and she must take
a reasonable view about the relationship of those attempts and revisions in our ideas
about what may turns out to be real.
a. Single Property Disproofs
Deductive disproofs have typically focused on logical inconsistencies to be found either
within a single property or between multiple properties. Philosophers have struggled to
work out the details of what it would be to be omnipotent, for instance. It has come to be
widely accepted that a being cannot be omnipotent where omnipotence simply means to
power to do anything including the logically impossible. This definition of the term
suffers from the stone paradox. An omnipotent being would either be capable of creating
a rock that he cannot lift, or he is incapable. If he is incapable, then there is something he
cannot do, and therefore he does not have the power to do anything. If he can create such
a rock, then again there is something that he cannot do, namely lift the rock he just
created. So paradoxically, having the ability to do anything would appear to entail being
unable to do some things. As a result, many theists and atheists have agreed that a being
could not have that property. A number of attempts to work out an account of
omnipotence have ensued. (Cowan 2003, Flint and Freddoso 1983, Hoffman and
Rosenkrantz 1988 and 2006, Mavrodes 1977, Ramsey 1956, Sobel 2004, Savage 1967, and
Wierenga 1989 for examples). It has also been argued that omniscience is impossible, and
that the most knowledge that can possibly be had is not enough to be fitting of God. One
of the central problems has been that God cannot have knowledge of indexical claims such
as, “I am here now.” It has also been argued that God can’t know future free choices, or
God cannot know future contingent propositions, or that Cantor’s and Gödel proofs imply
that the notion of a set of all truths cannot be made coherent. (Everitt 2004, Grim 1985,
1988, 1984, Pucetti 1963, and Sobel 2004). See the article on Omniscience and Divine
Foreknowledge for more details.
The logical coherence of eternality, personhood, moral perfection, causal agency, and
many others have been challenged in the deductive atheology literature.

b. Multiple Property Disproofs

Another form of deductive atheological argument attempts to show the logical
incompatibility of two or more properties that God is thought to possess. A long list of
properties have been the subject of multiple property disproofs, transcendence and
personhood, justice and mercy, immutability and omniscience, immutability and
omnibenevolence, omnipresence and agency, perfection and love, eternality and
omniscience, eternality and creator of the universe, omnipresence and
consciousness. (Blumenfeld 2003, Drange 1998b, Flew 1955, Grim 2007, Kretzmann
1966, and McCormick 2000 and 2003)
The combination of omnipotence and omniscience have received a great deal of
attention. To possess all knowledge, for instance, would include knowing all of the
particular ways in which one will exercise one’s power, or all of the decisions that one will
make, or all of the decisions that one has made in the past. But knowing any of those
entails that the known proposition is true. So does God have the power to act in some
fashion that he has not foreseen, or differently than he already has without compromising
his omniscience? It has also been argued that God cannot be both unsurpassably good
and free. (Rowe 2004).

c. Failure of Proof Disproof

When attempts to provide evidence or arguments in favor of the existence of something
fail, a legitimate and important question is whether anything except the failure of those
arguments can be inferred. That is, does positive atheism follow from the failure of
arguments for theism? A number of authors have concluded that it does. They taken the
view that unless some case for the existence of God succeeds, we should believe that there
is no God.

Many have taken an argument J.M. Findlay (1948) to be pivotal. Findlay, like many
others, argues that in order to be worthy of the label “God,” and in order to be worthy of
a worshipful attitude of reverence, emulation, and abandoned admiration, the being that
is the object of that attitude must be inescapable, necessary, and unsurpassably
supreme. (Martin 1990, Sobel 2004). If a being like God were to exist, his existence
would be necessary. And his existence would be manifest as an a priori, conceptual
truth. That is to say that of all the approaches to God’s existence, the ontological
argument is the strategy that we would expect to be successful were there a God, and if they
do not succeed, then we can conclude that there is no God, Findlay argues. As most see it
these attempts to prove God have not met with success, Findlay says, “The general
philosophical verdict is that none of these 'proofs' is truly compelling.”
4. Inductive Atheology
a. The Prospects for Inductive Proof
The view that there is no God or gods has been criticized on the grounds that it is not
possible to prove a negative. No matter how exhaustive and careful our analysis, there
could always be some proof, some piece of evidence, or some consideration that we have
not considered. God could be something that we have not conceived, or God exists in
some form or fashion that has escaped our investigation. Positive atheism draws a
stronger conclusion than any of the problems with arguments for God’s existence alone
could justify. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Findlay and the deductive atheological arguments attempt to address these concerns, but
a central question put to atheists has been about the possibility of giving inductive or
probabilistic justifications for negative existential claims The response to the, “You
cannot prove a negative” criticism has been that it invokes an artificially high
epistemological standard of justification that creates a much broader set of problems not
confined to atheism.
The general principle seems to be that one is not epistemically entitled to believe a
proposition unless you have exhausted all of the possibilities and proven beyond any
doubt that a claim is true. Or put negatively, one is not justified in disbelieving unless you
have proven with absolute certainty that the thing in question does not exist. The problem
is that we do not have a priori disproof that many things do not exist, yet it is reasonable
and justified to believe that they do not: the Dodo bird is extinct, unicorns are not real,
there is no teapot orbiting the Earth on the opposite side of the Sun, there is no Santa
Claus, ghosts are not real, a defendant is not guilty, a patient does not have a particular
disease, so on. There are a wide range of other circumstances under which we take it that
believing that X does not exist is reasonable even though no logical impossibility is
manifest. None of these achieve the level of deductive, a priori or conceptual proof.

The objection to inductive atheism undermines itself in that it generates a broad,

pernicious skepticism against far more than religious or irreligious beliefs. Mackie (1982)
says, “It will not be sufficient to criticize each argument on its own by saying that it does
not prove the intended conclusion, that is, does not put it beyond all doubt. That follows
at once from the admission that the argument is non-deductive, and it is absurd to try to
confine our knowledge and belief to matters which are conclusively established by sound
deductive arguments. The demand for certainty will inevitably be disappointed, leaving
skepticism in command of almost every issue.” (p. 7) If the atheist is unjustified for
lacking deductive proof, then it is argued, it would appear that so are the beliefs that
planes fly, fish swim, or that there exists a mind-independent world.

The atheist can also wonder what the point of the objection is. When we lack deductive
disproof that X exists, should we be agnostic about it? Is it permissible to believe that it
does exist? Clearly, that would not be appropriate. Gravity may be the work of invisible,
undetectable elves with sticky shoes. We don’t have any certain disproof of the elves—
physicists are still struggling with an explanation of gravity. But surely someone who
accepts the sticky-shoed elves view until they have deductive disproof is being
unreasonable. It is also clear that if you are a positive atheist about the gravity elves, you
would not be unreasonable. You would not be overstepping your epistemic entitlement
by believing that no such things exist. On the contrary, believing that they exist or even
being agnostic about their existence on the basis of their mere possibility would not be
justified. So there appear to be a number of precedents and epistemic principles at work
in our belief structures that provide room for inductive atheism. However, these issues
in the epistemology of atheism and recent work by Graham Oppy (2006) suggest that
more attention must be paid to the principles that describe epistemic permissibility,
culpability, reasonableness, and justification with regard to the theist, atheist, and
agnostic categories.

Below we will consider several groups of influential inductive atheological arguments .

b. The Santa Claus Argument

Martin (1990) offers this general principle to describe the criteria that render the belief,
“X does not exist” justified:
A person is justified in believing that X does not exist if

(1) all the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be
inadequate; and

(2) X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be
evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and

(3) this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to
do so; and

(4) the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively
examined; and

(5) there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists. (p. 283)

Many of the major works in philosophical atheism that address the full range of recent
arguments for God’s existence (Gale 1991, Mackie 1982, Martin 1990, Sobel 2004, Everitt
2004, and Weisberger 1999) can be seen as providing evidence to satisfy the first, fourth
and fifth conditions. A substantial body of articles with narrower scope (see References
and Further Reading) can also be understood to play this role in justifying atheism. A
large group of discussions of Pascal’s Wager and related prudential justifications in the
literature can also be seen as relevant to the satisfaction of the fifth condition.

One of the interesting and important questions in the epistemology of philosophy of

religion has been whether the second and third conditions are satisfied concerning
God. If there were a God, how and in what ways would we expect him to show in the
world? Empirically? Conceptually? Would he be hidden? Martin argues, and many
others have accepted implicitly or explicitly, that God is the sort of thing that would
manifest in some discernible fashion to our inquiries. Martin concludes, therefore, that
God satisfied all of the conditions, so, positive narrow atheism is justified.

c. Problem of Evil
The existence of widespread human and non-human animal suffering has been seen by
many to be compelling evidence that a being with all power, all knowledge, and all
goodness does not exist. Many of those arguments have been deductive: See the article
on The Logical Problem of Evil.More recently, several inductive arguments from evil for the
non-existence of God have received a great deal of attention. See The Evidential Problem
of Evil.
d. Cosmology
Questions about the origins of the universe and cosmology have been the focus for many
inductive atheism arguments. We can distinguish four recent views about God and the
cosmos:
Naturalism: On naturalistic view, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.7 billion years
ago, the Earth formed out of cosmic matter about 4.6 billion years ago, and life forms on
Earth, unaided by any supernatural forces about 4 billion years ago. Various physical
(non-God) hypotheses are currently being explored about the cause or explanation of the
Big Bang such as the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary condition model, brane cosmology
models, string theoretic models, ekpyrotic models, cyclic models, chaotic inflation, and
so on.
Big Bang Theism: We can call the view that God caused about the Big Bang 13.7 billion
years ago Big Bang Theism.
Intelligent Design Theism: There are many variations, but most often the view is that God
created the universe, perhaps with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and then beginning
with the appearance of life 4 billion years ago. God supernaturally guided the formation
and development of life into the forms we see today.
Creationism: Finally, there is a group of people who for the most part denies the
occurrence of the Big Bang and of evolution altogether; God created the universe, the
Earth, and all of the life on Earth in its more or less present form 6,000-10,000 years ago.

Taking a broad view, many atheists have concluded that neither Big Bang Theism,
Intelligent Design Theism, nor Creationism is the most reasonable description of the
history of the universe. Before the theory of evolution and recent developments in
modern astronomy, a view wherein God did not play a large role in the creation and
unfolding of the cosmos would have been hard to justify. Now, internal problems with
those views and the evidence from cosmology and biology indicate that naturalism is the
best explanation. Justifications for Big Bang Theism have focused on modern versions of
the Cosmological and Kalam arguments. Since everything that comes into being must
have a cause, including the universe, then God was the cause of the Big Bang. (Craig 1995)
The objections to these arguments have been numerous and vigorously argued. Critics
have challenged the inference to a supernatural cause to fill gaps in the natural account,
as well as the inferences that the first cause must be a single, personal, all-powerful, all-
knowing, and all-good being. It is not clear that any of the properties of God as classically
conceived in orthodox monotheism can be inferred from what we know about the Big
Bang without first accepting a number of theistic assumptions. Infinite power and
knowledge do not appear to be required to bring about a Big Bang—what if our Big Bang
was the only act that a being could perform? There appears to be consensus that infinite
goodness or moral perfection cannot be inferred as a necessary part of the cause of the
Big Bang—theists have focused their efforts in the problem of evil, discussions just
attempting to prove that it is possible that God is infinitely good given the state of the
world. Big Bang Theism would need to show that no other sort of cause besides a morally
perfect one could explain the universe we find ourselves in. Critics have also doubted
whether we can know that some supernatural force that caused the Big Bang is still in
existence now or is the same entity as identified and worshipped in any particular
religious tradition. Even if major concessions are granted in the cosmological argument,
all that it would seem to suggest is that there was a first cause or causes, but widely
accepted arguments from that first cause or causes to the fully articulated God of
Christianity or Islam, for instance, have not been forthcoming.
In some cases, atheists have taken the argument a step further. They have offered
cosmological arguments for the nonexistence of God on the basis of considerations from
physics, astronomy, and subatomic theory. These arguments are quite technical, so these
remarks will be cursory. God, if he exists, knowing all and having all power, would only
employ those means to his ends that are rational, effective, efficient, and optimal. If God
were the creator, then he was the cause of the Big Bang, but cosmological atheists have
argued that the singularity that produced the Big Bang and events that unfold thereafter
preclude a rational divine agent from achieving particular ends with the Big Bang as the
means. The Big Bang would not have been the route God would have chosen to this world
as a result. (Stenger 2007, Smith 1993, Everitt 2004.)

e. Teleological Arguments
In William Paley’s famous analysis, he argues by analogy that the presence of order in the
universe, like the features we find in a watch, are indicative of the existence of a designer
who is responsible for the artifact. Many authors—David Hume (1935), Wesley Salmon
(1978), Michael Martin (1990)—have argued that a better case can be made for the
nonexistence of God from the evidence.
Salmon, giving a modern Bayesian version of an argument that begins with Hume, argues
that the likelihood that the ordered universe was created by intelligence is very low. In
general, instances of biologically or mechanically caused generation without intelligence
are far more common than instances of creation from intelligence. Furthermore, the
probability that something that is generated by a biological or mechanical cause will
exhibit order is quite high. Among those things that are designed, the probability that
they exhibit order may be quite high, but that is not the same as asserting that among the
things that exhibit order the probability that they were designed is high. Among dogs, the
incidence of fur may be high, but it is not true that among furred things the incidence of
dogs is high. Furthermore, intelligent design and careful planning very frequently
produces disorder—war, industrial pollution, insecticides, and so on.

So we can conclude that the probability that an unspecified entity (like the universe),
which came into being and exhibits order, was produced by intelligent design is very low
and that the empirical evidence indicates that there was no designer.

See the article on Design Arguments for the Existence of God for more details about the
history of the argument and standard objections that have motivated atheism.
f. Arguments from Nonbelief
Another recent group of inductive atheistic arguments has focused on widespread
nonbelief itself as evidence that atheism is justified. The common thread in these
arguments is that something as significant in the universe as God could hardly be
overlooked. The ultimate creator of the universe and a being with infinite knowledge,
power, and love would not escape our attention, particularly since humans have devoted
such staggering amounts of energy to the question for so many centuries. Perhaps more
importantly, a being such as God, if he chose, could certainly make his existence manifest
to us. Creating a state of affairs where his existence would be obvious, justified, or
reasonable to us, or at least more obvious to more of us than it is currently, would be a
trivial matter for an all-powerful being. So since our efforts have not yielded what we
would expect to find if there were a God, then the most plausible explanation is that there
is no God.

One might argue that we should not assume that God’s existence would be evident to
us. There may be reasons, some of which we can describe, others that we do not
understand, that God could have for remaining out of sight. Revealing himself is not
something he desires, remaining hidden enables people to freely love, trust and obey him,
remaining hidden prevents humans from reacting from improper motives, like fear of
punishment, remaining hidden preserves human freewill.

The non-belief atheist has not found these speculations convincing for several reasons. In
religious history, God’s revealing himself to Moses, Muhammad, Jesus’ disciples, and
even Satan himself did not compromise their cognitive freedom in any significant
way. Furthermore, attempts to explain why a universe where God exists would look just
as we would expect a universe with no God have seemed ad hoc. Some of the logical
positivists’ and non-cognitivists’ concerns surface here. If the believer maintains that a
universe inhabited by God will look exactly like one without, then we must wonder what
sort of counter-evidence would be allowed, even in principle, against the theist’s claim. If
no state of affairs could be construed as evidence against God’s existence, then what does
the claim, “God exists,” mean and what are its real implications?

Alternately, how can it be unreasonable to not believe in the existence of something that
defies all of our attempts to corroborate or discover?
Theodore Drange (2006) has developed an argument that if God were the sort of being
that wanted humans to come to believe that he exists, then he could bring it about that
far more of them would believe than currently do. God would be able, he would want
humans to believe, there is nothing that he would want more, and God would not be
irrational. So God would bring it about that people would believe. In general, he could
have brought it about that the evidence that people have is far more convincing than what
they have. He could have miraculously appeared to everyone in a fashion that was far
more compelling than the miracles stories that we have. It is not the case that all, nearly
all, or even a majority of people believe, so there must not be a God of that sort.

J.L. Schellenberg (1993) has developed an argument based upon a number of

considerations that lead us to think that if there were a loving God, then we would expect
to find some manifestations of him in the world. If God is all powerful, then there would
be nothing restraining him from making his presence known. And if he is omniscient,
then surely he would know how to reveal himself. Perhaps, most importantly, if God is
good and if God possesses an unsurpassable love for us, then God would consider each
human’s requests as important and seek to respond quickly. He would wish to spare those
that he loves needless trauma. He would not want to give those that he loves false or
misleading thoughts about his relationship to them. He would want as much personal
interaction with them as possible, but of course, these conditions are not satisfied. So it
is strongly indicated that there is no such God.

Schellenberg gives this telling parable:

“You’re still a small child, and an amnesiac, but this time you’re in the middle of a vast
rain forest, dripping with dangers of various kinds. You’ve been stuck there for days,
trying to figure out who you are and where you came from. You don’t remember having
a mother who accompanied you into this jungle, but in your moments of deepest pain and
misery you call for her anyway, ‘Mooooommmmmmm!’ Over and over again. For days
and days … the last time when a jaguar comes at you out of nowhere … but with no
response. What should you think in this situation? In your dying moments, what should
cross your mind? Would the thought that you have a mother who cares about you and
hears your cry and could come to you but chooses not to even make it onto the list?” (2006,
p. 31)
Like Drange, Schellenberg argues that there are many people who are epistemically
inculpable in believing that there is no God. That is, many people have carefully
considered the evidence available to them, and have actively sought out more in order to
determine what is reasonable concerning God. They have fulfilled all relevant epistemic
duties they might have in their inquiry into the question and they have arrived at a
justified belief that there is no God. If there were a God, however, evidence sufficient to
form a reasonable belief in his existence would be available. So the occurrence of
widespread epistemically inculpable nonbelief itself shows that there is no God.

g. Atheistic Naturalism
The final family of inductive arguments we will consider involves drawing a positive
atheistic conclusion from broad, naturalized grounds. See the article on Naturalism for
background about the position and relevant arguments. Comments here will be confined
to naturalism as it relates to atheism.
Methodological naturalism can be understood as the view that the best or the only way to
acquire knowledge within science is by adopting the assumption that all physical
phenomena have physical causes. This presumption by itself does not commit one to the
view that only physical entities and causes exist, or that all knowledge must be acquired
through scientific methods. Methodological naturalism, therefore, is typically not seen as
being in direct conflict with theism or having any particular implications for the existence
or non-existence of God.

Ontological naturalism, however, is usually seen as taking a stronger view about the
existence of God. Ontological naturalism is the additional view that all and only physical
entities and causes exist.

Among its theistic critics, there has been a tendency to portray ontological naturalism as
a dogmatic ideological commitment that is more the product of a recent intellectual
fashion than science or reasoned argument. But two developments have contributed to a
broad argument in favor of ontological naturalism as the correct description of what sorts
of things exist and are causally efficacious. First, there is a substantial history of the
exploration and rejection of a variety of non-physical causal hypotheses in the history of
science. Over the centuries, the possibility that some class of physical events could be
caused by a supernatural source, a spiritual source, psychic energy, mental forces, or vital
causes have been entertained and found wanting. Second, evidence for the law of the
conservation of energy has provided significant support to physical closure, or the view
that the natural world is a complete closed system in which physical events have physical
causes. At the very least, atheists have argued, the ruins of so many supernatural
explanations that have been found wanting in the history of science has created an
enormous burden of proof that must be met before any claim about the existence of
another worldly spiritual being can have credence. Ontological naturalism should not be
seen as a dogmatic commitment, its defenders have insisted, but rather as a defeasible
hypothesis that is supported by centuries of inquiry into the supernatural.

As scientific explanations have expanded to include more details about the workings of
natural objects and laws, there has been less and less room or need for invoking God as
an explanation. It is not clear that expansion of scientific knowledge disproves the
existence of God in any formal sense any more than it has disproven the existence of
fairies, the atheistic naturalist argues. However, physical explanations have increasingly
rendered God explanations extraneous and anomalous. For example, when Laplace, the
famous 18th century French mathematician and astronomer, presented his work on
celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the Emperor asked him about the role of a divine creator
in his system Laplace is reported to have said, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”
In many cases, science has shown that particular ancillary theses of traditional religious
doctrine are mistaken. Blind, petitionary prayer has been investigated and found to have
no effect on the health of its recipients, although praying itself may have some positive
effects on the person who prayers (Benson, 2006). Geology, biology, and cosmology have
discovered that the Earth formed approximately 3 billion years ago out of cosmic dust,
and life evolved gradually over billions of years. The Earth, humans, and other life forms
were not created in their present form some 6,000-10,000 years ago and the atheistic
naturalist will point to numerous alleged miraculous events have been investigated and
debunked.

Wide, positive atheism, the view that there are no gods whatsoever, might appear to be
the most difficult atheistic thesis to defend, but ontological naturalists have responded
that the case for no gods is parallel to the case for no elves, pixies, dwarves, fairies, goblins,
or other creates. A decisive proof against every possible supernatural being is not
necessary for the conclusion that none of them are real to be justified. The ontological
naturalist atheist believes that once we have devoted sufficient investigation into enough
particular cases and the general considerations about natural laws, magic, and
supernatural entities, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the whole enterprise is an
explanatory dead end for figuring out what sort of things there are in the world.

The disagreement between atheists and theists continues on two fronts. Within the arena
of science and the natural world, some believers have persisted in arguing that material
explanations are inadequate to explain all of the particular events and phenomena that
we observe. Some philosophers and scientists have argued that for phenomena like
consciousness, human morality, and some instances of biological complexity,
explanations in terms of natural or evolutionary theses have not and will not be able to
provide us with a complete picture. Therefore, the inference to some supernatural force
is warranted. While some of these attempts have received social and political support,
within the scientific community the arguments that causal closure is false and that God
as a cause is a superior scientific hypothesis to naturalistic explanations have not received
significant support. Science can cite a history of replacing spiritual, supernatural, or
divine explanations of phenomena with natural ones from bad weather as the wrath of
angry gods to disease as demon possession. The assumption for many is that there are no
substantial reasons to doubt that those areas of the natural world that have not been
adequately explained scientifically will be given enough time. ( Madden and Hare 1968,
Papineau, Manson, Nielsen 2001, and Stenger.) Increasingly, with what they perceive as
the failure of attempts to justify theism, atheists have moved towards naturalized
accounts of religious belief that give causal and evolutionary explanations of the
prevalence of belief. (See Atrans, Boyer, Dennett 2006)

5. Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism

In 20th century moral theory, a view about the nature of moral value claims arose that has
an analogue in discussions of atheism. Moral non-cognitivists have denied that moral
utterances should be treated as ordinary propositions that are either true or false and
subject to evidential analysis. On their view, when someone makes a moral claim like,
“Cheating is wrong,” what they are doing is more akin to saying something like, “I have
negative feelings about cheating. I want you to share those negative
feelings. Cheating. Bad.”
A non-cognitivist atheist denies that religious utterances are propositions. They are not the
sort of speech act that have a truth value. They are more like emoting, singing, poetry, or
cheering. They express personal desires, feelings of subjugation, admiration, humility,
and love. As such, they cannot and should not be dealt with by denials or arguments any
more than I can argue with you over whether or not a poem moves you. There is an appeal
to this approach when we consider common religious utterances such as, “Jesus loves
you.” “Jesus died for your sins.” “God be with you.” What these mean, according to the
non-cognitivist, is something like, “I have sympathy for your plight, we are all in a similar
situation and in need of paternalistic comforting, you can have it if you perform certain
kinds of behaviors and adopt a certain kind of personal posture with regard to your place
in the world. When I do these things I feel joyful, I want you to feel joyful too.”
So the non-cognitivist atheist does not claim that the sentence, “God exists” is false, as
such. Rather, when people make these sorts of claims, their behavior is best understood
as a complicated publicizing of a particular sort of subjective sensations. Strictly
speaking, the claims do not mean anything in terms of assertions about what sorts of
entities do or do not exist in the world independent of human cognitive and emotional
states. The non-cognitivist characterization of many religious speech acts and behaviors
has seemed to some to be the most accurate description. For the most part, atheists
appear to be cognitivist atheists. They assume that religious utterances do express
propositions that are either true or false. Positive atheists will argue that there are
compelling reasons or evidence for concluding that in fact those claims are false. (Drange
2006, Diamond and Lizenbury 1975, Nielsen 1985)
Few would disagree that many religious utterances are non-cognitive such as religious
ceremonies, rituals, and liturgies. Non-cognitivists have argued that many believers are
confused when their speech acts and behavior slips from being non-cognitive to
something resembling cognitive assertions about God. The problem with the non-
cognitivist view is that many religious utterances are clearly treated as cognitive by their
speakers—they are meant to be treated as true or false claims, they are treated as making
a difference, and they clearly have an impact on people’s lives and beliefs beyond the mere
expression of a special category of emotions. Insisting that those claims simply have no
cognitive content despite the intentions and arguments to the contrary of the speaker is
an ineffectual means of addressing them. So non-cognitivism does not appear to
completely address belief in God.

6. Future Prospects for Atheism

20th century developments in epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and philosophy
of language indicate that many of the presumptions that supported old fashioned natural
theology and atheology are mistaken. It appears that even our most abstract, a priori, and
deductively certain methods for determining truth are subject to revision in the light of
empirical discoveries and theoretical analyses of the principles that underlie those
methods. Certainty, reasoning, and theology, after Bayes’ work on probability,
Wittgenstein’s fideism, Quine’s naturalism, and Kripke’s work on necessity are not what
they used to be. The prospects for a simple, confined argument for atheism (or theism)
that achieves widespread support or that settles the question are dim. That is because, in
part, the prospects for any argument that decisively settles a philosophical question where
a great deal seems to be at stake are dim.
The existence or non-existence of any non-observable entity in the world is not settled by
any single argument or consideration. Every premise will be based upon other concepts
and principles that themselves must be justified. So ultimately, the adequacy of atheism
as an explanatory hypothesis about what is real will depend upon the overall coherence,
internal consistency, empirical confirmation, and explanatory success of a whole
worldview within which atheism is only one small part. The question of whether or not
there is a God sprawls onto related issues and positions about biology, physics,
metaphysics, explanation, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of language, and
epistemology. The reasonableness of atheism depends upon the overall adequacy of a
whole conceptual and explanatory description of the world.