Atheism is one thing: A lack of belief in gods. It is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about a person.
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For some, atheism may be an act of rebellion against a religious upbringing, but usually it results from independent thinking and reasoned skepticism. Many have spent time studying one or more religions, often quite thoroughly, and have made a carefully considered decision to reject them. A American study has shown that atheists are actually distinctly better informed about religion than people who consider themselves religious closely followed by agnostics, with Catholics and Protestants firmly at the bottom of the list.
A good proportion but by no means all become atheists because religion just did not work for them or seem irrelevant to their lives, because their questioning of the core beliefs of religion have left them unsatisfied, or because they have come to the conclusion that religious convictions are fundamentally incompatible with their own observations.
However, it should be noted that atheism can encompass a whole range of views, and there is no one ideology or set of behaviours to which all atheists adhere. An individual atheist may deny anything from the existence of a specific deity, to the existence of any gods at all, to the existence of any spiritual, supernatural or transcendental concepts, such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism.
All thinking men are atheists. There are a small but vocal number of what might be called militant atheists who would like to see all forms of religious belief completely eradicated. In addition to the convictions of moderate atheists, they would also claim that religion is demonstrably false and, furthermore, usually or always harmful or dangerous.
What is Atheism Really All About?
Most open-minded atheists and humanists are opposed to such militant views, considering them equivalent to religious fundamentalism, and more likely to give atheism a bad reputation than to further its cause. Atheism is not in itself a religion. It does not involve any kind of worship, rituals, faith, prayers, etc, and it has no spiritual leader and no sacred text.
Most atheists never join any kind of atheist organization although they do exist. Some atheist and humanist organizations do offer secular rituals for common events such as namings, weddings and funerals with the intention of giving them meaning and significance without any religious content , but these are realively rare and not mainstream events.
Atheism is not necessarily anti-religious either, and atheists in general do not dislike or outright hate theists although they may be vehemently opposed to their views.
What is atheism?
Most atheists would willingly concede there are, or have been, some good things about religion, such as religious art and music, religious charities and good works, some religious wisdom and scripture, and the human fellowship and togetherness that religion often fosters. Atheists are no more required to be hostile to the religious than Christians or Jews are required to be hostile to Hindus or Muslims.
There are even some, like Alain de Botton for example, who try to find a middle way between religion and fundamantalist atheism, and who look for ways to preserve some of the finer elements of religion - such as its art and architecture, its spirit of community and its concept of humility - without involving the idea of a transcendent being or God. De Botton has even albeit playfully, and not entirely seriously suggested the idea of temples for atheists. Atheism is not even necessarily equivalent to irreligion, although the majority of atheists are also irreligious, in the sense that they do not practice any religion.
Some religious and spiritual belief systems that do not actively advocate belief in gods such as some forms of Buddhism, for example could be described as atheistic, and several other religions, including Confucianism, Taoism and Jainism, either do not include belief in a personal god as a tenet of the religion, or actively teach non-theism. There are even sects of Christian Atheists who reject the God of Christianity but follow the teachings of Jesus and Jewish Atheists who emphasize Jewish culture and history, rather than belief in a God, as the sources of Jewish identity.
Unitarian Universalism is an example of a religious Christian movement into which some atheists may comfortably fit, should they feel the need. Atheists are no less moral than any other individual, and they are just as likely to be empathetic, charitable, etc. Religions do not have a monopoly on moral behaviour, and morality is or should be more than just simply following rules.
Indeed, atheists often follow a very similar moral code as religious people, but they arrive at the decision of what is good or bad without any help from the idea of God. Atheism does not have its own moral code, and indeed does not say anything about how an individual person should act, but most atheists nevertheless follow the same general moral code as theists even if for different reasons. Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but believe that it is not possible to determine which. But all three are mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or false.
In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical empiricists. While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too broad.
For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight.
They believe in God not because it is probable that he exists—they think it more probable that he does not—but because belief is thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer a Blaise Pascal or a Soren Kierkegaard or an agnostic a T. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization of atheism.
It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be justified in asserting that there is no God.
It has been argued, however, that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify their unbelief by showing if they can how the assertion is well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God.
Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God assuming that he could have them , what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is false that God exists.
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Every time one legitimately asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. The claim is that this tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take. An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality.
He needs to show that there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may bring.
There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a God.
Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical conclusion also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of God.
He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist. Such a form of atheism the atheism of those pragmatists who are also naturalistic humanists , though less inadequate than the first formation of atheism, is still inadequate. God in developed forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not, like Zeus or Odin , construed in a relatively plain anthropomorphic way.
Such a reality—a reality that is taken to be an ultimate mystery—could not be identified as objects or processes in the universe can be identified. The word God can only be taught intralinguistically.
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- Why be an atheist?.
That does not mean that anyone has actually pointed to Zeus or observed Zeus but that one knows what it would be like to do so. He could not be anything material or empirical, and he is said by believers to be an intractable mystery. This, in effect, makes it a mistake to claim that the existence of God can rightly be treated as a hypothesis and makes it a mistake to claim that, by the use of the experimental method or some other determinate empirical method, the existence of God can be confirmed or disconfirmed as can the existence of an empirical reality.
The retort made by some atheists, who also like pragmatists remain thoroughgoing fallibilists, is that such a proposed way of coming to know, or failing to come to know, God makes no sense for anyone who understands what kind of reality God is supposed to be. Anything whose existence could be so verified would not be the God of Judeo-Christianity.
God could not be a reality whose presence is even faintly adumbrated in experience, for anything that could even count as the God of Judeo-Christianity must be transcendent to the world. Anything that could actually be encountered or experienced could not be God.
At the very heart of a religion such as Christianity there stands a metaphysical belief in a reality that is alleged to transcend the empirical world. It is the metaphysical belief that there is an eternal, ever-present creative source and sustainer of the universe.
The problem is how it is possible to know or reasonably believe that such a reality exists or even to understand what such talk is about. It is not that God is like a theoretical entity in physics such as a proton or a neutrino. They are, where they are construed as realities rather than as heuristically useful conceptual fictions, thought to be part of the actual furniture of the universe.
They are not said to be transcendent to the universe, but rather are invisible entities in the universe logically on a par with specks of dust and grains of sand, only much, much smaller. They are on the same continuum; they are not a different kind of reality. It is only the case that they, as a matter of fact, cannot be seen. Indeed no one has an understanding of what it would be like to see a proton or a neutrino—in that way they are like God—and no provision is made in physical theory for seeing them.
Still, there is no logical ban on seeing them as there is on seeing God. They are among the things in the universe, and thus, though they are invisible, they can be postulated as causes of things that are seen. Since this is so it becomes at least logically possible indirectly to verify by empirical methods the existence of such realities.
What Is An Atheist
It is also the case that there is no logical ban on establishing what is necessary to establish a causal connection, namely a constant conjunction of two discrete empirical realities. But no such constant conjunction can be established or even intelligibly asserted between God and the universe, and thus the existence of God is not even indirectly verifiable. God is not a discrete empirical thing or being, and the universe is not a gigantic thing or process over and above the things and processes in the universe of which it makes sense to say that the universe has or had a cause.
But then there is no way, directly or indirectly, that even the probability that there is a God could be empirically established. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions.
Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Atheism as rejection of religious beliefs A central, common core of Judaism , Christianity , and Islam is the affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God.