Defining Atheism

Explaining the nature of atheism can be difficult. A lot of people have very deep misconceptions about the concept and while sometimes it is possible to help them understand the nuances of reality, it's always nice to find new and different ways to explain things. Sometimes one explanation won't work but a slightly different one will.

Chad explains atheism very nicely:

The meaning of atheism depends on the meaning of theism. That definition is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial. Theism means, quite simply "god-belief" or a belief in a God or gods. Here we come to a potentially sticky issue. What is God? What are gods? I understand god with a little "g" to mean a supernatural being who is immortal and more powerful than humans, and thus an object of worship by some humans. This differs from "God" with a big "G," which is the one and only God, the creator and sustainer of all things, and the most powerful being in the cosmos. This is the God of western monotheism, as expressed in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

So we see that there is more than one type of theist. There are those who believe in many gods, and those who only believe in one. There are theists who believe in a God who appeared in physical form as Jesus to save us from sin. There are theists who believe that God revealed himself to Mohammed and chose him as his foremost prophet. There are theists who believe that God chose Joseph Smith as his prophet in the New World, and revealed a further written Testament through him. Some theists believe in an aloof God who has set the world in motion and then left it to its own devices. Since there are many different ideas about what God is, or what the gods are, there are many different types of theist.

So what about the atheist? If an atheist is one who believes there is no God, then is it only one type of God that he believes doesn’t exist, or is it all of them? And what about the gods? Is an atheist also one who believes there are no gods? That would be a lot of beliefs to keep track of! ... So we can see why this definition of an atheist is problematic, and why so many people who call themselves atheists have rejected it. It is at once too general and too specific. If an atheist is anyone who believes that no God at all exists, then there would probably be no such thing as an atheist, for this would require the atheist to consider countless hypothetical propositions about what God is and then believe the contradictions of these propositions. And if an atheist is anyone who believes that the “actual” God does not exist, then the meaning becomes entirely relative to what kind of God a particular theist believes in, and everyone could qualify as an atheist, depending on your own religious perspective.

What Chad does so well here is explain the very important point that if atheism were nothing more than "denial of the existence of God," it would allow a person to believe in all kinds of alleged gods and still be an atheist. They could believe in Zeus, Odin, Krishna, and a dozen others — just so long as they don't believe in "God" of traditional western monotheism, they qualify as an "atheist." Does this make any sense? Of course not.

Atheism only makes sense is the person disbelieves in any and all gods. At the very least "denial of the existence of any and all gods" would be necessary, though even that doesn't quite work from a logical perspective. Still, it's a lot better than the limited definition so often used by Christians.

Read More:

• Atheism 101
• Agnosticism 101
• Defining Atheism
• Questions About Atheism