Do Atheists Have or Lack a Belief In God?

Atheism’s implications, indifference to God, and universal religiousness

One confusion about atheism is about whether atheism is a positive or a negative claim.

Theists say that atheists have a belief about God and don’t just lack confidence in theistic arguments. Atheists often insist that atheism isn’t a belief system and that they don’t actively disbelieve in God so much as they’re free from theistic beliefs.

How, then, should atheism be understood?

Atheism’s Explicit and Implicit Contents

First, the question of whether atheism by itself amounts to a worldview is neither here nor there since there’s no one who’s just an atheist. Semantically, “atheism” is indeed merely the negation of theism, but there’s no one whose life philosophy consists solely of that negative proposition.

The question is what atheism entails. Even if atheism doesn’t suffice for a worldview, atheists may generally be committed to certain positive judgments that follow logically or psychologically from the denial of theism and from the repudiation of theistic religions.

Although you can find liberal and conservative atheists, most of them are philosophical naturalists, and they pride themselves on being rigorously rational. They reject religions because religions tend to promote anachronistic superstitions and are sustained by dubious dogmas. Monotheistic religions, at least, are undignified because they’re premodern.

Specifically, Western atheists identify with the progressive values of the eighteenth-century European and American Enlightenments. Chinese atheism, mind you, is based on an independent tradition of pragmatic secularism that goes back to Confucian humanism and to the Daoist reverence for nature.

To understand atheism we need to distinguish, then, between explicit and implicit beliefs. By itself, atheism is a negative proposition: atheists deny that there are gods or at least that a case has been made to rationally warrant believing there are gods. Explicitly, that’s all atheism is.

But implicitly, atheism is something more. In most cases, atheism amounts to, or is bundled in with, secular humanism (which is confidence in reason and in the human potential to progressively solve our problems), naturalism (the view that there are no miracles and that science and philosophy are the best at showing us what’s real), and either existential cosmicism for “old” atheists, on the one hand, or scientism or wokesterism for so-called new atheists, on the other.

Putting aside the details for now, the point is that theists and atheists are both correct here even though they think they’re disagreeing. Atheism is implicitly more than a negation, but by itself it’s only an explicit negation, denial, or lack of something.

When Atheists Couldn’t Care Less About God

Again, that’s neither here nor there, and there’s another reason for saying so since what’s really at issue, I think, is whether atheists care much about the question of God’s existence.

Suppose that two couples break up, and a year later one of the individuals still pines for her former romantic partner, whereas in the other case, both former partners have gone their separate ways and barely even remember having been together.

Theists want to say that atheism is like the first couple, whereas atheists often imply it’s like the second one. Theists want to believe that God is so important that no one could possibly ignore him and all he’s done to reveal his nature and his plan for our eternal happiness. This seems to be what theists have in mind when they say that atheism is somehow a positive claim about, or a substantial attitude towards God.

The idea is that atheists secretly pine for God, that they have a void in their being which only God can fill. As creatures created by God, we’re like moths that can’t help but circle the flame. So atheism isn’t just the lack of certain beliefs or even a rational denial of God; atheism is supposed to be perverse, satanic opposition to God based on sinful hatred of all that’s righteous and holy.

Of course, atheists deny all of that. Some atheists are indeed fascinated by religion as a sociological, psychological, or historical phenomenon. (I’m one of those, for example.) Other atheists or nontheists do indeed pay religion no mind. They don’t care about religion or the question of God, not because they’re agnostic but because their rejection is so practically absolute, they see no reason to waste even a moment’s time thinking about something so farfetched or empty.

As Richard Dawkins and the other leading new atheists have pointed out, religion to these atheists is like a paranoid conspiracy theory or a cult’s paranormal fantasy. Most people don’t think about such “theories” or fantasies at all; they just ignore the crackpot’s nonsense. After all, there’s limited time in the day and limited brain power for anyone to be fixated on everything that crops up. We all must prioritize, discriminating against certain possibilities perhaps when our attention is captured elsewhere. If we decide that theistic religion isn’t for us, we end up doing something else: we immerse ourselves in science, philosophy, or secular culture.

Clearly, the theist’s conception of atheism would beg the question. If God were real, then perhaps a neutral stance towards the prospects of religion would be not just infuriating but impossible. Satan and the fallen angels would provide a paradigm for how opposition to religion plays out. Satan couldn’t be neutral or atheistic since he knew that God exists. But Satan’s pride could inspire him to rebel, and the inevitable result is his failure and ignominious punishment. Again, that’s likely the myth that runs through the Christian’s or the Muslim’s head when he or she thinks about the nature of atheism.

But if God is unreal and religion is just a social strategy sustained by a host of extravagant delusions, we can indeed forget about religion, as a psychological matter. To be sure, there may be natural instincts and social pressures that stand in the way of that freedom. But there would be no metaphysical, supernatural compulsion to be obsessed with God. If it was possible to avoid the Harry Potter or the “Titanic” movie crazes, it’s possible to put aside theistic religion and to find meaning rather in secular projects.

Is Atheism A Religion?

Still, this question of whether atheists can be neutral or indifferent towards God touches on a related confusion about atheism, which is the allegation that atheism is itself a religion. Were atheism to amount to a religion, a theist could take that as evidence for God’s existence, since we’d seem to have a God-shaped void in our being after all. Not even those who explicitly reject God could succeed, in practice, at living a godless life.

This confusion is largely a semantic one about our choice of labels. Obviously, the solution depends on how broadly we want to define “religion.” If religion were just any social system that keeps people together by showing how they can find meaning in life, then perhaps secular institutions would count as religions. Of if any form of idolatry or the effective worship of something other than God as sacred were to have religious aspects, all secularists who strive after money, power, fame, or romantic love would be acting religiously.

If we’re clear about how broadly we’re defining “religion,” there’s nothing wrong with doing so. This definition amounts to a sociological reduction of religion to tribal behaviours, whereas the conventional usage associates religion with theism, which leaves Jainism and Buddhism as problematic. But word usages change, and it’s fair to try to model things differently to generate some new insights.

The problem, though, is that you need to broaden your understanding of religion to include atheism and secular practices as being religious, and once you do that, the universality of this kind of religion would no longer provide such obvious support for theism. This is because you’d have dissociated religion from theism to show how atheists can be religious. Once religiosity begins to look like mere tribalism, you’ve naturalized religion, which if anything undercuts theistic truth claims.

The theist wants to say that her god is real, but if religions evolve as social adaptations, we haven’t necessarily a God-shaped inner void but a genetic or archetypal social strategy. The theist would have to show that God directs evolution to make us religious in this broad sense of being tribal by distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, or by worshipping idols.

The simpler explanation would be that idolatry and tribalism are based on mistakes, vices, or the survival instinct. We might have to debase ourselves and to struggle for power by preying on each other’s cognitive and psychological weaknesses to survive in an indifferent environment. Tribalism can easily look like it evolves because of God’s absence, in which case natural or universal religiosity would amount to evidence of unnecessary suffering and would count against theism.