Atheism

• 1. Introduction

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  Atheism, in its broadest sense, is simply an absence of belief in the existence of deities. That sounds tidy. It is not. Writers cannot agree on where the line falls. Is a one-month-old baby an atheist, having never heard of any god? Is a person who never paused to consider the question an atheist, or just an innocent? Back in 1772, Baron d'Holbach insisted that all children are born atheists, having no idea of God. Centuries later, Sam Harris argued the word should not even exist, comparing it to a label like non-astrologer. Yet hundreds of millions of people sit under this single contested term. Estimates of those without theistic belief run from 500 million to 1.1 billion. Where did such a position come from, and why do strangers so often distrust the people who hold it? Those are the questions ahead.

• 2. The Trouble With Definitions

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  The ancient Romans accused Christians of being atheists for refusing to worship the pagan deities. The charge reveals how slippery the word is. Atheism only makes sense against a backdrop of what counts as a god, and conceptions of divinity vary wildly. Over time, that Roman accusation fell out of use as theism grew to mean belief in any divinity at all.

  Antony Flew and Michael Martin drew a sharper distinction, splitting atheism into two camps. Positive, or strong, atheism is the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist. Negative, or weak, atheism covers everything else that is not theism. Under this scheme, anyone who is not a theist falls into one bucket or the other. Martin even held that agnosticism entails negative atheism, though many agnostics insist their view is something separate.

  Graham Oppy offered another label entirely for the people who fall outside the debate. He calls innocents those who never considered the question because they lack any grasp of what a god is, citing one-month-old babies as his example. Ernest Nagel went the opposite way, arguing in his work on philosophical atheism that the mere absence of belief should not count as atheism at all. The disagreement is not trivial. Before the 18th century, the West so assumed God's existence that the very possibility of true atheism was doubted, a notion called theistic innatism.

• 3. Roots In Word And World

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  In early ancient Greek, the adjective atheos meant godless, built from a privative prefix and the word for god. It started as an insult, roughly ungodly or impious. By the fifth century BCE, it sharpened into something more deliberate, the sense of severing relations with the gods or denying them outright. Cicero carried the Greek word into Latin, and the term became ammunition in the quarrels between early Christians and Hellenists, each hurling it at the other.

  The English word atheist arrived from the French athee, meaning one who denies the existence of God or gods. It appears as early as 1566, and again in 1571. The noun atheism, drawn from the French atheisme, shows up in English around 1587. When atheism was first used to describe a belief someone claimed for themselves, in late 18th-century Europe, it specifically meant disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god.

  Atheistic ideas reach back much further than the European vocabulary. They are documented in the Vedic period and in classical antiquity. Among the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, Samkhya, the oldest, does not accept God, and the early Mimamsa rejected the notion as well. The most explicitly atheistic of all was the Charvaka, also called Lokayata, a thoroughly materialistic school that originated in India around the sixth century BCE. Satischandra Chatterjee and Dhirendramohan Datta noted that our knowledge of it is fragmentary, surviving mostly through the criticisms other schools wrote in order to refute it.

• 4. The Greek Underground

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  Anaxagoras, whom Irenaeus called the atheist, was condemned for impiety after declaring that the sun is a type of incandescent stone, an attempt to strip the heavens of their divinity. He was not alone in courting danger. In the late fifth century BCE, the lyric poet Diagoras of Melos was sentenced to death in Athens as a godless person after mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries, and he fled the city to escape. Modern scholars dispute how radical he really was. Marek Winiarczyk argued he was not an atheist in the modern sense, while Tim Whitmarsh countered that Diagoras rejected the gods through the problem of evil.

  Protagoras is sometimes taken for an atheist but was closer to agnostic, confessing he could not discover whether the gods exist or what form they take, citing the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life. Socrates, who lived roughly from 470 to 399 BCE, was tried and executed for not believing in the gods of the state, though he vehemently denied the charge. Aristophanes had already painted him this way in The Clouds, performed in 423 BCE, showing him teaching that the traditional deities do not exist. David Sedley surveyed these thinkers and concluded that none openly defended radical atheism, yet the sources attest such ideas plainly enough that Athens probably had what he called an atheist underground.

  Epicurus, around 300 BCE, became the most important Greek figure in the development of atheism. Drawing on Democritus and the Atomists, he held that the universe ran on the laws of chance with no need for divine intervention. He still allowed that the gods existed but believed they took no interest in human affairs. His followers sought ataraxia, peace of mind, partly by exposing the fear of divine wrath as irrational, and they denied any afterlife or punishment after death.

• 5. Arguments Against God

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  Epicurus is credited with first laying out the problem of evil, and David Hume preserved the sharpest version of it. In his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion of 1779, Hume cited Epicurus as a chain of questions. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Theodicean atheists press exactly this point, holding that a world of suffering cannot be squared with a God called omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Similar arguments appear in Buddhist philosophy, where Vasubandhu, in the fourth or fifth century, set out numerous Buddhist objections to God.

  Skepticism, rooted in David Hume, claims certainty about anything is impossible, so one can never know whether a god exists. Hume himself wanted such unobservable metaphysical concepts dismissed as sophistry and illusion. A different tack is theological noncognitivism, which holds that the sentence God exists states no real proposition and is simply meaningless. A.J. Ayer and Theodore M. Drange rejected sorting such people into either atheism or agnosticism, giving noncognitivism a category of its own.

  Most atheists lean toward ontological monism, the belief in only one kind of fundamental substance. Materialism names matter as that substance, leaving no room for a non-material divine being. Naturalism holds that everything is fundamentally natural with no supernatural phenomena. Graham Oppy cited a PhilPapers survey in which 56.5% of academic philosophers leaned toward physicalism and 49.8% toward naturalism. Oppy argues that a strong naturalism favors atheism, since naturalism and theism cannot both be true, while judging the evidential problem of evil the best direct argument against God.

• 6. The Question Of Morals

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  Blaise Pascal argued in his Pensees that denying God leaves life meaningless and miserable, a charge that has shadowed atheism ever since. The same suspicion echoes in the saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, the claim that nonbelievers rush back to God in a crisis or make deathbed conversions. The record offers counterexamples, including literal atheists in foxholes. Plato's Euthyphro dilemma cut at the heart of the matter, suggesting the gods' role in deciding right from wrong is either unnecessary or arbitrary.

  Susan Neiman and Julian Baggini turned the moral question around entirely. They argue that behaving ethically only because a divine authority commands it is not real ethics but blind obedience. Baggini goes further, claiming atheism is a superior basis for ethics, because judging the morality of any divine command requires a standard outside religion. Without that external footing, one could not say that thou shalt steal is immoral even if a religion instructed it.

  Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist, found in his review of social science research that societal well-being is positively correlated with irreligion. Atheism and secularity cluster far more thinly in poorer, less developed nations, particularly in Africa and South America, than in the richer industrialized democracies. In the United States, he reported that atheists and secular people were less nationalistic, prejudiced, antisemitic, racist, dogmatic, and authoritarian than religious counterparts. In the states with the highest percentages of atheists, the murder rate ran below average. In the most religious states, it ran higher.

• 7. The State And The Movement

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  Karl Marx called religion the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions, the opium of the people. He had been influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach, who treated God as a human invention and religion as wish-fulfillment. Mikhail Bakunin pushed harder still, reversing Voltaire's famous line. Where Voltaire said that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, Bakunin wrote that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

  State atheism took these ideas and made them policy. It emerged in the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and in Communist China under Mao Zedong. Soviet measures included outlawing religious instruction in schools and creating the League of Militant Atheists. Stalin softened his stance toward the Orthodox church during the second world war to win broader acceptance for his regime. Believers later pointed to such regimes and their mass killings as an indictment of atheism. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins replied that Stalin's atrocities flowed from dogmatic ideology, not from atheism, and that he and Mao, though atheists, did not kill in atheism's name.

  Individual campaigners reshaped the law in courtrooms. In India, Periyar E.V. Ramasamy fought Hinduism and the Brahmins over caste discrimination. In the United States, Vashti McCollum was the plaintiff in a 1948 Supreme Court case that struck down religious education in public schools. Madalyn Murray O'Hair brought the 1963 case Murray v. Curlett, which banned compulsory prayer in public schools. In 1976, Anne Nicol Gaylor and her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which promotes the separation of church and state.

• 8. Counting And Being Counted

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  Melbourne hosted the first Global Atheist Convention in 2010, billed as the largest event of its kind in the world. Held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from the 12th to the 14th of March, it drew over 2,000 delegates, with every ticket selling out more than five weeks early. A second convention followed in Melbourne from the 13th to the 15th of April 2012. A third, planned for February 2018, was cancelled, apparently for insufficient interest.

  Counting atheists is genuinely hard, since poll respondents define the word differently and draw different lines between atheism and other forms of non-religion. A 2010 survey published in Encyclopaedia Britannica put the non-religious at about 9.6% of the world's population and atheists at about 2.0%. Win-Gallup International found convinced atheists at 13% in 2012-11% in 2015, and 9% in 2017. China topped that list at 47%, followed by Japan at 31% and the Czech Republic at 30%. The number of atheists per country correlates strongly with how secure people feel, both individually and as a society.

  That correlation extends to a contested link between atheism and reasoning. In a sample of 137 countries, the correlation between national IQ and disbelief in God was found to be 0.60. A 2016 study reported that self-identified atheists scored 18.7% higher than theists on the cognitive reflection test. The authors warned the effect is not large and not fully understood. Yet across the globe, atheists are still held in poor regard. A 2016 Pew Research Center publication found that 99% of Indonesians, 45% of Americans, and 15% of French people believe a person must believe in God to be moral, the same suspicion the ancient Romans once aimed at Christians.