For example, it might be identified with any of the following positions: that neither theistic belief nor atheistic belief is justified, that neither theistic belief nor atheistic belief is rationally required, that neither belief is rationally permissible, that neither has warrant, that neither is reasonable, or that neither is probable. Yet they have faith that God exists and such faith at least in some cases involves belief.
Thus, some fideists are extreme agnostics in the epistemological sense even though they are not agnostics in the psychological sense. More likely, though, what is being claimed by these self-identified agnostic atheists is that, while their belief that God does not exist has positive epistemic status of some sort minimally, it is not irrational , it does not have the sort of positive epistemic status that can turn true belief into knowledge.
Hopefully, context will help to disambiguate. This makes a huge difference to the issue of justification. Consider, for example, this passage written by the agnostic, Anthony Kenny 84—85 :. I do not myself know of any argument for the existence of God which I find convincing; in all of them I think I can find flaws. Equally, I do not know of any argument against the existence of God which is totally convincing; in the arguments I know against the existence of God I can equally find flaws.
So that my own position on the existence of God is agnostic. That view would, of course, come in two flavors: theistic gnosticism—the view that theism is known and hence atheism is not —and atheistic gnosticism—the view that atheism is known and hence theism is not. Jeanine Diller points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.
Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are. For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion. There are also the Gods of specific Western theistic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, which may or may not be best understood as classical or neo-classical Gods.
There are also panentheistic and process theistic Gods, as well as a variety of other God-concepts, both of Western and non-Western origin, that are largely ignored by even the most well-informed atheists. Philosophically sophisticated theists, for their part, often act as if refuting naturalism establishes the existence of the particular sort of God in which they believe.
Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances. Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify Diller 11— Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.
Global atheists might object that, even if atheism and metaphysical naturalism are not identical, a belief in the former can be based on a belief in the latter; in other words, if one has good arguments for the view that nature is a closed system, then that removes any burden to consider each God-concept separately, so long as all legitimate concepts of God imply that God is a supernatural entity—that is, an entity that is not natural, yet affects nature.
This is no easy task, especially given recent work on naturalist forms of theism e. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case. Concerning the issue of what exactly counts as a legitimate or religiously adequate concept of God, various approaches might be taken. See, for example, Le Poidevin 52; and Leftow 66— In some religions, especially but not only certain Western monotheistic ones, worship involves total devotion and unconditional commitment.
To be worthy of that sort of worship if that is even possible when the pool of potential worshipers are autonomous agents like most adult humans requires an especially impressive God, though it is controversial whether or not it requires a perfect one. For example, even if the ancient Egyptians worshipped the Sun and regarded it as worthy of such worship, the global atheist need not deny the existence of the Sun.
Instead, the global atheist can claim that the ancient Egyptians were mistaken in thinking that the Sun is worthy of religious worship. If we examine, without prejudice, the ancient heathen mythology, as contained in the poets, we shall not discover in it any such monstrous absurdity, as we may at first be apt to apprehend. Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest?
That these creatures may be capricious, revengeful, passionate, voluptuous, is easily conceived; nor is any circumstance more apt, among ourselves, to engender such vices, than the license of absolute authority.
And in short, the whole mythological system is so natural, that, in the vast variety of planets and world[s], contained in this universe, it seems more than probable, that, somewhere or other, it is really carried into execution. Hume [] 53, emphasis added. There is much debate about whether Hume was an atheist or a deist or neither, but no one uses this passage to support the view that he was actually a polytheist.
Perhaps this is because, even if there are natural alien beings that, much like the ancient Greek and Roman gods, are far superior in power to humans but quite similar in their moral and other psychological qualities, presumably no one, at least nowadays, would be tempted to regard them as worthy of religious worship. One possible flaw in the proposed account of global atheism is that it seems to imply overlap between deism and atheism.
Of course, not all deists would count as atheists on the proposed account, but some would. For example, consider a deist who believes that, while a supernatural person intentionally designed the universe, that deity did not specifically intend for intelligent life to evolve and has no interest whatsoever in the condition or fate of such life.
According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin 76 argues for this position as follows:.
This probability depends solely on a priori considerations like the intrinsic features of the content of the proposition in question e. Le Poidevin defends the first premise of this argument by stating that, while intrinsic probability plausibly depends inversely on the specificity of a claim the less specific the claim, the more ways there are for it to be true and so the more probable it is that it is true , it is impossible to show that versatile theism is more specific or less specific than its denial.
This defense appears to be incomplete, for Le Poidevin never shows that the intrinsic probability of a proposition depends only on its specificity, and there are good reasons to believe that this is not the case see, for example, Swinburne 80— Le Poidevin could respond, however, that specificity is the only uncontroversial criterion of intrinsic probability, and this lack of consensus on other criteria is all that is needed to adequately defend premise 1.
One way to defend the second premise is to review the relevant evidence and argue that it is ambiguous Le Poidevin chapter 4; and Draper Another way is to point out that atheism, which is just the proposition that theism is false, is compatible with a variety of very different hypotheses, and these hypotheses vary widely in how well they account for the total evidence.
Thus, to assess how well atheism accounts for the total evidence, one would have to calculate a weighted average of how well these different atheistic hypotheses account for the total evidence, where the weights would be the different intrinsic probabilities of each of these atheistic hypotheses.
This task seems prohibitively difficult Draper and in any case has not been attempted, which supports the claim that there is no firm basis upon which to judge whether the total evidence supports theism or atheism. The agnostic, however, might reply that this sense of the divine, unlike memory, operates at most sporadically and far from universally.
Also, unlike other basic cognitive faculties, it can easily be resisted, and the existence of the beliefs it is supposed to produce can easily be explained without supposing that the faculty exists at all. Thus, the analogy to memory is weak. For the argument also contains two inferences from steps 1 and 2 to step 3 and from step 3 to step 4 , neither of which is obviously correct. Almost all well-known arguments for atheism are arguments for a particular version of local atheism.
One possible exception to this rule is an argument recently made popular by some New Atheists, although it was not invented by them. Notice the obvious relevance of this argument to agnosticism. According to one prominent member of the agnosticism family, we have no good reason to believe that God exists and no good reason to believe that God does not exist. Clearly, if the first premise of this argument is true, then this version of agnosticism must be false. Can the no arguments argument be construed as an argument for global atheism?
One might object that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument for any sort of atheism since its conclusion is not that atheism is true but instead that there is good reason to believe that atheism is true.
But that is just a quibble. Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended. The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims.
One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists. Consider, for example, intelligent life in distant galaxies cf.
Morris Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false.
It might then be argued that i a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so ii the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist. This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence.
The sort of God in whose non-existence philosophers seem most interested is the eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent i. One interesting question, then, is how best to argue for atheism understood locally as the proposition that omni-theism is false.
It is often claimed that a good argument for atheism is impossible because, while it is at least possible to prove that something of a certain sort exists, it is impossible to prove that nothing of that sort exists. One reason to reject this claim is that the descriptions of some kinds of objects are self-contradictory.
For example, we can prove that no circular square exists because such an object would have to be both circular and non-circular, which is impossible.
Many attempts have been made to construct such arguments. For example, it has been claimed that an omnibenevolent being would be impeccable and so incapable of wrongdoing, while an omnipotent being would be quite capable of doing things that would be wrong to do.
There are, however, sophisticated and plausible replies to arguments like these. Similar problems face attempts to show that omni-theism must be false because it is incompatible with certain known facts about the world.
Such arguments typically depend on detailed and contested interpretations of divine attributes like omnibenevolence. A very different approach is based on the idea that disproof need not be demonstrative. The goal of this approach is to show that the existence of an omni-God is so improbable that confident belief in the non-existence of such a God is justified.
Each of these arguments employs the same specific strategy, which is to argue that some alternative hypothesis to omni-theism is many times more probable than omni-theism. In the case of the second argument, the alternative hypothesis aesthetic deism is arguably a form of theism, and even in the case of the first argument it is arguable that the alternative hypothesis source physicalism is compatible with some forms of theism in particular ones in which God is an emergent entity.
This is not a problem for either argument, however, precisely because both are arguments for local atheism instead of global atheism. This is said to follow because theism starts out with a very low probability before taking into account any evidence.
Since ambiguous or absent evidence has no effect on that prior or intrinsic probability, the posterior or all-things-considered probability of theism is also very low. If, however, theism is very probably false, then atheism must be very probably true and this implies according to the defender of the argument that atheistic belief is justified.
This last alleged implication is examined in section 7. The low priors argument implicitly addresses this important issue in a much more sophisticated and promising way. Unlike ontological physicalism, source physicalism is a claim about the source of mental entities, not about their nature.
Source physicalists, whether they are ontological physicalists or ontological dualists, believe that the physical world existed before the mental world and caused the mental world to come into existence, which implies that all mental entities are causally dependent on physical entities. Further, even if they are ontological dualists, source physicalists need not claim that mental entities never cause physical entities or other mental entities, but they must claim that there would be no mental entities were it not for the prior existence and causal powers of one or more physical entities.
The argument proceeds as follows:. The other steps in the argument all clearly follow from previous steps. A thorough examination of the arguments for and against premise 1 is obviously impossible here, but it is worth mentioning that a defense of this premise need not claim that the known facts typically thought by natural theologians to favor omni-theism over competing hypotheses like source physicalism have no force.
Instead, it could be claimed that whatever force they have is offset at least to some significant degree by more specific facts favoring source physicalism over omni-theism. More precisely, the point is this. Even when natural theologians successfully identify some general fact about a topic that is more probable given omni-theism than given source physicalism, they ignore other more specific facts about that same topic, facts that, given the general fact , appear to be significantly more probable given source physicalism than given omni-theism.
For example, even if omni-theism is supported by the general fact that the universe is complex, one should not ignore the more specific fact, discovered by scientists, that underlying this complexity at the level at which we experience the universe, is a much simpler early universe from which this complexity arose, and also a much simpler contemporary universe at the micro-level, one consisting of a relatively small number of different kinds of particles all of which exist in one of a relatively small number of different states.
In short, it is important to take into account, not just the general fact that the universe that we directly experience with our senses is extremely complex, but also the more specific fact that two sorts of hidden simplicity within the universe can explain that complexity.
Given that a complex universe exists, this more specific fact is exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, because, as the best natural theologians e. There is, however, no reason at all to expect this more specific fact on omni-theism since, if those same natural theologians are correct, then a simple God provides a simple explanation for the observed complexity of the universe whether or not that complexity is also explained by any simpler mediate physical causes.
Another example concerns consciousness. Its existence really does seem to be more likely given omni-theism than given source physicalism and thus to raise the ratio of the probability of omni-theism to the probability of source physicalism. But we know a lot more about consciousness than just that it exists. We also know, thanks in part to the relatively new discipline of neuroscience, that conscious states in general and even the very integrity of our personalities, not to mention the apparent unity of the self, are dependent to a very high degree on physical events occurring in the brain.
Given the general fact that consciousness exists, we have reason on source physicalism that we do not have on theism to expect these more specific facts. Given theism, it would not be surprising at all if our minds were more independent of the brain than they in fact are.
Thus, when the available evidence about consciousness is fully stated, it is far from clear that it significantly favors omni-theism. Arguably, given that fine-tuning is required for intelligent life and that an omni-God has reason to create intelligent life, we have more reason to expect fine-tuning on omni-theism than on source physicalism. Given such fine-tuning, however, it is far more surprising on omni-theism than on source physicalism that our universe is not teeming with intelligent life and that the most impressive intelligent organisms we know to exist are merely human: self-centered and aggressive primates who far too often kill, rape, and torture each other.
In fairness to omni-theism, however, most of those humans are moral agents and many have religious experiences apparently of God. And while religious experiences apparently of God are no doubt more to be expected if an omni-God exists than if human beings are the product of blind physical forces, it is also true that, given that such experiences do occur, various facts about their distribution that should be surprising to theists are exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, such as the fact that many people never have them and the fact that those who do have them almost always have either a prior belief in God or extensive exposure to a theistic religion.
It seems, then, that when it comes to evidence favoring omni-theism over source physicalism, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Further, when combined with the fact that what we know about the level of well-being of sentient beings and the extent of their suffering is arguably vastly more probable on source physicalism than on theism, a very strong though admittedly controversial case for premise 1 can be made.
What about premise 2? Again, a serious case can be made for its truth. Such a case first compares source physicalism, not to omni-theism, but to its opposite, source idealism. Source idealists believe that the mental world existed before the physical world and caused the physical world to come into existence.
This view is consistent with both ontological idealism and ontological dualism, and also with physical entities having both physical and mental effects. It entails, however, that all physical entities are, ultimately, causally dependent on one or more mental entities, and so is not consistent with ontological physicalism. The symmetry of source physicalism and source idealism is a good pro tanto reason to believe they are equally probable intrinsically.
They are equally specific, they have the same ontological commitments, neither can be formulated more elegantly than the other, and each appears to be equally coherent and equally intelligible. For example, it adds the claim that a single mind created the physical universe and that this mind is not just powerful but specifically omnipotent and not just knowledgeable but specifically omniscient.
In addition, it presupposes a number of controversial metaphysical and meta-ethical claims by asserting in addition that this being is both eternal and objectively morally perfect. If any of these specific claims and presuppositions is false, then omni-theism is false. Thus, omni-theism is a very specific and thus intrinsically very risky form of source idealism, and thus is many times less probable intrinsically than source idealism.
Therefore, if, as argued above, source physicalism and source idealism are equally probable intrinsically, then it follows that premise 2 is true: source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than omni-theism.
Notice that the general strategy of the particular version of the low priors argument discussed above is to find an alternative to omni-theism that is much less specific than omni-theism and partly for that reason much more probable intrinsically , while at the same time having enough content of the right sort to fit the totality of the relevant data at least as well as theism does.
In other words, the goal is to find a runner like source physicalism that begins the race with a large head start and thus wins by a large margin because it runs the race for supporting evidence and thus for probability at roughly the same speed as omni-theism does.
An alternative strategy is to find a runner that begins the race tied with omni-theism, but runs the race for evidential support much faster than omni-theism does, thus once again winning the race by a margin that is sufficiently large for the rest of the argument to go through.
The choice of alternative hypothesis is crucial here just as it was in the low priors argument. Atheist shares roots with words such as theology and theism , which generally have something to do with God. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'atheist. Send us feedback. See more words from the same year.
Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for atheist. See the full definition for atheist in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Nglish: Translation of atheist for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of atheist for Arabic Speakers.
Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of atheist. How Agnostic Differs From Atheist Many people are interested in distinguishing between the words agnostic and atheist. Petersburg, was his contemporary Andrei Andreyevich Markov, an atheist and a bitter enemy of the church.
First Known Use of atheist , in the meaning defined above. History and Etymology for atheist see atheism. Learn More About atheist. Time Traveler for atheist The first known use of atheist was in See more words from the same year. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Style: MLA.
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