On the definition of atheism

Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash

In light of recent discussions on the atheism definition, fueled by Cosmic Skeptic’s recent video, I wanted to take the opportunity to capture my thoughts on the issue and offer my perspective.

I prefer the so called ‘philosophical’ definition of atheism. That is to say, atheism as the proposition that there is no god or, more broadly, are no gods. There are quite a few reasons why I prefer this definition, a list of which can be found at the bottom of this article. If you prefer the ‘lack of belief’ definition, and are curious as to why I prefer a different definition, I hope you’ll give my list a read!

Let me start by making something abundantly clear: I do not believe, nor did I ever believe, that all people who prefer the ‘lack of belief’ definition are inherently stupid and/or ignorant because of this preference. I did, and to some extent still do, mock specific patterns of behaviour often tied to the definition, especially if seasoned with a sky-high level of arrogance and lack of self-awareness. I do, however, apologise if this came across as an attack or mockery of all people who subscribe to the ‘lack of belief’ definition, it wasn’t my intent to do so, and I’ll try to be clear about who I am targeting in the future and why.

When it comes to the recent discussions on the definition, here are my thoughts. First of all, I do think that the ‘philosophical’ definition is better. By better I mean that it has greater utility, is clearer, and would benefit conversations on the topic. If you’re curious about my reasoning on this, please read the aforementioned list at the bottom of this article. I would like to see the adoption of the ‘philosophical’ definition grow, and I am actively promoting it over the alternative. I think this definition is better not only in the context of philosophy, but in pretty much in all domains of discourse, with perhaps an exception for activism. This is because the justifications for the ‘philosophical’ definition work across all conversations on the ‘god issue’. This may very well be because I don’t see how this discussion can be held in any other domain but philosophy: after all when talking about beliefs and how they may or may not be justified, it seems to inherently be a philosophical discussion. You could argue that science is relevant too, and I would agree, but in the sense that the data it provides can be helpful in arguing for or against god. I should also clarify that I don’t see a divide between academic philosophy and everyday, laymen philosophy, if not for the complexity and increasingly technical language. I’ve seen people who seem to imply that there is a divide, and that this definition should therefore be relegated to academic philosophy — needless to say that I disagree with this assessment.

This idea — that it would be better if the ‘philosophical’ definition were to be adopted in mainstream discussions on the topic — is often met with accusations of arrogance. I have a hard time understanding on what grounds the charge of arrogance is constructed, as I feel like with anything that someone thinks would improve something — in this case the discussions and understanding around the theism debate — it is only natural to promote it. The way you go about promoting it seems to me more important, and perhaps this is where I can see a charge of arrogance make more sense. I don’t like it when either definition is forced onto anyone. I do not advocate for this type of approach. I am happy to engage in discussions on the topic, and try to persuade people to adopt the ‘philosophical’ definition, but you won’t find me say that only one definition is correct, or that anyone must adopt the ‘philosophical’ definition. I will, however, express my belief that one is better and why, as well as build my case as to why you should — as in, it would be better if you did — adopt it. Much of this case is built on the frequent misconceptions that the ‘lack of belief’ definition seems to promote. It follows therefore that should most people who prefer the ‘lack of belief’ definition be clear on the conceptual foundations, a large portion of my case would die. I care about the underlying concepts, not the labels we apply to them, much to the disappointment of anyone who tries to label the definition debates as ‘useless semantics’. The concepts are what drove me toward these debates in the first place.

On the topic of forcing definitions onto other people: I haven’t yet encountered people from my side arguing that only one definition is correct, or that you must adopt the ‘philosophical’ definition. This on the other hand is contrasted quite strongly from some people on the other side of the debate. The American Atheist website for example would like to inform you that:

Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god [..] To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. Older dictionaries define atheism as “a belief that there is no God.” Clearly, theistic influence taints these definitions [..]

This is only one among many examples. I won’t list them all here, but if you’d like to hold my feet to the fire, just ask and you shall receive. Another thing that the American Atheists website does that is incredibly toxic for conversations on the topic is to suggest that the ‘older definition’ is a product of ‘theistic influence’, which routinely leads people from the other side accusing me and others that prefer and advocate for the ‘philosophical’ definition to be ‘theists in disguise’, a thing so popular that it became a meme at this point. I’m bringing all of this up because I don’t think that the issue of who is forcing a definition onto other people is symmetrical at all. I genuinely think that people forcing one definition over the other — and please keep in mind that I’m not talking about promoting one definition here, but explicitly arguing that only one definition exists, that only one is correct, that atheism means only one thing or that you have to use this specific definition — disproportionately exist on the side that argues for the ‘lack of belief’ definition. I welcome people who want to argue that the ‘lack of belief’ definition is better and want to promote it — by all means. But that is not the type of behaviour I am criticising here.

Speaking of this, I found the reaction to Cosmic Skeptic’s video on the definition from the people who prefer the ‘lack of belief’ definition puzzling. I celebrated when I saw that clip, because I’d love to see the ‘philosophical’ definition gain popularity. I understand that, because of the same considerations that made me celebrate, someone from the other side may be disappointed. What I don’t understand though is how that clip got interpreted as forcing people to adopt the ‘philosophical’ definition. It makes me think that anything merely promoting the ‘philosophical’ definition, perhaps promoting it outside of academia, may be interpreted as forceful, which I strongly disagree with.

In closing, I’d like to briefly indulge in a bit of healthy criticism of my side of the debate: things that I don’t like to see, or that I think are not helpful to the overall conversation. The main thing here is that although I haven’t seen anyone explicitly force the ‘philosophical’ definition, the conversational context in which some of these conversations happen either imply or explicitly state that using the ‘lack of belief’ definition makes you dumb, stupid, ignorant, ‘like a flat earther’ and so on. As I stated at the very beginning, I don’t think that this is a true characterisation for the majority of people subscribing to the ‘lack of belief’ definition, let alone for all of them. It also feels like a ‘well you chose to be shot in the head, after all, I gave you the option to kill your loved one as an alternative’ type scenario, where the ‘not being forceful’ is only apparent, because the choice given was in the context of two terrible options (either adopt the ‘philosophical’ definition, or be characterised as an imbecile).

As hinted at before, most of my case against the ‘lack of belief’ definition rests on the misconceptions and patterns of behaviour it promotes, which means that should those misconceptions cease to exist, the strength of my argument would fade. I feel like sometimes, people get overly attached to the debate (in the past, I would probably count myself as one of those people), and start to loose sight of why this conversation matters and on what grounds, to the point where it becomes an empty label debate. This is should be avoided at all costs.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you got something out of it. Please feel free to engage with me either publicly or in DMs if you have questions, or would like to discuss. I hope that this can help further the conversation and clarify why I, but I feel probably many others on my side, may prefer the philosophical definition and some general sentiments on discussing these topics.

Why I prefer the ‘philosophical’ definition

1. When discussing god’s existence, there are generally three epistemic positions you can take toward the proposition (as with any proposition): you can think the proposition is true, think it is false or be undecided (because you are weighing the evidence to be roughly balanced or just feeling like there is too little material for an assessment). Atheism defined in the ‘philosophical’ sense occupies one of the three slots (‘god exists’ is false), agnosticism covers the undecided portion, and theism, as to be expected, represents ‘god exists’ being true. It’s important to note that this epistemic structure is present regardless of whether you use the ‘philosophical’ or ‘lack of belief’ definition. My first reason for preferring the ‘philosophical’ definition is thereby that the semantic structure matches the epistemic structure: that is to say that there are clear, distinct words for every attitude that someone can have towards the ‘god exists’ proposition. That makes it easy to identify the epistemic credence someone is holding toward the proposition straight from the way someone calls himself, without the need for follow-up questions.
   The ‘lack of belief’ definition, while covering the same epistemic spectrum, doesn’t convey as much information, because it collapses the ‘undecided’ and ‘is false’ epistemic options under one label. When discussing credences on the god issue, it is therefore necessary to ask follow-up questions to break the broader, ‘lack of belief’ umbrella term into the aforementioned options, making the definition less efficient in conversation. I should perhaps mention that you can argue that collapsing meaning to form broader definitions is not inherently a defect: we do this all the time. You can have general terms and more specific terms. What I would argue though is that the level of specificity at which these conversations usually happen actively benefits from having distinct terms that match the epistemic schema at that ‘resolution’ of discourse. In other words, the broader level of specificity at which the ‘lack of belief’ definition operates is cumbersome in discussions, because the level of specificity at which these conversations naturally happen ‘demands’ more detail.
2. Putting the level of detail aside for a moment, the ‘lack of belief’ definition suffers from a symmetry problem. From a purely conceptual perspective, there are no more reasons to group and thereby collapse the ‘undecided’ epistemic group with the ‘is true’ epistemic group than it is to group it with the ‘is false’ group. That is to say, there is no conceptual, abstract reason to prefer grouping undecided people under theism than there is to prefer grouping it with atheism (defined here in the ‘philosophical’ sense). You could have ‘theist’ as a label for all people that ‘lack the belief’ that the proposition is false, just as you could have ‘atheist’ as a label for all people that ‘lack a belief’ that the proposition is true. The sword cuts both ways. To be fair, you can, in my opinion with some level of success, argue that the symmetry breaker, the thing that determines with which group undecided people get grouped, can be popular usage. That is to say: because of how theism has been used so far, and is popularly understood, it would be deeply unintuitive to collapse people who don’t believe in god under theism. While I agree with this, it is noteworthy that this is not offering a conceptual reason, but merely appealing to popularity. Another avenue that could work as a symmetry breaker is to establish some sort of a-priori advantage of one side over the other. Paul Draper in my opinion successfully argues that believing theism false benefits from such a probabilistic advantage. This asymmetry may provide a reason to prefer collapsing undecided people under atheism. However, I still think that this line of reasoning is vulnerable, because the scenario may be unfair to people that do weigh the belief that ‘god exists’ is true and the belief that ‘god exists’ is false as roughly equally likely while already taking Draper’s argument into account. Given the symmetry problems, I find it much simpler, clear and accurate to treat the ‘undecided’ epistemic group separately.
3. The main driver for preferring the ‘philosophical’ definition of atheism is that the ‘lack of belief’ definition seems to promote (and this is based on my experience, as well as the experience of other people that I frequently talk to — aka. an anecdotal report that may suffer from selection bias) conceptual misconceptions on epistemology and other similar avenues. For example, a typical misconception that I often observe is the idea that a person can ‘just’ lack a belief in the idea that the ‘god exists’ proposition is true. As a matter of fact, this person either also believes that the same proposition is false, or also doesn’t believe that it is false, in which case he is undecided and should, presumably, take the idea that the proposition is false and the idea that the proposition is true as roughly equally likely. From my experience, most people that ‘just’ lack a belief — which again is not possible — do not in fact think that both sides are equally likely, or at least they don’t behave or act as if they did. If you prefer the lack of belief definition, it should be clear to you that the definition is an umbrella term and is in no way a standalone epistemic option.
   Another example in the ‘misconceptions’ category is the idea that belief or believing something is somehow inherently bad. I think it’s easy to see how this issue can come from the ‘lack of belief’ definition: if believing x is bad and lacking a belief is good, then the question ‘why is it good?’ naturally arises. Unfortunately, the way some atheists seem to answer is by adopting the view that believing any proposition is accepting it without evidence and therefore bad. Sometimes, this spirals into an even further confusion on ideas like ‘I just know things, I don’t believe them’. This is increasing the conceptual and conversational confusion because believing something, as far as I’m aware of in all of epistemology, is simply ‘accepting something as true’ or ‘accepting something as likely’. It is not expressing whether or not this is ‘without evidence’, or otherwise. Someone may very well believe something because of good evidence. The conversations around knowledge often hit the same type of confusion quickly. Related to this problem is the seeming desire to agree with apologists that believing god doesn’t exist is indeed irrational, to the point where you feel the need to retract into ‘it is irrational, but I’m not doing that, I merely lack a belief’. This is throwing those of us who do actually think god doesn’t exist under the bus. If you want to normalise atheism, normalise the idea of people believing that there is no god, don’t cease that ground to apologists by agreeing with them. There are remarkable arguments to argue for the non-existence of god (especially if we are talking about the typical monotheistic god), be it deductive, inductive or abductive, that should be taken into account, and provide an excellent foundation to defend the reasonableness of the ‘philosophical’ atheist position.
   A third type of misconception that seems to be fuelled by the ‘lack of belief’ definition is that proving a negative is impossible, and that it is therefore irrational, unreasonable or otherwise to believe that there are no gods. This is false, and ties into the previous point. It is relatively easy to prove a negative: if proposition A entails proposition B, but proposition B is false, then proposition A is also false. This schema is known in logic as Modus Tollens, and is a deductively valid rule of inference. It is often easier to prove a negative than it is to prove a positive: for a negative, all I have to do is establish a fact that is incompatible with the hypothesis. For example, I don’t need to prove that the earth is a sphere to establish that the earth is not flat: all I need is an observation that is incompatible with a flat earth, like establishing curvature. That doesn’t prove the earth is a globe (could be a donut or something else), but it does prove that it is not flat.
   All of this is merely a summary: there are quite a few additional misconceptions that I think can be reasonably traced back to the ‘lack of belief’ definition, such as the four quadrant graph of ‘agnostic atheism’, the idea that babies and rocks are atheists, etc.
4. The ‘lack of belief’ definition often leads to toxic and unproductive conversations with theists. I am not claiming that all people who prefer the ‘lack of belief’ definition engage in the type of behaviour I’m about to describe. In fact, I’d be happy to grant that most people just use it because it makes sense to them and happily live on. But I would be lying in saying that I don’t see this very often, especially in online conversations. The behaviour I’m talking about is weaponising the ‘lack of belief’ definition for use in debates and conversations, such that it allows you to (very often mistakenly) claim that you don’t have a burden of proof in the conversation, because you ‘merely lack a belief’ and don’t make any positive claims. This ties into misconceptions about what the burden of proof/justification is. The most helpful way I’ve found to think about these concepts is as conditions that have to be satisfied for a specific thing to occur or be the case. In conversations for instance, if you want your skeptical interlocutor (or the audience) to accept what you are saying as true, you have to provide reasons and/or ‘proof’ (loosely speaking — proof is usually not intended here as definitive evidence, but rather some type of reasoning to support your points) to convince them. If you’re not in the business of convincing anyone, even ‘claiming’ that god exists is not putting you under a conversational burden of proof, and neither is ‘claiming’ that god doesn’t exist. Another type of burden that is sometimes brought up exists as a condition of rationality — if you want your belief to be rational, you have to have reasons and justifications for it. This type of internal burden exists even outside of conversations, as it would be there even if you were the last survivor on earth. The latter type of burden exists in some capacity for all epistemic options — if you want your belief in god to be rational, you have to have justifications, and the same is true if you believe that god doesn’t exist. In an undecided scenario, the belief that requires justification for the undecidedness to be considered rational is that the evidence is roughly balanced, or that the information available is indeed insufficient to draw a conclusion. For the conversational burden on the other hand, whether or not you have it is determined by the discursive context. If you want to convince your interlocutor or the public of something — even if that thing is simply that the reasons your interlocutor has for believing are bad or insufficient — then you do have a discursive burden of proof. In pretty much all other scenarios, you don’t. It’s perhaps important to note that there are different types of dialogue that have different objectives: if one party involved is fine being involved in asymmetric dialogue, then it may be perfectly fine for one side to not have a burden in the conversation, or at least not a burden on what they believe to be true as an alternative ontology.
   What atheists often assume is that every theist ‘claiming’ that god exist is actively attempting to persuade, and should therefore be challenged on meeting the burden of proof, without in turn realising that, should the initial assumption be correct, every attempt to persuade the theist (or the audience) of his potentially bad reasoning comes with the same obligation. There are many different ways these types of conversations can occur, too many to list them all here, but it is a safe assumption that in any kind of persuasion dialogue, a symmetrical scenario is typically the default.
5. The last reason why I prefer the ‘philosophical’ definition is simply practical: most books I’ve read that discuss the issue — even books from ‘new atheists’ such as The God Delusion — use atheism this way. In my journeys through philosophy of religion, I’ve found that understanding atheism as the proposition that there is no god is what is being intended, which makes reading the papers and books easier. It makes considerations about atheism being true or false easier to follow, and gives you a semantic tool to better express your points. I recognise that this last reason is simply a matter of personal preference, and highly dependent on my reading habits and interests. I don’t expect this last point to be particularly appealing for anyone that is not engaging in similar activities.