Contra-Lacktheism

Why Atheism is More than a Lack of Belief Concerning the Existence of God

A popular move when debating the existence of God is simply to reject atheism as a denial of God’s existence. Rather, the definition becomes ‘lacking a belief in God’ (i.e. lacktheism). It is therefore not a claim to knowledge of any kind. Here I will spell out what I think how the positions should be formulated regarding the debate about God’s existence, and why lacktheism does not suffice as a definition of atheism.

When it comes to any proposition, we can understand it as true, false, or unkown. When we make a claim that a proposition is true or false, it comes with a specific justification. When it comes to the proposition being unknown, it can be unknown in principle (that means we could never know one way or another), or that we are ignorant of the debate going on. The way we attribute propositions correspond to the three possible categories one can align with in the debate regarding God’s existence.

• True = Theism
• False = Atheism
• Unknown = Agnostic

The proposition in question is “there exists at least one being such that it has attributes resembling what we consider a god”. The proposition does not outline any necessary and sufficient conditions for what is and is not a god because the term can be ambiguous since the gods portrayed between the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Greek Paganism, and other varieties of theism, are all rather different. In this sense, the term ‘god’ can be analogous to the term ‘game’; chess, American football, solitaire, boxing and D&D are all games, but they greatly differ. What our conceptions of games and gods share are a resemblance with one another, and this I believe is good enough to capture what we mean when someone is either playing a game, or believes in a god.

With this out of the way, let’s go into the problem with lacktheism. Lacktheism equivocates between an atheist and a non-theist. An atheist is someone who denies the proposition is true, while a non-theist is just someone who isn’t a theist. A non-theist would then encapsulate both atheists and agnostics. The problem with doing this is that it could be done in reverse.

Let’s say that a theist is “someone who lacks belief in the non-existence of a God”. That way people who are agnostics (people who just don’t believe, but won’t deny the proposition, some god exists) and those who believe in some god, are theists. The problem would become apparent in this context that all the theist is doing is equivocating between being a theist, and between being a non-atheist. If it is unacceptable in this case, we should agree that it is just as unacceptable when the lacktheist does the same thing.