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The term “atheism” is as slippery to define as it is fraught with emotion. Doubtless, these two facts are intimately entwined. In part the problem in defining atheism rises from its relativity—as a negative term—to the denial of varying positive religious frameworks in which God or the gods are differently understood. This makes atheism dependent on historical setting and community belief. In part, the problem of definition also rises from emotions stirred against a perceived challenge to deeply felt community beliefs: “Atheist” has often been used as a term of abuse.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–500 B.C.E.) was widely reviled as an atheist for poking fun at the anthropomorphic foibles of the Olympian deities accepted by the orthodox in his day. It did not alter his classification as an atheist that he affirmed a single, motionless, nonanthropomorphic god, cited approvingly by Aristotle two centuries later. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500–428 B.C.E.) was prosecuted and condemned to exile for atheism because he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies and, instead, insisted that the sun and moon were glowing stones, the sun even larger than the Peloponnesus. Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.), too, was condemned and was executed as an impious atheist despite his acknowledgment of personal spiritual guidance from a divine agent.

Other examples of the protean character of atheism abound. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), though the “God-intoxicated philosopher,” was excommunicated as a Jewish heretic by his synagogue (1656) and was denounced by Moses Mendelssohn for his “atheism.” Paul Tillich, though a Christian theologian, was considered an atheist by some for his rejection of any belief in God as “a being over against other beings,” but he was not so considered by others, because of his affirmations of the “God beyond the god of theism.”

Recognizing the inescapable dependence of the term on historical setting and circumstances and avoiding any abusive overtones, our definition will be explicitly relative to what might be called “minimal Jewish and Christian theism.” Atheism in this sense is defined as rejection of belief in the existence of a cosmic reality—whether literally infinite or merely vast beyond human conception—of whom religiously important personal attributes like knowledge, purpose, action, goodness, or love can be at least analogically or symbolically affirmed. This rejection can be of two sorts: first, rejection as disbelief, in which arguments may be given for the logical impossibility, empirical improbability, or theoretical implausibility of belief in such a cosmic reality; or, second, rejection as dismissal, in which theistic utterances are held to be cognitively meaningless, not qualifying for belief or disbelief and thus not a fit basis for ordering policies of life or for worship.

Arguments for Disbelief. 1. Arguments for the logical impossibility of the existence of God depend, like any a priori argumentation (that is, arguments from the necessity of ideas rather than from evidence of experience), on a careful definition of the God-idea that is held to lead to the logical contradiction or necessary incoherence that rules out belief. The dual task of a priori atheist arguments of this sort is to show that the definition offered is legitimately derived from genuine religious theism and, at the same time, fatally flawed.

Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, observes that the God of theism must be believed both to possess a maximum of secure reality, that is, a maximum of “being” of the strongest conceivable sort, and simultaneously to possess a maximum of interiority—of freedom, thought, love, and self-awareness to an eminent degree. If God were lacking in either of these aspects, God would not be the God that theists adore. But, Sartre points out, the two aspects are mutually incompatible. Secure being is the sort of phenomenon that can be “in itself” only by being entirely solid, ponderous, closed to possibilities of being in any way other than it is. Self-awareness, on the other hand, is the sort of phenomenon that can be “for itself” only by being a sort of nothingness, pure possibility, radical freedom. But to try to combine them constitutes a contradiction! What we want in a God is a projection of our own thirst to link impossibly the two aspects of ourselves between which we are torn. We are dangerously free, like it or not, and we wish—passionately—that we could at the same time be something solid. We attribute such an ideal, unreachable unity to God, but this projected God of our existential anguish is a “useless passion.” Sartre’s atheism, in consequence, is theoretically necessary. If the underlying Sartrian categories of “being” and “nothingness” can be shown not to be compelling, however, then the impossibility of belief in God on this ground vanishes.

Another example of an a priori argument less dependent on special background assumptions for the logical impossibility of belief in God is John Findlay’s ontological disproof. He points to the religious requirement that God—to be worthy of worship—be absolutely perfect in all ways, including the way in which God exists: God must not exist merely contingently (the possibility of God’s not being would be a terrible imperfection), but necessarily, as Anselm recognized and made the basis of his ontological argument. But, Findlay asserts, modern logic has shown that since all existential statements are contingent, “necessary existence” is an oxymoron. God must be conceived as enjoying necessary existence, but necessary existence is ruled out in principle. Atheism is required, therefore, since any God worthy of worship turns out to be impossible. This a priori argument for disbelief in God, like the first, rests on a theoretical framework, though an even wider one than Sartre’s. Its key theoretical assumptions are that all existential propositions are included within the class of empirical propositions and that all empirical propositions are contingently true. This fundamental framework is no less open to rejection than the first if, for example, synthetic a priori propositions can be defended or if some existential propositions simply do not share the logic of empirical ones.

2. Arguments for disbelief in God may, in addition, be grounded in a posteriori modes of reasoning (that is, arguments from the evidence of experience). Assuming the inconclusiveness of the so-called theistic proofs, the atheist position pushes beyond indecision toward a negative judgment. In the foregoing section we saw how the traditional ontological argument can be reversed in an attempted a priori disproof of the existence of the allegedly Necessary Being. Likewise, but in an a posteriori mode, the traditional cosmological argument, arguing for the existence of a First Mover, can be counterattacked with an appeal to modern empirical science in which motion is no less self-explanatory than rest, and in which cosmological theory has come to depict the universe’s origins in an impersonal Big Bang rather than in divine purpose. The traditional teleological argument (from design), from an atheist’s perspective, is even more vulnerable to counterattack. Not only does evolutionary science offer an alternative, impersonal explanation for orderliness and mutual adaptation within the biological world, but also close observation reveals maladaptations, extinctions, and vast domains of suffering.

The problem of evil, raised in one of its sharpest forms by this counterattack against the argument from design, is a mainstay in the atheist’s arsenal against the probability of an all-powerful and all-benevolent God. Given the evidence as a whole, containing not only adaptation and beauty but also plague and earthquake, birth defects and innocent suffering among both humans and animals, how could any rational mind infer a perfectly well-intentioned intelligence in full control? As David Hume allowed, it may be possible by sophisticated argument to “square” these empirical findings with the hypothesis of theism, but surely no reasonable inference directly from our mixed data to an unmixed, perfect God is possible. Therefore, barring a priori information about a hidden God purposely veiling divine perfection behind a most imperfect creation, atheism would appear to hold the balance.

3. Even if a strong probable case for atheism is difficult to work out, because of the vastness of the range of relevant evidence as well as conceptual problems in quantifying relative likelihoods in this domain, suspension of judgment (such as is advocated by agnosticism) would not be warranted as long as the theoretical plausibility of belief in God is weaker than the plausibility of disbelief. A belief becomes implausible when it is gratuitous or redundant or arbitrary, even if probabilities cannot be exactly counted. In the spirit of Laplace’s retort to Napoleon, that he had “no need for the hypothesis” of God, modern atheists find no need compelling them to introduce references to the divine in their accounts of reality. Jacques Monod, for example, argues that a complete story of living things can be told with reference only to molecules operating according to chance and necessity. Paul Edwards asks why we should be asked to suspend a negative judgment in connection with gratuitous claims about the Jewish and Christian form of theism any more than we should continue to suspend such judgment about similarly gratuitous claims concerning the gods of Mount Olympus or about the devil or witches.

Arguments for dismissal. The most radical form of atheistic argument in the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries has been the dismissal of theistic language as empty of possible belief-content. The characterization of this position as atheistic is sometimes rejected on the ground that, if theism cannot be affirmed, then neither can its contradictory. But this objection is somewhat mischievous, at best, since if the logical dismissal of theism succeeds, then what is left is a world devoid of God-talk and full of science-talk—which is exactly the outcome sought by more traditional atheistic arguments.

The classic statement of the argument for dismissal was made by A. J. Ayer as part of his general condemnation of metaphysical discourse on behalf of logical positivism. The key doctrine of logical positivism is the equation of factual meaning with actual or possible verifying experience. Mere tautologies do not carry factual significance, since they are true under all factual circumstances; all true sentences in logic and mathematics can be classified as more or less elaborate tautologies. Likewise, mere emotional outbursts do not carry factual significance, since they simply express the feelings of the utterer. Nonemotive, nontautological language will have to carry any factual significance, and this will turn out to be exhaustively expressible in terms of the sorts of experience that would tend to verify the assertion of a fact if it is true. This can be expressed in a principle: namely, that the meaning of a factual proposition is equivalent to the method of its verification.

But it is clear that language about God has no ready method of verification. If anything is verified, it will be by mundane human experience. “God”—if more is intended by the term than such actual or possible experiences as the regularity of seasons, or the orderliness of the astronomical bodies, or the feeling of satisfaction upon performing certain actions mandated by ecclesiastical organizations—is never verified as God. Anything that could be so verified would be indignantly denied as truly God by theists; thus, by making God transcendent in principle, theists remove all factual meaning from God-language. And if it is impossible to assert truths about God in a philosophical tone of voice, it is equally impossible to “believe” them “by faith.” According to this doctrine of meaning, there is literally nothing to be believed.

This verificational analysis of meaning fell onto hard times in the later part of the twentieth century, since (among other problems) it could not account for its own nontautological, nonemotive, apparently assertive (but not empirically verifiable) meaning. But a closely related challenge to the unfalsifiability of theistic claims forced careful rethinking by theists. If, as Antony Flew demanded, every possible state of affairs is compatible with theistic belief—if, that is, nothing could conceivably falsify such claims—then is anything definite being claimed at all? What is the “bottom line” difference between a theist and an atheist? Has theism died the “death of a thousand qualifications”?

A remarkable episode in twentieth-century Christian theology occurred when certain theologians took all these criticisms to heart and embraced the “death of God” within their theological work. The movement, extending mainly through the decade of the 1960s, was highly diverse in method and content. Gabriel Vahanian was misunderstood if considered an atheist at all; Paul M. Van Buren blended dismissive elements from logical positivism with Barthian neoorthodoxy; Thomas Altizer affirmed genuine atheism of a most unusual sort, holding that God had in fact died at a point in history in order to set human history free and to save it; Bishop John A. T. Robinson spoke of the absence of God “out there” but retained an impenetrable Tillichian ambiguity about what might be real “deep down” at reaches of being accessible only by subjectivity.

Atheism, though mainly a minority opinion, has flourished in different forms since the rise of critical thought in human history. Various atheisms abound in our own time. It is wise to remember that by the standard that condemned Anaxagoras to exile we would all be declared atheists. That the moon is made of rock is not, after all, religiously shocking in the setting of theism today.

The circumstances of theistic belief are constantly changing, though the changes are often too slow or complex for a living generation to notice. One of the agents of this change within any historical context is the atheism of its time. Atheism, as primarily a counterattacking position, is the critical voice that constantly opens new possibilities for thought about the ultimately real. When this voice is heard with care, new possibilities of theism may be suggested. What shall “God” mean in the future? Every meaning of “God” presupposes a theoretical framework of some sort, old or new, familiar or alien. Within these frameworks, whether derived from A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Teilhard de Chardin, or some other source, God-talk is provided its function and is related to other domains of thought and life. Atheism is the rejection of some specific sort of God-talk, whether by disbelief or dismissal. As long as such rejection is encouraged to be clearly articulated, theological dross is subjected to cleansing fires of criticism, and the human project of relating cognitively and practically to the most high and the most real is advanced.

FREDERICK FERRÉ