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. For example, seven-in-ten U. Fewer than one-in-five U.
Atheists were at least as knowledgeable as Christians on Christianity-related questions — roughly eight-in-ten in both groups, for example, know that Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus — and they were also twice as likely as Americans overall to know that the U. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. In other words, you could believe on faith that God exists, but ascribe to the agnostic position that God's existence cannot be proven by physical evidence or rational arguments. Such a person would be an agnostic theist. There's even a school of theology called apophatic theology that claims that God is inherently unknowable.
Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian, wrote, "Now we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which God does. While it's technically true that you can be both an agnostic and a faithful believer, it's far more common for agnostics to highly doubt the existence of God, even if they can't ultimately prove it.
Bertrand Russell, the brilliant British philosopher and mathematician, wrote an excellent treatise on agnosticism in which he explained why the agnostic and atheist positions often overlap:. As we said at the beginning, the reasons for identifying as agnostic are myriad and different for every person. Draper, who has participated in high-profile debates with Christian philosophers , calls himself a "local atheist" and "global agnostic.
Is there some being that qualifies for the title God? There could be such a thing. HowStuffWorks picks related titles based on books we think you'll like. Should you choose to buy one, we'll receive a portion of the sale.
According to Pew, 72 percent of religious nones — a group that includes atheists and agnostics — believe in a "high power. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. This is also an uncomplicated idea, but it may be as misunderstood as atheism. One major problem is that atheism and agnosticism both deal with questions regarding the existence of gods.
Whereas atheism involves what a person does or does not believe , agnosticism involves what a person does or does not know. Belief and knowledge are related but nevertheless separate issues. There's a simple test to tell if one is an agnostic or not. Do you know for sure if any gods exist? If so, then you're not an agnostic, but a theist. Do you know for sure that gods do not or even cannot exist? If so, then you're not an agnostic, but an atheist.
Everyone who cannot answer "yes" to one of those questions is a person who may or may not believe in one or more gods. However, since they don't also claim to know for sure, they are agnostic. The only question then is whether they are an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist.
An agnostic atheist doesn't believe in any gods while an agnostic theist believes in the existence of at least one god. However, both do not make the claim to have the knowledge to back up this belief. Fundamentally, there is still some question and that is why they're agnostic. This seems contradictory and difficult, but it's actually quite easy and logical. Whether one believes or not, they can also be comfortable in not claiming to know for sure that it's either true or false.
It occurs in many different topics as well because belief is not the same as direct knowledge. The presence of a belief in a god and the absence of a belief in a god does not exhaust all of the possibilities. Agnosticism is not about belief in god but about knowledge.
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