(2025)
At its most basic level the word atheist describes a nontheist. It’s literally derived by combining the words “a” (or “non”) and “theist” into one word. Atheists are therefore nontheists. Atheists don’t believe in religious theisms, such as pantheism, polytheism, henotheism, panentheism, monotheism, or tritheism, or by extension, any religions. Atheists are therefore nonbelievers. If anyone thinks that atheism is a religion, then they need to provide a definition of religion that applies both to supernaturalism and to its denial. Any definition of religion that includes atheism will either deny the inherent supernaturalism of religion, or end up describing religion as a social grouping of some kind.[1] That’s it.
Someone can be an atheist without being anywhere close to certainty. One way to categorize degrees of belief/nonbelief is according to a seven-point spectrum proposed by Richard Dawkins.[2] On the nonbelief side there is (5) agnostic close to atheism, (6) de facto atheist, and (7) strong atheist. I am a strong atheist. I have even argued that agnostics should recognize that they are basically atheists.[3] The sum of my informed views can be understood in just two affirmations. First, I’m an atheist because sufficient objective evidence doesn’t exist to warrant belief in any gods or their actions in history through supposed miracles.[4] Second, I’m a debunker of religious faith because the evidence is clear that faith in god or gods is unjustified, harmful, and dangerous.[5]
There is perhaps a better way to categorize nonbelief. Matt McCormick makes an epistemological distinction between atheists. On the one hand there are narrow atheists, and on the other hand there are wide atheists. A narrow atheist accepts the existence of one superhuman being/force to the exclusion of others. A wide atheist disbelieves in all superhuman beings/forces.[6] In this way Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all narrow atheists, or selective nonbelievers, when it comes to other religions. They are inconsistent atheists, disbelieving all others gods and religions except their own.
Since atheists are best categorized as nonbelievers, it is wrong to characterize atheists as having a belief system, or even a religious faith. But believers do characterize atheists this way. Take for instance the late Norman Geisler, arguably one of the biggest names in Christian apologetics. Along with cowriter Frank Turek, in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (2004) Geisler said: “The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge.” Their whole argument is that “the atheist has to muster a lot more faith than the Christian” (2004, pp. 25-26). Implicit is the assumption that faith adds something to the mix, that it takes off where the probabilities end. They have a reasonable faith, they say, as opposed to people of reason who eschew religious faith.
Geisler and Turek’s book is typical in being bent on dragging atheists down to their level. Those who value reason, evidence, and science are said to have no greater justification for what we conclude than people of faith who, on my view, devalue, diminish, discredit, and deny reason, evidence, and science. When it comes to science there is no higher authority than the consensus of scientists working in their respective fields. There is no other method for gaining factual knowledge about the nature of nature, its workings, its biological evolution, or even its origins, which even includes things like scientific studies on petitionary prayer and miracle claims. No nonscientist can justifiably dispute the scientific consensus until that consensus changes. No scientist qua scientist can legitimately punt to the mystery of faith as an answer to the original mystery to be solved. Only further science can change the consensus, not prescientific biblical verses. If believers refuse to accept this requirement, it’s clear that they are not reasoning properly.[7]
I have defined faith as “an irrational leap over the evidence.”[8] Christian apologists David Marshall and Timothy McGrew scoffed at this definition. They define faith as “trusting, holding to, and acting on what one has good reason to believe is true, in the face of difficulties.” They go on to document that “for nearly two millennia many of the greatest names in the Christian tradition have grounded faith in reason and evidence.”[9] However, it’s quite clear to me that most believers in the churches and colleges tout the virtues of faith without evidence. Just watch the many interventions that street epistemologist Anthony Magnabosco has published on his YouTube channel. There you’ll see the overwhelming anecdotal evidence. When questioned, believers on the street almost always revert to blind faith as an answer.[10]
It seems as though average Christian believers understand their faith better than Christian apologists do, just as those same apologists understood their faith before attending Christian seminaries. Average believers have read and understood their Bible, such as the Gospel story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe without any objective evidence.[11] The whole point of the tale is that faith without objective evidence is a virtue, not a vice. The lesson to be learned comes from the character of Jesus himself: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This is what 2 Corinthians 5:7 affirms, that “we walk by faith, not by sight,” as does Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for. It is being sure of what we do not see” (NRSV).
Just consider how reasonable people come to trust in someone or something. That’s the real question here. They do so based on the evidence. The greater the evidence, the greater the trust in someone or something. It’s that simple. The only way to objectively place a reasonable trust in the existence and caring nature of one’s deity is with sufficient evidence of his existence and care. There is no other way. There must be sufficient evidence for this trust. Faith has nothing to do with this. Objective probabilities are all that matter. Reasonable people think exclusively in terms of the probabilities according to the strength of the evidence. This is something David Hume argued that a wise man does.[12]
In response, apologists claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for determining what counts as extraordinary evidence for miracles. But I know what doesn’t count as extraordinary evidence, which says it all. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count; nor does circumstantial evidence, or anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events they recount, documents which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, experiences, and inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence, nor do the reports of someone who tells others that his writings are inspired or conveyed by divine revelation through dreams or visions.[13]
In any case, how Marshall and McGrew define faith is irrelevant since there isn’t sufficient evidence—much less sufficient objective evidence—that petitionary prayer works or that miracles occur, especially reports of biblical miracles made in the prescientific past based merely on second-, third-, and fourth-hand testimonies. Not until they can produce the requisite evidence can they justifiably define faith as trust. Otherwise their definitions of faith are pure, unadulterated obfuscations hiding the fact that they don’t have the evidence for their Christian faith. They end up with a faith that trusts on insufficient and even nonexistent objective evidence, so there is every reason not to trust in their faith.[14]
There is a very real sense in which theistic believers are dead wrong about one important aspect of faith. George H. Smith captures the point in his book Atheism: The Case Against God (1974). Hear him out. He wrote: “In order to understand the nature of a philosophical conflict one must grasp the fundamental differences that give rise to the conflict” (p. 96). What does he mean? “The conflict between Christian theism and atheism is fundamentally a conflict between faith and reason.” How so? Because “faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid—and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason” (p. 120 [emphasis mine]). I used to think differently, but now I agree with Smith. Too many believers disagree with each other because people of faith don’t require sufficient evidence to believe things like a virgin named Mary was the mother of God’s son.[15] When the evidence is lacking, they still believe rather than—at the very least—doing the right thing and suspending judgment.
For Smith, just as for Peter Boghossian, it all comes down to the question of epistemology: how can we know what we claim to know? When it comes to epistemological questions Boghossian effectively argues that “Faith based belief processes are unreliable.” After surveying several diverse and wildly improbable paranormal and religious beliefs held by believers around the globe, he says, “We are forced to conclude that a tremendous number of people are delusional. There is no other conclusion one can draw.” He goes on to add: “The most charitable thing we can say about faith is that it’s likely to be false.”[16]
This is the reason why Boghossian suggests that a good definition of faith is “pretending.” According to him, believers are pretending to know what they don’t know, just as the Sophist pretenders did in the days of Socrates. Believers are pretending when they claim to know with 100% certainty that what they believe is true, yet they can’t be that certain of anything else. The antidote for this faith virus, as Boghossian calls it, is to give them an intervention by using the Socratic method, which involves asking leading questions intent on showing believers they don’t know what they’re pretending to know.[17]
When believers are confronted with these kinds of “attacks” on their faith, they will usually attack science, reason, and the need for objective evidence. I’ve dealt with those attacks[18] many times.[19] Claims of extraordinary miracles and the gods who supposedly perform them are legion, and atheists can rightly dismiss them out of hand if no evidence is presented for them, as Christopher Hitchens quipped.[20] This is something that all of us do with the unevidenced belief claims of so many others around the globe, and why believers should examine what they believe with no double standards, as if they were outsiders.[21]
The problem is that faith here is blind faith, the only kind of faith that exists on behalf of gods, goddesses, religions, miracles, and other paranormal claims. Believers claim that faith is trust, but if so, there’s no reason to trust in faith. There’s no such thing as reasonable faith. To have religious faith is to have a misplaced trust in nonexistent deities. Faith is the entrance ticket to the fantasy land of religion. It keeps people childish in their thinking. Consequently, I’ve argued that a rite of passage into adulthood is to ask young people to examine their indoctrinated faith through the lens of an outsider, a nonbeliever, by requiring sufficient objective evidence for the first time in their lives.
The main difference between believers and nonbelievers, then, is that believers value faith—blind faith, the only kind of faith there is, faith without objective evidence—while nonbelievers value sufficient objective evidence, and seek to proportion their views to the strength of the evidence as best as possible. That’s why we’re nonbelievers.
As this essay was being published, David Eller allowed me to publish a chapter of his Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s) (Global Center for Religious Research, 2024) on my blog. It’s titled “Freeing Ourselves (and Others) from Misunderstandings of Atheism.” As the most comprehensive discussion of the words “atheism” and “agnosticism” available, I wish I had written it![22]
Notes
[1] For this and other myths, see Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk, 50 Great Myths About Atheism (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
[2] Mark Cheney, “Are You a Believer? Take the Dawkins Test” (March 29, 2012). Big Think. <https://bigthink.com/articles/atheism-easter-atheister/>.
[3] John W. Loftus, “An Atheist is an Agnostic is an Atheist is an Agnostic! Why Every Agnostic Should Become an Atheist” (September 26, 2016). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2016/09/an-atheist-is-agnostic-is-atheist-is.html>
[4] See especially Loftus (ed.), The Case against Miracles (United States of America: Hypatia Press, 2019).
[5] As seen in Loftus (ed.), Christianity is not Great: How Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).
[6] Matt McCormick, “Atheism” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. James Fieser (Martin, TN: University of Tennessee at Martin, 2010). <https://iep.utm.edu/atheism/>.
[7] See Loftus (ed.), Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016).
[8] See Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013, esp. chapter 10, where I discuss various definitions of faith.
[9] Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2013), p. 149.
[10] See Anthony Magnabosco’s YouTube channel dedicated to street epistemology.
[11] In John 20:24-29. On this, see Loftus, “Doubting Thomas Tells Us All We Need to Know About Christianity” (April 19, 2021). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/04/doubting-thomas-tells-us-all-we-need-to.html>.
[12] Hume famously said: “A wise man therefore proportions his belief to the evidence.” I’ve defended Hume on miracles from all important objections in: Loftus, “Questioning Miracles: In Defense of David Hume” (April 6, 2024). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/questioning-miracles/>.
[13] See the Debunking Christianity blog’s search results for Phil Bair on extraordinary evidence for miracles.
[14] The lack of any objective evidence for miracles is why there are five major strategies for doing apologetics. Upwards to 80% of Christian theologians/apologists reject the primary need for objective evidence for their faith in favor of other things. On this, see my chapter 6 (“The Abject Failure of Christian Apologetics,” pp. 171-209) in The Case against Miracles.
[15] See Loftus, “Hail Mary: Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?” (December 25, 2024). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/hail-mary/>.
[16] Peter Boghossian, “Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions: Just Say No!” (January 27, 2012). Talk at Portland State University.
[17] Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013), pp. 17-18, 65-131.
[18] Loftus, “The Demon, Matrix, Material World, and Dream Possibilities” (September 30, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/the-demon-matrix-material-world-and-dream-possibilities/>.
[19] Loftus, “Psychic Epistemology: The Special Pleading of William Lane Craig” (October 31, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/psychic-epistemology-the-special-pleading-of-william-lane-craig/>.
[20] I have defended what is called Hitchen’s razor in: Loftus, “What’s Wrong with Using Bayes’ Theorem on Miracles?” (January 25, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/whats-wrong-with-bayes-theorem/>.
[21] Loftus, “The Outsider Test for Faith: How To Know Which Religion is True” (December 21, 2022). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2022/12/day-ten-of-thirteen-days-of-solstice.html>.
[22] David Eller, “Freeing Ourselves (and Others) from Misunderstandings of Atheism” (February 5, 2025). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2025/02/david-eller-on-freeing-ourselves-and.html>.
Copyright ©2025 by John W. Loftus. This electronic version is copyright ©2025 by Internet Infidels, Inc. with the written permission of John W. Loftus. All rights reserved.