Atheism

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

— Psalm 14:1

Atheism is the denial that God exists. It has no content of its own: theism holds that a personal, self-existent Creator and moral governor exists, and atheism simply negates that claim, so that establishing theism already refutes atheism.¹ It appears both as a reasoned conclusion (speculative atheism) and as a functional disregard for God among people who deny holding it (practical atheism), a life lived as though God’s existence made no difference.² Atheism differs from agnosticism, which calls the question permanently unsettleable rather than answering it, and from apatheism, which treats it as unimportant rather than false.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to atheism by name; its authors would not have needed one, since the confession opens by treating God’s existence as already evident to everyone rather than as a live question. Chapter 1, on the Holy Scriptures, states that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable,” though not sufficient by themselves to convey “that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.”³ So on the confession’s own terms, atheism refuses evidence it already judges sufficient to leave everyone without excuse, rather than drawing a fair conclusion from a genuine lack of it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture treats the atheist’s denial as willful rather than reasoned. David’s fool does not conclude there is no God from a fair weighing of evidence; he “says in his heart” what his own corruption wants to be true (Ps. 14:1; 53:1), a verse Calvin reads as describing those who “stifle the light of nature, and intentionally stupefy themselves.”⁴ Paul traces the same movement in his account of those who “knew God” through what he had made yet “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21). Calvin reads the next verse as naming the result: self-inflicted foolishness, “thinking to be wise, they became fools,” brought on by refusing knowledge already available to them (Rom. 1:22).⁵ The traditional cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments for God’s existence corroborate what natural revelation already discloses, without being its foundation.

Historical Development

Ancient usage

The word “atheist” did not originally mark out a distinct philosophical school. Ancient Greeks applied it to Socrates and other philosophers whose views departed from the popular religion, and it was applied in the same way to the early Christians, who denied the reality of the Greco-Roman gods.⁶ The word functioned as an accusation of irreligion relative to whatever a given society took for granted, not yet as the name of a settled denial that any god exists.

Reformation-era diagnosis

Calvin’s Institutes treats atheism less as a school of thought than as a moral condition every fallen person is capable of, sustained only by active suppression. He grants that “a seed of religion is divinely sown in all,” but argues that this seed is smothered rather than absent in the atheist, whether through the pride of “vain speculation” about God’s nature or through the deliberate self-stupefying David describes in Psalm 14.⁵

Nineteenth-century speculative atheism

By the later nineteenth century, atheism increasingly took the form of philosophical systems built on avowedly naturalistic premises rather than open denial. Writing in 1879, A. A. Hodge classified this “speculative atheism” into dogmatic forms, which conclude outright that God does not exist or that his existence can never be verified (he names Herbert Spencer’s First Principles here), skeptical forms, which merely doubt the evidence, and “virtual” atheism, which holds principles inconsistent with God’s existence or knowability without asserting atheism directly: materialism, positivism, J. S. Mill’s denial of divine attributes in his Essays on Religion, and explanations of the universe that leave out the agency of an intelligent, morally governing Creator, which Hodge attributes to Darwin, Spencer, and the necessitarians of his day.⁶ Charles Hodge observed the same period’s tendency of self-described unbelievers to resist the label itself: Helvetius denied being an atheist because he affirmed “an active principle in nature”; Herbert Spencer called himself religious, reducing all knowledge to the bare claim that “force is” and “force is persistent,” an inscrutable cause of which “nothing can be predicated… not consciousness; not intelligence; not will.”⁷ Hodge judged this a dispute over the word rather than a genuine alternative to atheism: the word “God” carries “a definite meaning, from which no man is at liberty to depart,” namely a personal, self-conscious being, so that a system which retains only “force” or “the incomprehensible” has not preserved theism under another name.⁸

This same naturalistic case against a Creator’s agency is what New Atheism presses into more recent, popular debate.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the order and apparent design of the natural world admit of a purely naturalistic explanation, with no need to invoke a Creator? Nineteenth-century “virtual” atheism made exactly this case, offering explanations of the universe that exclude both an intelligent Creator and moral governor.⁶ Van Mastricht traces the same move to “that perverse treatment of natural wisdom” by which people confine their account of the world to secondary causes alone and persuade themselves that everything follows its course without a director behind it, alluding to Peter’s warning against those who forget that the world did not come to be, and will not end, by natural processes running on their own (2 Pet. 3:3-5).⁹ His own remedy presses further into the natural world rather than away from it: he counsels “invincible arguments” for God’s existence and providence, a refutation of the objections raised against them, and “the book of nature and its three pages, as it were: heaven, earth, and the seas, with all that they contain,” the same natural order an atheist reads as needing no Creator.⁹

If atheism is simply the conclusion reached by weighing the evidence fairly, why hold it against someone as blameworthy rather than treating it as an honest position? Charles Hodge distinguishes two different questions bundled under “is atheism possible?” A person cannot permanently free himself from the conviction that he is answerable to a personal God for his conduct, since that would mean escaping the moral law itself, which Hodge judges impossible. But a person can, by speculation or by the practice of sin, suppress that conviction and lose its felt force for a time. Hodge compares this to holding down a spring by force: “the moment the force is removed, the spring returns to its normal position,” which is why he finds sudden, non-argumentative reversions from professed unbelief to conviction a common and rational occurrence rather than a mystery.¹⁰ Calvin’s reading of Romans 1 makes the same point from the opposite direction: the fool’s denial suppresses a knowledge of God that Paul says was already plain to him, rather than concluding a neutral inquiry that simply came up empty (Rom. 1:19-21).⁵

Is it fair to call someone an atheist who insists they believe in God, only in a stripped-down, impersonal sense? Charles Hodge treats this as a dispute about who controls the meaning of a word rather than a real exception to atheism. Language, he argues, “has its rights”: the word “God” has an established meaning, a personal, self-conscious being, that a speaker is not free to redefine simply to avoid an unwelcome label.⁸ On that reasoning, describing “force,” “the unknowable,” or “moral order” as one’s god retains theism’s word while discarding its content, and counts as the atheism it declines to name.

Doesn’t the reality of evil and suffering count as positive evidence against God’s existence, rather than merely an absence of proof for it? This is the problem of evil: Reformed, Arminian, Molinist, and open theist theology all affirm both God’s goodness and evil’s reality, and none of them treats evil’s existence as disproving God’s.

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241. ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse II: On Practical Atheism,” 89. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 1, chap. 4, sec. 2, 47. ↩
Calvin, Institutes, book 1, chap. 4, sec. 1, 46. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 46-47. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 241-242. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 242. ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 2, “The Existence and Knowledge of God,” 100-102. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 242-243. ↩