Atheism
Smart argues that "sometimes a person who is really an atheist may describe herself, even passionately, as an agnostic because of unreasonable generalized philosophical skepticism which would preclude us from saying that we know anything whatever, except perhaps the truths of mathematics and formal logic.
[43] Michael Martin argues that atheism is a justified and rational true belief, but offers no extended epistemological justification because current theories are in a state of controversy.
[54]: 53 Fiona Ellis describes the "expansive naturalism" of John McDowell, James Griffin, and David Wiggins while also asserting there are things in human experience which cannot be explained in such terms, such as the concept of value, leaving room for theism.
Such atheists present deductive arguments against the existence of God, which assert the incompatibility between certain traits, such as perfection, creator-status, immutability, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, transcendence, personhood (a personal being), non-physicality, justice, and mercy.
David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) cited Epicurus in stating the argument as a series of questions:[57] "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
[59] Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach[60] and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud have argued that God and other religious beliefs are human inventions, created to fulfill various psychological and emotional wants or needs.
"[62] Sociologist Phil Zuckerman analyzed previous social science research on secularity and non-belief and concluded that societal well-being is positively correlated with irreligion.
[79] Some prominent atheists—most recently Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, and following such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Robert G. Ingersoll, Voltaire, and novelist José Saramago—have criticized religions, citing harmful aspects of religious practices and doctrines.
[80] The 19th-century German political theorist and sociologist Karl Marx called religion "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
[108][101] Pre-Socratic Atomists such as Democritus attempted to explain the world in a purely materialistic way and interpreted religion as a human reaction to natural phenomena,[109] but did not explicitly deny the gods' existence.
[109][110] Anaxagoras, whom Irenaeus calls "the atheist",[111] was accused of impiety and condemned for stating that "the sun is a type of incandescent stone", an affirmation with which he tried to deny the divinity of the celestial bodies.
[112] In the late fifth century BCE, the Greek lyric poet Diagoras of Melos was sentenced to death in Athens under the charge of being a "godless person" (ἄθεος) after he made fun of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but he fled the city to escape punishment.
[108] On the other hand, the verdict has been challenged by Tim Whitmarsh, who argues that Diagoras rejected the gods on the basis of the problem of evil, and this argument was in turn alluded to in Euripides' fragmentary play Bellerophon.
[115] A fragment from a lost Attic drama that featured Sisyphus, which has been attributed to both Critias and Euripides, claims that a clever man invented "the fear of the gods" in order to frighten people into behaving morally.
[101] Drawing on the ideas of Democritus and the Atomists, he espoused a materialistic philosophy according to which the universe was governed by the laws of chance without the need for divine intervention (see scientific determinism).
The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus (c. 200 CE)[130] compiled a large number of ancient arguments against the existence of gods, recommending that one should suspend judgment regarding the matter.
Along with advances in science and philosophy, Arab and Persian lands produced rationalists who were skeptical about revealed religion, such as Muhammad al Warraq (fl.
Other critics of religion and the Church during this time included Niccolò Machiavelli, Bonaventure des Périers, Michel de Montaigne, and François Rabelais.
[149] He was followed by two other explicit atheist writers, the Polish ex-Jesuit philosopher Kazimierz Łyszczyński (who most likely authored the world's first treatise on the non-existence of God[150]) and in the 1720s by the French priest Jean Meslier.
[152] Baron d'Holbach was a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment who is best known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770) but also Christianity Unveiled.
The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error.
"[153] In Great Britain, William Hammon and physician Mathew Turner authored a pamphlet in response to Joseph Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.
"[155] The philosopher David Hume developed a skeptical epistemology grounded in empiricism, and Immanuel Kant's philosophy has strongly questioned the very possibility of metaphysical knowledge.
Atheistic thought found recognition in a wide variety of other, broader philosophies, such as Marxism, logical positivism, existentialism, humanism and feminism,[160] and the general scientific movement.
[32][162] State atheism emerged in Eastern Europe and Asia, particularly in the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin,[163] and in Communist China under Mao Zedong.
[173][174] "New Atheism" is a movement among some early-21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.
[186] As of 2012[update], the top 10 surveyed countries with people who viewed themselves as "convinced atheists" were China (47%), Japan (31%), the Czech Republic (30%), France (29%), South Korea (15%), Germany (15%), Netherlands (14%), Austria (10%), Iceland (10%), Australia (10%), and Ireland (10%).
[209] Also, a study of religious college students found that they were more likely to perceive and interact with atheists negatively after considering their mortality, suggesting that these attitudes may be the result of death anxiety.
[211] One hypothesis is that the negative relationship between IQ and religiosity is mediated by individual differences in nonconformity; in many countries, religious belief is a conformist choice, and there is evidence that more intelligent people are less likely to conform.
[211] In a 2017 study, it was shown that compared to religious individuals, atheists have higher reasoning capacities and this difference seemed to be unrelated to sociodemographic factors such as age, education and country of origin.
Explicit strong/positive atheists (in purple on the right ) assert that "at least one deity exists" is a false statement.
Explicit weak/negative atheists (in blue on the right ) reject or eschew belief that any deities exist without asserting that "at least one deity exists" is a false statement.
Implicit weak/negative atheists (in blue on the left ) would include people (such as young children and some agnostics) who do not believe in a deity but have not explicitly rejected such belief.
