Theism and Atheism: Reasons for Belief and Disbelief

Author: Tom Metcalf
Category: Philosophy of Religion
Word count: 998

A common conception or idea of God is that of a powerful, knowledgeable, morally good creator of the physical universe.^[1] In contemporary philosophy, we say that atheists believe that this being does not exist and theists believe that this being does exist.^[2]

Many people have been interested in the question of whether theism or atheism (or something else)^[3] is true. To settle that question, philosophers offer evidence for or against the existence of God. But there are also important arguments that have to do with whether it might be beneficial in various ways to believe or disbelieve there’s a God.

This essay provides an overview of these various types of reasons for affirming theism or atheism.

1. A Brief History of the Theism-Atheism Debate

Philosophy of religion goes back to the ancient world.^[4] Several Medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers developed arguments for the existence of God.^[5] Many European philosophers in the “modern” period (roughly 1600–1800 CE)^[6] argued for the existence of God,^[7] although skeptics about religion were present.^[8] While arguments for atheism can be found as far back as the ancient world,^[9] the Twentieth Century saw much more argumentation for atheism than ever before.^[10] In the present day, about 67% of philosophers in the English-speaking world accept or lean toward atheism, but there are plenty of theist philosophers as well.^[11]

2. Evidence for Theism or Atheism

The most-discussed way to decide between theism and atheism is to look at what the evidence supports.

Many theists appeal to empirical observations of the natural world: they sometimes cite the existence of the universe itself,^[12] or of design-like features in the universe or in biological organisms,^[13] as evidence for the existence of God. Atheists often argue that there is a lot of seemingly undeserved suffering in the world: this is the basis of one popular version of the Problem of Evil.^[14]

Outside of observations of nature, other types of evidence may be available. Theists sometimes cite the existence of alleged miracles,^[15] or the reliability of a religious document such as the Bible,^[16] or widespread reports of religious experiences,^[17] or a strong intuition that God exists.^[18]

Theists sometimes also cite the alleged existence of objective facts about right and wrong,^[19] and they sometimes argue that reflection on the concept of God itself can show us that God exists. For example, if God is a perfect being, and nonexistence would be an imperfection, then God must exist.^[20] These would be a priori (non-empirically-based) arguments.^[21]

For atheism, one might cite the fact that many people seem to sincerely seek to experience God and never do, and argue that if God existed, God would likely ensure that some of these people find God.^[22] And some philosophers argue that common conceptions of God are self-contradictory, the way a square circle would be.^[23]

Last, some have argued that atheism should be the “default” position: justified until proven otherwise.^[24] If so, then perhaps atheism is justified simply if the evidence for theism is insufficient.

3. The Possible Benefits of Being a Theist or an Atheist

We can set aside the question of whether the evidence overall supports atheism or theism, and ask whether it’s a good idea (or whether it benefits you) to be an atheist or theist.^[25]

Blaise Pascal famously argued that it is very risky to be an atheist: if you believe in God and you’re correct, you go to Heaven; if you’re wrong, nothing happens when you die; if you disbelieve in God and you’re right, nothing happens when you die; but if you’re wrong, then you might go to Hell.^[26] Critics of this argument have pointed out that it doesn’t tell you which God to believe in.^[27] And, if you choose the wrong religion, you might secure no benefits after all (or even invite punishment for believing in the wrong god)!

Yet there might be other benefits to theism. Perhaps theists are often happier, or live longer lives, or are mentally or physically healthier, than atheists.^[28] Similarly, to some people, an atheistic worldview seems pointless, absurd, or depressing: they may think there’s no reason to get up in the morning if there’s no greater purpose, and if when people die they are just gone forever and ultimately forgotten.

In reply, some philosophers argue that it’s important to have justified beliefs (and avoid unjustified beliefs), even if those beliefs don’t make you happy.^[29] And many philosophers have also argued that atheists can reasonably believe that life is meaningful;^[30] some have even argued that atheists can believe that humans are immortal.^[31]

4. Theism, Atheism, and Morality

Perhaps theists can best explain why a person ought to be morally good: God wants them to be good, and maybe God will reward good people and punish evil people. As noted, another answer might be that God has created objective facts about right and wrong.

However, atheists obviously don’t think that morality comes from God. As a result, one might wonder whether atheists can be good people and whether they have any reason to follow the rules of morality.

Empirically, the evidence we have suggests that atheists do not generally behave morally worse than theists.^[32] But there may be a deeper worry here: that atheism still provides no reason to be morally good.^[33] In reply, some philosophers have argued that the alleged reason theism provides to be morally good—to please God, or to avoid God’s punishment—is selfish and so isn’t a moral reason anyway. Philosophers have also argued that ethics tend to depend on facts about happiness and suffering, benefit and harm, respect, consistency, consent, or moral virtue, and such facts are all arguably independent of whether God exists.^[34]

5. Conclusion

Some atheists and theists do not think much about whether their beliefs regarding God’s existence are true. But whether God exists might have deep and far-reaching implications for our everyday lives, and perhaps even our afterlives. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider the reasons for and against believing in God.

Notes

^[1] This definition arguably follows from St. Anselm of Canterbury’s (1926 [1077-78]) view of God as a being greater than which none can be imagined (Williams, 2021, § 3). Many later Christian philosophers largely agree with Anselm, and Anselm’s conception of God is a very popular conception in today’s philosophy of religion (Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, 2002; Almeida, 2013; Nagasawa, 2017). See The Concept of God: Divine Attributes by Bailie Peterson for elaboration on divine attributes.

^[2] This is standard in recent philosophy (see Atheism: Believing God Does Not Exist by Nathan Nobis for more discussion of the definition), although “atheism” has also been used to mean the denial of the dominant religious beliefs, or even to simply mean insufficient piety. See Draper (2021, § 1) on definitions. There is, however, an alternative definition, according to which atheists are people who do not believe that God exists (McCormick n.d.; Flew 1972). Yet this position, as well as the position of a kind of apathy about whether God exists, may be better-described as “non-theism” (see Bullivant & Lee 2016 for more on this term). We might also say that “agnostics” suspend judgment on the question (see Agnosticism about God’s Existence by Sylwia Wilczewska for discussion of agnosticism), and “skeptics” about a religion deny that we can be justified in believing some religion’s central claims. “Deists” are sometimes understood to adopt an alternative to these other positions: they believe in a creator being that doesn’t have the traditionally-believed characteristics of the God of the monotheistic religions.

^[3] See previous note.

^[4] Epicurus (341-271 BCE) (see O’Keefe n.d.: § 3.e), Plato (428-348 BCE), Aristotle (384-322 BCE), and the Stoics (see for example Baltzly 2021: § 3) all wrote about religion and theology. For the atheism-theism debate, perhaps the most-important entries from ancient philosophy are Plato’s Euthyphro and Aristotle’s Physics (VIII, 4-6) and Metaphysics (XII, 1-6).

^[5] Spade (2021: § 7) suggests that philosophy of religion may have been invented in the medieval period. Some of the most-important Christian figures in this period in philosophy of religion include St. Augustine, St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus (Spade 2021). As for Jewish, medieval philosophers, the most-important is Maimonides (see Seeskin 2021 for description). Two of the most-important Muslim figures are Al-Ghazâlî (see Griffel 2021 for description) and Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. “Averroes”) (see Ben Ahmed and Pasnau 2021 for description).

^[6] The “modern” period is normally understood to comprise the works of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes through Immanuel Kant (Skirry n.d.; Rohlf 2021; Aries and Watkins 2019).

^[7] Descartes (Nolan 2021; Hatfield 2021: sect. 3.2), Spinoza (Nadler 2021: sect 2.1), Leibniz (Look 2021: sect. 7.1; Murray and Greenberg 2021), Locke (book IV), Berkeley, and Kant provided arguments in defense of the existence of God, although they differed in their views of God’s nature and about the natures of those proofs. See also Descartes’ Meditations 1-3 by Marc Bobro.

^[8] David Hume (see Morris and Brown 2021: sect. 8 for description) was clearly skeptical of “natural religion,” which is the attempt to prove the existence of God by looking at nature, such as through cosmological or design arguments. (See the entries on Cosmological Arguments for the Existence of God and Design Arguments for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf.)

^[9] The most famous ancient case for atheism is in Epicurus; see O’Keefe (n.d.), § 3.e.

^[10] See especially Russell (1927) Irvine (2021: sect. 6); Mackie (1955); Flew (1972), and Rowe (1979) for landmark arguments against theism.

^[11] Bourget and Chalmers (2014: 476). In the contemporary period, some of the most-cited defenders of atheism or skeptics of theism include Paul Draper, Michael Martin, Wes Morriston, Kai Nielsen, Graham Oppy, William Rowe, Quentin Smith, and Michael Tooley. Some of the most-cited contemporary defenders of theism include William Alston, William Lane Craig, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Alvin Plantinga, Eleanore Stump, Richard Swinburne, and Peter van Inwagen. See e.g. PhilPapers (n.d.) to search for these authors, and see also the other citations in this entry.

^[12] See Cosmological Arguments for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf.

^[13] See Design Arguments for the Existence of God and The Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God, by Thomas Metcalf. A similar argument is the Nomological Argument, according to which the existence of laws of nature or regularities is evidence for the existence of God (Hildebrand and Metcalf 2021).

^[14] One occasionally hears the claim that it’s impossible to prove a negative (see Hales (2005) for discussion), but this is false, which is obvious after a moment’s thought. If some hypothesis entails that p is true, but we observe that not-p is true, then we’ve falsified the hypothesis. For example, it is possible to prove that there are not 500 elephants in the room with you right now. On attempting to prove the nonexistence of God, see for example the The Problem of Evil by Thomas Metcalf.

^[15] See Can We Believe in Miracles? by Tomás Bogardus for a summary.

^[16] See e.g. Swinburne (2004, 273) on the Argument from History and McShane (2015) on prophecy.

^[17] See e.g. Webb (2021) for an overview. In general, we can follow Hume (2007 [1779]) in distinguishing “natural theology” (arguing for God based on nature) from “revealed theology” (arguing for God based on God’s revealing himself or itself to humanity, for example as in the Bible or miracles). For more on religious or mystical experiences, see also Philosophy of Mysticism: Do Mystical Experiences Justify Religious Beliefs?; William James on Mystical Experience; Richard Swinburne on Religious Experience; Rudolf Otto on “Numinous” Religious Experience; and Jean-Luc Marion on “Saturated Phenomena”: What Are Mind-blowing Experiences? by Matthew Sanderson.

^[18] Some authors have argued that we are justified in trusting any particular intuition until we have a good reason not to (Huemer 2001, ch. 5). See Swinburne (2004, ch. 13) for an application to theism itself.

^[19] See Evans (2021) for an overview. For more on these metaethical issues, see also Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory by Spencer Case, and Evans (2021, sect. 3), as well as Ethical Realism, or Moral Realism by Thomas Metcalf.

^[20] See the The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God by Andrew Chapman and Modal Ontological Arguments for the Existence of God by Thomas Metcalf for introductions to similar arguments.

^[21] Some philosophers have also argued that theists can know that God exists without having a clear argument for the existence of God. For elaboration, see “Properly Basic” Belief in God: Believing in God Without An Argument by Jamie B. Turner.

^[22] See Divine Hiddenness by David Bayless for an introduction to this argument.

^[23] See The Concept of God: Divine Attributes by Bailie Peterson. Divine attributes might be in conflict with other views important to theism; see e.g. Hunt and Zagzebski (2021) on foreknowledge and free will.

^[24] Flew (1972) and Gutting (2013) discuss this idea. See also Draper (2021, section 6.2) and McCormick (n.d., sect. 3.c).

^[25] See Jordan 2021 for an overview of pragmatic arguments for believing in God.

^[26] See Pascal’s Wager: A Pragmatic Argument for Belief in God by Liz Jackson. On the assumption that non-belief would be punished, see Hájek 2021 and Hell and Universalism: Could God Sentence Anyone to Eternal Punishment? by A. G. Holdier.

^[27] Hájek 2021, sect. 5.1, summarizes this problem.

^[28] See e.g. Mueller et al. (2001) and Koenig (2012) for discussions of this idea.

^[29] For more explanation, see “The Ethics of Belief”: Is it Wrong to Believe Without Sufficient Evidence? by Spencer Case.

^[30] See Matthew Pianalto, Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? for an introduction.

^[31] Huemer (2021) provides such a case that humans are immortal.

^[32] Sharif (2015) is an overview of research on the potential relations between religious belief and moral behavior.

^[33] See Rosati (2021) for an overview of moral motivation.

^[34] For the general idea of whether objective moral facts depend on God’s existence, see Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory by Spencer Case, Ethics and God: the Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Dilemma by Nathan Nobis, as well as Heathwood (2012), and Ethical Realism, or Moral Realism by Thomas Metcalf. For elaboration on these particular ethical theories, see the ethical theories under the category Ethics.

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Translation

Turkish

About the Author

Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus.  shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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