Belief and disbelief in God

The vocabulary of belief and disbelief in God is often used as though it named points along a single line running from certainty that God exists to certainty that God does not. The more useful analysis, now standard in philosophy of religion, separates two questions: what a person believes, and what a person claims to know.

Theism and atheism answer the first. Gnosticism and agnosticism, in this technical usage, answer the second. The two axes are independent, which is why the combinations are the interesting part: a person may be an agnostic theist, believing without claiming knowledge, or an agnostic atheist, not believing while making no claim to know there is nothing to believe in.

The terms carry histories that complicate them. "Atheist" was for most of its life an accusation rather than a self-description: it was levelled at Socrates, at early Christians who refused the civic gods, and generally at anyone whose theology was sufficiently unlike the accuser's. Self-described atheism becomes common in Europe only in the eighteenth century. "Agnostic" was coined by T. H. Huxley in 1869, and coined deliberately to name a principle, that one should not claim certainty where the evidence does not warrant it, rather than a doctrine about God; Huxley presented it as a method, not a creed.

"Atheism" is also defined differently by different parties, and a great deal of unproductive argument turns on this. On one definition it is the positive claim that there is no God, which carries a burden of proof. On another it is simply the absence of belief, which its holders argue carries none. Neither definition is incorrect, and disputes about who must prove what are frequently disputes about which definition is in play.

Agnostic theism is belief in God without the claim to know. It has a long religious pedigree rather than being a modern hedge: a great deal of theology insists that God exceeds human knowledge, and faith in most traditions is distinguished from certainty rather than identified with it. The believer who acknowledges doubt is a familiar rather than an anomalous figure.

Agnostic atheism is the absence of belief without the claim to know that there is no God. This is how a large proportion of modern unbelief describes itself when pressed, and it is the position that generates the recurring argument about where the burden of proof lies.

Ignosticism, also called theological noncognitivism, holds that the question is not well formed until "God" has been given a coherent definition, and that the competing definitions are so various that no single question is being asked at all. It has roots in logical positivism and in A. J. Ayer's verificationism, though it does not depend on them, and it is often expressed as the demand that one be told what is being asserted before being asked whether one believes it.

Apatheism is indifference to the question, the view that whether God exists makes no practical difference and does not warrant the attention. It is a stance rather than a doctrine, and survey researchers increasingly identify it as the actual position of much of the growing religiously unaffiliated population, whose members are more often uninterested than opposed.

Antitheism is active opposition to belief in God on the ground that religion is harmful. It is a normative position and is logically independent of atheism, since one can disbelieve without regarding belief as damaging; the "New Atheist" writing of the 2000s, and Christopher Hitchens in particular, is its best-known modern expression.

Nontheism covers religious and philosophical positions that operate without a creator god. Theravada Buddhism, Jainism, classical Samkhya, much of Confucianism, and modern religious naturalism and Unitarian Universalism all qualify. Their existence is the strongest available evidence that "religion" and "belief in God" are not the same category, a point that matters whenever general claims are made about religion as such, since a great many of them are in fact claims about theism.