In this episode Trent examines controversy surrounding the definition of atheism and shows why it is insufficient to define atheism merely as “lack of belief in God.”
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On today’s show, I want to talk about this question, “Are at least some atheists as dumb as rocks?” Now, there are smart atheists out there, Graham Oppy, Paul Draper, people I’ve interacted with at the Real Atheology channel, and smart non-theists, people like Joe Schmid, but are some atheists just as dumb as rocks?
Trent Horn:
Well, it depends. It depends on how you define atheism, because some people might get pretty mad at me. “Trent, that’s really uncharitable. How can you say that there are atheists out there who are as dumb as rocks? That’s really mean.”
Trent Horn:
Well, I saw a tweet several months ago from a prominent online atheist, Aron Ra, and he was responding to someone else who was tweeting, saying all the things that he disagreed with or he was sick of, and one of the things he was sick of was saying that rocks are atheists. Atheism cannot be defined simply by a lack of belief, and so Aron Ra simply tweets, “Rocks are atheist,” and so there’s a lot of people who define atheism in this way and say, “Well, atheism is a lack of belief,” so if something lacks a belief in God, then it is an atheist, or maybe you might describe it like Aron Ra does, and just say it is atheist as the adjective. If under this view, if rocks are dumb and rocks are atheist, then there are some atheists that are as dumb as rocks because they are rocks. Now, I know, I know, “Oh, Trent, this was clickbait to get us to watch.” I’m putting the Velveeta cheese over the broccoli to jump into some important philosophical terminology, but I do think it’s important because we need to be able to define our terms and to make sure that our positions are well-understood, and that we’re putting forward a position that makes sense, that’s consistent and has something frankly interesting to say, because one of my biggest criticisms of defining atheism as a lack of belief is that it’s just not very interesting.
Trent Horn:
That’s what I want to talk about today, “How do we define atheism?” If you define it as a lack of belief, if you say that babies or rocks are atheist, then some atheists are as dumb as rocks because rocks are atheist under this view, which I don’t think makes very much sense. Now, some people might push back and say, “Well, a rock is not dumb. A rock just lacks intelligence.” Now, how would you feel if I said, “Oh, I’m not saying that you’re dumb, I’m just saying that you lack intelligence”? I think the point I’m trying to make here is I don’t think it’s helpful to define atheism in this way as merely a lack of belief, and in fact, traditionally in the history of philosophy and among contemporary philosophers of religion, including leading atheists who defend atheism, they’ll say, “That’s not how you define atheism.”
Trent Horn:
“That’s not what atheism is.” Now, some people might be saying to me, “Trent, there’s actually some atheists. Why do you care? Just let us define ourselves however we want to.” Well, I think it’s important because for Christians and atheists to have good dialogue with each other, we need to come to the table with as few things between us.
Trent Horn:
I think sometimes if you define a position in a very poor way, we can’t get to the heart of the matter of what divides us, and what divides us is whether God exists, whether, “Does God exist or not?,” not the presence or absence of belief in God, but, “Does God exist or does God not exist?,” or, “Can we just not know either way?” That’s what I want to talk about today, so what I’m going to go through here is a few of these attitudes and phrases and slogans that I’ve come across online and offer you some of my thoughts. I’m going to share some things I’ve written down here actually, that I wanted to share for a magazine article at Catholic Answers Magazine Online, CAMO, as we like to call it, but I thought it’d be fun to share it with you first before I tweak it a little bit. Here’s the first attitude, atheism is not a belief, it’s just a lack of belief. That gets to the heart of the matter to say, “Look, as an atheist, I’m not saying that I believe something, I don’t have a belief system.”
Trent Horn:
Atheism is not a religion or a belief system anymore than non-stamp collecting is a hobby. Atheism is not a belief. It’s not a belief that God does not exist. It’s just the lack of belief in God.” What’s my problem with defining atheism that atheism is the lack of belief in God?
Trent Horn:
It’s boring. It’s boring. It doesn’t make a claim about the world. The philosophical claims, the isms that I want to talk about are those that make a claim about the world, the claim that could be true or false, so theism is not the … I wouldn’t even call it the belief that God exists.
Trent Horn:
I would say theism is the claim that God exists, and so people who are theists, they believe in God, but they believe in God because they would say that God exists, and I think most theists would say that they know God exists. It’s not just a matter of belief, it’s also knowledge. We’ll talk about the difference between belief and knowledge here shortly. It’s boring. Instead of making a claim about the world, like God does exist or God does not exist, or we don’t know if God exists, it’s just making a claim about a person’s interior psychological state, and it’s really boring and uninteresting because all it says about that psychological state is that it’s absent.
Trent Horn:
Well, as an atheist, I have a lack of belief in God. So what? Who cares? If you think about it, we lack an almost infinite number of beliefs. How many beliefs are there that you lack?
Trent Horn:
We think about all … Look my bookshelf behind me. Imagine you had all these encyclopedias of knowledge about the world. We probably lack belief in a lot of those things, right? There’s all kinds of things that we lack belief in, so the question is not, “Do you lack belief in X?”
Trent Horn:
The more relevant question is, “Why do you lack a belief in X?” That’s what I would ask an atheist. “Why do you lack a belief?,” because you could lack a belief in something for all kinds of reasons. Let me give you an example here. Let’s take a look at three beliefs.
Trent Horn:
Belief number one, there are an even number of stars in the observable universe, number two, there are an odd number of stars in the observable universe, and number three, there is a Santa Claus that delivers all of the presents on Christmas, so odd number of stars, even number of stars, Santa Claus exists. I would say nearly everybody watching this video lacks a belief in those three statements, but they lack a belief in those statements for different reasons. Take the number of stars in the universe. I bet you lack the belief that it’s odd or that it’s even probably because you’ve never thought about the question if the number of stars is odd or even, so you lack a belief because you never thought about it in the first place, and if you did think about it, like I’m getting you to think about it now, “Are the number of stars odd or even?,” you would say, “I have no idea,” and it’s interesting. It’s got to be one.
Trent Horn:
It’s either an odd number or an even number, but you would say, “Well, I don’t know.” You would be agnostic towards the question, so you lack a belief in those statements. One of which has to be true, by the way, either because you never thought about it or you did think about it and you have no way of being able to come to the right, figuring out which one’s the right answer. Now, what about number three, there is a Santa Claus who delivers all the Christmas presents? I’ve defined this very particularly as to what I mean by Santa Claus, because people say, “Well, I saw Santa Claus.”
Trent Horn:
“He’s at the mall.” No, I am talking about a being who has abilities beyond what we understand, who is the cause of all of the presents appearing under Christmas trees around the world. Here’s what’s interesting about this belief. For many people, they start life lacking a belief in Santa Claus when they’re a baby, then they acquire a belief in Santa Claus when they’re a little child. I didn’t do that.
Trent Horn:
My kids don’t do that, but for a lot of people, they do. They acquire a belief as a small child, then when they are an older child, preferably, not like an adult, but an older child, they lack belief in Santa Claus again, but for different reasons. When they were an infant, they lacked belief in Santa Claus. When they’re 13 years old, they lack belief again, but not for the same reason, and so if we had the same term, the same way of applying it to say that both those lack of belief are equivalent, then it would make rejection of the belief in Santa Claus kind of meaningless, and I think the same thing happens with God. If you say atheism that Graham Oppy, world-renowned philosopher has engaged William Lane Craig, others, very, very smart guy, that if he is an atheist and this glass is an atheist, because both lack a belief in God, your definition of atheist is, it’s just way too broad.
Trent Horn:
It’s got to focus on, “Why do you lack that belief?,” because the 13-year-old lacks a belief in Santa for a different reason than the infant. The infant doesn’t understand what Santa Claus, the concept even is. That’s why the infant lacks belief. The 13-year-old, hopefully by then, lacks belief in Santa because he or she believes that Santa Claus does not exist, and it’s not a mere lack of belief. I’ve spoken with some atheists online, and I ask them, “Which of these statements is true, God exists, Santa Claus exists, and, oh, I lack belief in Santa Claus, Santa Claus does not exist?” I asked people about it on Twitter a while back, and I had a fair number of atheists reply to that and say, “It’s definitely true they lack a belief in Santa,” and I said, “Well, does Santa Claus exist?”
Trent Horn:
“Is that true?” The only reply I got was … Now, some people said it’s false, but other people said there’s no good reason to believe in Santa. I said, “Well, that’s not what I asked. I said, is this statement true, Santa Claus exists?,” and they just said, “Well, no.”
Trent Horn:
“There’s no good reason.” They weren’t willing to say there is no Santa Claus, and I’m not sure why. I think it’s because they were operating from the principle that they could not make a definitive claim that something does not exist if there is even a scintilla, a little, non-negligible value that they could be wrong. They could not say they know there is no Santa Claus without universal knowledge, but that’s not how knowledge works. You can know things with certainty, even if you’re not absolutely certain.
Trent Horn:
You could rationally say that you know God does not exist. I would say you’re mistaken, but you could follow reason, and I think you’ll make some incorrect inferences along the way, but you wouldn’t be a raving lunatic if you said God does not exist, and conversely, I would say you would be correct and rational to say you know that God exists, even if you’re not absolutely certain of it, even if you can’t prove it to other people. That’s why when we define atheism, if people define atheism as a lack of belief that God exists, I’m going to say, “That’s uninteresting. Who cares?” My question to you is, “Why do you lack a belief?”
Trent Horn:
I think you could lack a belief in God for one of four reasons. Here’s the four I’ll lay out for you. Number one, you’re not capable of believing in God, number two, you’ve never thought about God, number three, you see no reason to believe God exists. You’re not saying there is no God, you’re just saying you have no reason to believe God exists, and number four, you have reasons to think there is no God, so you lack a belief in God because you say there is no God, or you just lack a belief because you’re saying, “Hey, maybe there’s a God, but I don’t think there’s good reasons,” so not capable, never thought about it, no reason to think God exists, or you see reasons to think that God does not exist, or that the proposition, God exists is false. What’s interesting is Graham Oppy wrote a book recently.
Trent Horn:
I think it was published in 2018, called Atheism: The Basics. Oppy defines atheism, and he defines it as the claim that God or gods do not exist, and so he talks about different types of people who might be atheists. People one and two that I’ve shared with you aren’t capable or have never thought about God, Oppy calls them innocents, okay? He just calls them … He uses the term innocents, and he says, “Examples of innocents include infants, those with advanced Alzheimer’s, adults who never acquire the concept of God and so forth. In all of these cases, there is failure to believe that there are gods but not atheism,” so atheism is not merely the absence of belief in God.
Trent Horn:
It is making the further claim, and I would say classically speaking, it is a claim about the world. It is a claim about the world and it is a claim about God, and it is the claim that God does not exist, okay? If you say God exists, you’re a theist. If you say God does not exist, you’re an atheist. If you say, “I don’t know if God exists or not,” then you’re an agnostic, so it’s making a particular claim about the world.
Trent Horn:
If you say, “Well, I don’t believe in God because I don’t see a good reason to believe God exists,” I would ask you, “Do you think there’s a good reason to say God does not exist?,” and if most atheists will say no by this kind of definition, then I would say, “Well, then you’re an agnostic,” so then, you would fall under reasons three or four. You either see no good reason to believe in God or you see good reasons to think there is no God, and so if that is your position, then I can ask, “Are you number three or four, and if so, why? What are your good reasons to deny God exists, or why should I believe that there are no good reasons to believe in God?” Now, when I bring this up and say that people who identify as number three, they lack a belief because they see no good reasons, that they’re not atheists, they’re agnostics, they’ll say that now, I’ve misunderstood the relationship between atheism and agnosticism, and they’ll say, “Well, no, no, no, I am an agnostic atheist.” What they’ll say is that you’re confusing knowledge with belief.
Trent Horn:
They’ll say that my definition of atheism is confusing knowledge and belief. They’ll say, “Look, an agnostic says he doesn’t know if God exists, an atheist says he does not believe God exists,” so an agnostic atheist doesn’t believe in God, but he’s not saying he knows there is no God. A gnostic atheist would say there is no God, an agnostic theist would be someone who believes in God, but doesn’t know if God exists, and then a gnostic theist would be somebody who not only believes in God, but knows that God exists. What do I think about this term? First, there’s kind of a parallel here.
Trent Horn:
If an atheist says there’s not enough evidence for him to be a gnostic atheist, but he can be an agnostic atheist, he’s justified to say, “Hey, look, I don’t believe in God, but I don’t know there is no God,” I would ask him, “Is it rational to be an agnostic theist?” I would ask these individuals, “Could you be someone who says, ‘Yeah, I believe God exists, but I don’t know that God exists. I just believe that God exists’?” I’d be interested to see their response because it seems like they would be parallel or symmetrical to each other of being warranted based on the evidence. You just lack or have belief, but you’re not claiming to know something, but really, I think the big problem with this argument is that it confuses knowledge and belief.
Trent Horn:
I think even implicitly, it treats knowledge and belief as if they were alternatives, but they’re not. Knowledge is traditionally understood as a subset of belief. What this would mean is that if you have knowledge, it is also a belief, but not all beliefs are knowledge. The classical definition of knowledge, it’s imperfect. There’s a huge debate about knowledge among philosophers.
Trent Horn:
There’s even a group of philosophers that study what knowledge is. They’re called epistemologists, so the study of knowledge, how we know things, and they’re even divided about what knowledge is, but a basic definition, as I said, it’s imperfect, but it’s a basic one, is justified true belief. That’s the difference between that knowledge is just a special kind of belief. It is a belief that is true and is justified. To give you an example, if I said to you right now it’s raining in Portland, okay, I’m just guessing.
Trent Horn:
Suppose I got my phone and I look on the weather app and it is raining. Did I know it was raining in Portland? Well, I have a true belief, but it’s not justified, so we would say it’s a lucky guess. It was not knowledge, but if I looked at the weather app first, saw that it’s raining in Portland and I said, “It’s raining in Portland,” and it turns out it is, then we could say that I knew it was raining in Portland. Notice here, by the way, and this comes up with, I think a lot of atheists who won’t make a definitive claim either that God does not exist or acknowledge that someone could hold that God does exist, they set the level of proof too high.
Trent Horn:
Like well, I can’t believe in something unless I have absolute certainty or scientifically demonstrable evidence, or he’s got to have super duper high evidence, but that’s just, we know lots of things and we don’t have evidence nearly that high. I mean, weather apps can be, they can be mistaken, but I still know what the weather is in a lot of places the vast majority of the time. What I find interesting here is that if you’re an agnostic atheist, okay, so if we’re talking about knowledge and belief, but the difference between knowledge and belief is justification, then it sounds like an agnostic atheist is someone who lacks belief in God, but does not have justification for that lack of belief. That’s what knowledge is, right? It’s justified true belief, so an agnostic atheist would lack justification for his lack of belief, but a gnostic atheist would have justification for his lack of belief. The justification is an argument saying that there is no God.
Trent Horn:
What I would say is that if you identify as an agnostic atheist, what’s wrong with what I’ve said, that atheism is lack of belief, and the difference between knowledge and belief is justification, so if you’re agnostic atheist, you don’t have knowledge, you just have lack of belief, that just means you don’t have justification for your lack of belief. If you’re an atheist, I would say, is that a good idea? Usually, atheists are very critical of Christians for believing things on faith, which they would define as a belief without evidence or belief without justification, so they’re very critical of faith as belief without justification, yet they seem to be okay with lack of belief without justification, if you’re an agnostic atheist. Now, there’s some atheists who say, “Trent, you’re totally misunderstanding it.” Hey, sometimes I don’t get everything right.
Trent Horn:
If you want to write it in the comments section below, by the way, I’d be happy to have a dialogue with an atheist who holds to this lack of belief view. Actually, it’d be fun to have a round table because my friends at Real Atheology, they would be on my side on this, so we could have a round table with Christians and atheists who disagree about how to define atheism. I think it doesn’t make sense, and I think when a lot of atheists try to define what they believe, they sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth when they say lack of belief, but they also have good reasons for their lack of belief, which is making a claim about the world. I’ll give an example. This is from Dan Barker’s book, Godless.
Trent Horn:
I’ve debated Dan twice. He’s a former minister. We’ve had some good debates with each other. This is what he writes on page 90 of his book, Godless. “Theists do not have a God. They have a belief.”
Trent Horn:
“Atheism is the lack of theism, the lack of belief in gods. I am an atheist because there is no reason to believe.” Now, look at this sentence because it waffles between three different kinds of atheism that I discussed earlier. Theists do not have a God. How does Dan know that? How could Dan know that there is no God who corresponds to my belief in Him, there’s no God that I actually prayed to?
Trent Horn:
How could Dan know that? Unless he believes the statement, God does not exist is true. Theists do not have a god, that would mean he’s claiming God does not exist. They have a belief, atheism is the lack of theism, the lack of belief in God, so we have a claim that God does not exist. It’s a lack of belief in God.
Trent Horn:
“I am an atheist because there is no reason to believe,” so not just we have God does not exist, lack of belief, and there are no good reasons to believe in God, which is something that some atheists would say, “But that’s traditionally just agnosticism.” If you say God could exist, I just don’t think there’s a good reason to believe in Him. What’s interesting is atheists, they’re agnostic. If you say, “I’m not saying there is no God, but there’s no good reason to believe in God,” that’s agnosticism. That’s not atheism.
Trent Horn:
Now, you are making a claim. Agnostics do make a claim if they’re making a big claim about the world, so if you identify as an atheist and you say there is no good reason to believe in God, you’re making a claim, and in making a claim, especially if you want to change somebody’s mind, I like the idea that the burden of proof falls on the person who is trying to change somebody else’s mind. If you’re a Christian trying to help an atheist believe in God, you’re the burden of proof. If you’re an atheist trying to help a Christian leave his faith, you have the burden of proof if you’re trying to change somebody’s mind, but if you’re making a claim about the world, then you have a burden of proof you have to carry. Saying there are no such things as X, that requires a burden of proof.
Trent Horn:
Now, sometimes when I pose that question, atheists will turn around to me and say, “Well, prove God exists. Show me the good reason, and I’ll retract my claim,” but this shifts the burden of proof. If you say there is no good reason to believe in God, you have the burden of proof to show that in some way to mount an argument. Now, how would you do that? Someone might say to me, “Well, fine, Trent.”
Trent Horn:
“Are you saying there’s no good reason to believe in Bigfoot? Prove that, Trent,” and I might say, “All right, it’ll take me a little while, but here is the purported evidence for Bigfoot. I think it’s called the Patterson-Gimlin film, that shows what looks like Bigfoot walking around. It’s probably a guy in a suit based on the movement of his gait. No bodies have been recovered. The tracks and things that seem to belong to Bigfoot are ambiguous.”
Trent Horn:
I would go through the evidence and show, “Here’s why it doesn’t work,” so there is no good reason to believe Bigfoot exists. Then, I might add onto that, “If there were these large hominids or large ape-like creatures, we would expect more individuals to sight them based on general zoological principles,” so yeah, I’m willing to do that with crypt … Then, those common examples are cryptics, Bigfoot, unicorns, dragons, fairies, these kinds of things. That’s one reply. Another reply is just, “Well, show me.”
Trent Horn:
“It’s your job. You show me.” No, it’s not, because I can invite another character into our dialogue to help me, and that would be one of Graham Oppy’s innocents, right? Think about someone who was never raised with the concept of God, and they just found out about God like five minutes ago, and they see there are theists who say God exists, atheists who say no good reason to believe in God. Theists, there is a good reason, atheists, no good reason, and they see a debate between them, so this little innocent …
Trent Horn:
Maybe not little, let’s say they’re 18 years old, they just found out about this, they go up to the atheist and say, “Hey, what do you think about God?” “Oh, there’s no good reason to believe in God.” “Oh, what’s your evidence for that claim?” The atheist can’t ask the innocent, “Well, you show the good reasons.” The innocent can say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m on the fence here.”
Trent Horn:
“I just found out about this like five minutes ago. These guys say there is a good reason, the theists. You say there is no good reason. I’ll go talk to them in a second, but why don’t you tell me your side, or I did talk to them. Here’s the reasons they gave me.”
Trent Horn:
“Why should I believe you, that these are not good reasons?” If you’re an atheist and you make a claim, there are no good reasons to believe in X, like the existence of God, or to believe in Christianity, whatever it may be, and especially if you’re trying to convince other people of that claim, then I would say that you have a burden of proof there. All right, here’s the last one. I sometimes hear this, atheism is atheos. The word atheism literally means without God, not there is no God.
Trent Horn:
The problem is you don’t define a term simply by its root parts, the etymology. The word, nice comes from the Latin word [foreign language 00:26:34], and that means ignorant, but nice is not synonymous with ignorant or stupid. I like how Paul Draper talks about this atheist, Paul Draper in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here’s what he says, “The A in atheism must be understood as negation instead of absence, as not instead of without. Therefore, in philosophy at least, atheism should be construed as the proposition that God does not exist, or more broadly, the proposition that there are no gods.”
Trent Horn:
In fact, the equivalent of this claim that atheism is the belief that there is no god or gods can be found, as I said in Graham Oppy’s book, Atheism: The Basics, and Julian Baggini, who is also an atheist in their book, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. I think that, once again, this is not nit-picky. For me, if you identify as an atheist, you either do so because you say God does not exist, and I think a lot of people see the burden of proof if you make a claim there is no God, but some people think you have no burden of proof if you’re only making the claim there’s no good reason to believe in God. Yeah, you do. I would ask, “How did you come to that belief?”
Trent Horn:
Maybe not even, “How do you know it’s true?,” but, “How did you come to the belief that there are no good reasons to believe in God?” I would hope that you looked at the reasons, and preferably the strongest ones and you found them lacking. That would be great. That would be my hope. If you’re an atheist, I would just say, “Look, I would hope that you have looked at the strongest reasons to believe in God.”
Trent Horn:
Sometimes I like to ask, “What is the best book on the existence of God you’ve ever read?” Somebody will say, “Well, the Bible.” Well, the Bible is not a book trying to prove God exists. It’s a book written to people who already believe in God, telling them about what God has done. A book defending the existence of God, you should look at, “What is the best evidence out there?”
Trent Horn:
“Well, Trent, are you going to look at the best books on the existence of fairies?” Yeah, I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, I think it’s called The Coming of the Fairies, and it’s a weird book. It talks a lot about the Cottingley fairies, these alleged photographs. I don’t buy it, but I’ve looked at the evidence, and I’ll especially tell you this. If there were a book published by Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, defending the claim that fairies exist, I would read it.
Trent Horn:
If it was published by a tenured professor, teaching at a major university like Oxford, yeah, I would read that and see what they had to say, and then evaluate the merits of the argument. I wouldn’t just immediately scoff, and that’s what I would hope atheists would do to check out some of the best books that are out there on that subject. There’s a wide variety you can look at. There’s higher level, there’s more systematic ones. Richard Swinburne’s Existence of God is a classic.
Trent Horn:
I really enjoyed Ed Feser’s book, Five Proofs for the Existence of God. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology is good. I wrote a book a while back, almost 10 years ago called Answering Atheism. I think it’s sufficient, but after doing this for 10 years, I think it’s time to do a little bit of an upgrade, so that might be coming soon, I’m hoping, but yeah, if you’re an atheist, I’d hope you would do that, and if you’re a Christian, you’re Christian and you’re discerning the truth, and if you feel called to do this, I would say it’s good to examine, “What are the best arguments that other worldviews put forward, and how would you show that those arguments don’t work?” I think it’s important for all of us to be intellectually honest in that regard.
Trent Horn:
Hope that was helpful for you all, and yeah, thank you, guys so much, but don’t forget, by the way, to subscribe to us. Click like on this, subscribe to the channel, and if you want access to things like my Catechism series, my New Testament study series, go to trenthornpodcast.com, trenthornpodcast.com to find all that great stuff. Thank you, guys, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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