Relation to the world· Philosophy of religion
Atheism
Axis: Existence of God — Does God exist?
God does not exist: no divine reality, personal or impersonal, grounds the world, and the idea of God can be explained by human, psychological, or social causes. The meaning of life must be built without recourse to the divine.
Movements 4
Marxismexplicit
Marx's atheism does not stop at denying God: it asks why humans need one. Religion is neither a mere error nor a priestly imposture, but at once the expression of real distress and the protest against it, an imaginary consolation that relieves suffering while making it bearable, and so lasting. Hence the decisive shift: to criticize heaven is useless unless one criticizes earth, that is, the social relations that make religion necessary. Abolishing the illusion presupposes abolishing the conditions that call for it, which ranges Marxism on the side of atheist materialism.
Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, introduction (1844)
Show inferred positions (3)
Buddhisminferable
A being itself subject to becoming and suffering cannot be the source of salvation: this is why Buddhism is non-theist. Deities (devas) do populate the cosmology, but they are caught in the cycle of rebirth and hence powerless to liberate, and a creator God would not account for the suffering he would have brought into being. Against Brahmanical theism, liberation therefore depends on no grace but on one's own effort and understanding; this absence of a creator is held serenely, without militant polemic against belief.
Brahmajāla Sutta (the discourse on the all-embracing net) · Aggañña Sutta (the discourse on origins)
Utilitarianisminferable
The ground of morality is wholly secular: utility, not divine will, measures the good. , frankly irreligious, attacks the religiously rooted principle of asceticism, and keeps a cautious agnosticism. The movement shifts the source of moral obligation from heaven to earthly welfare, without erecting atheism into a dogma.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 2 · Mill, Three Essays on Religion
Cynicisminferable
The Cynics profess no theoretical atheism, but a practical irreligion: Diogenes mocks the rites, the mysteries and the oracles, and holds the city's religious beliefs and fears to be vain. Indifferent to the gods of cult, they reduce the divine to virtue and to nature, which sets them clearly apart from theism without making them militant atheists.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI
Philosophers 11
Beauvoirexplicit
Beauvoir is an atheist: raised in fervent Catholicism, she broke with faith in adolescence and never returned to it. Her existentialism starts from a world without God in which the human being, having no value guaranteed from above, must himself bring forth meaning and ground his morality on his freedom alone.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), the loss of faith · The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), a morality without God
Marxexplicit
Religion is a human production and an illusion, the opium of the people, at once a protest against real misery and a consolation that perpetuates it. The critique of religion, completed by and then traced by Marx to its social roots, is the presupposition of all critique: an avowed that would dispel heaven in order to transform earth.
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, introduction (1844)
Sartreexplicit
Sartre is resolutely atheist: his defines itself as the attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheist position. If God does not exist, there is no divine craftsman to have conceived an essence of man, and so no value inscribed in an intelligible heaven: everything must be invented. The absence of God is not lamented, it is the assumed starting point.
Existentialism Is a Humanism (atheistic existentialism) · Being and Nothingness, conclusion (the idea of God, in-itself-for-itself, is contradictory)
Nietzscheexplicit
Nietzsche does not prove God's non-existence: he observes that faith in the moral God has become untenable within our own culture, undermined by the very will to truth it had fostered, and that we have killed him. He draws the consequence we dare not look at: deprived of their ground, our highest values totter, this is nihilism, at once the danger and the chance of a creation of new values.
The Gay Science, §125 · The Antichrist
Schopenhauerexplicit
An explicit and argued atheism: a world whose very substance is suffering cannot be the work of a good God, and the will that grounds it is blind, without wisdom or aim. He salutes in a lofty religion without a God, and takes pantheism to be 'a polite way of dismissing God,' the undue deification of a wretched world.
Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II, 'On Religion: A Dialogue'
Camusexplicit
Camus resolutely thinks a world without God: presupposes precisely that no guarantees meaning. His atheism nevertheless stays free of militant , attentive to the scandal of evil more than to any metaphysical proof, hence a strong but not absolute score.
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) · The Plague (1947), Paneloux's sermon
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Benthaminferable
Bentham's morality is wholly secular: good and evil are settled by the sole calculus of pleasures and pains, with no recourse to a divine will. Under the pen name Philip Beauchamp he published a critique of the usefulness of natural religion, and his analysis of the theological principle of antipathy rejects religious sanction as a moral foundation. The leaning is markedly anti-religious and critical, without an explicitly systematized metaphysical atheism.
Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (as Philip Beauchamp) · An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (the theological principle reducible to the others)
Nāgārjunainferable
An heir of , Nāgārjuna acknowledges no creator God: his critique of any production by a cause with undercuts in advance the idea of a self-positing first principle. Liberation comes from no grace but from understanding . This is a non-theism, held without militant polemic against belief.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. I (the examination of conditions, against a self-sufficient cause)
Humeinferable
In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume dismantles the argument from design: the order of the world warrants no secure inference to an infinite, wise and good creator, above all given evil. Without professing firm atheism (he allows a vague cause or causes of order), he empties theism of any determinate content: the position leans clearly toward agnosticism and atheism.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (esp. parts V, VIII and XI) · The Natural History of Religion
Diogenes of Sinopeinferable
Diogenes professes no theoretical atheism but a practical irreligion: he mocks rites, mysteries and oracles, and holds the city's religious beliefs and fears to be vain. Seeing the votive offerings of shipwreck survivors, he remarked that they would be far more numerous if those who had perished had dedicated theirs too. Indifferent to the gods of cult, he reduces the divine to nature and to virtue, which sets him apart from theism without making him a militant atheist.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 24, 42 and 59
Millinferable
Raised without religion, Mill examines the question of God in terms of empirical proof: the argument from design makes at most probable a creator of limited power and goodness, never an omnipotent God compatible with the world's evil. This agnosticism, which allows only a faint hope of an afterlife, places him slightly on the side of unbelief.
Three Essays on Religion (posthumous, 1874), Theism
Characters 1
Meursaultexplicit
Meursault simply declares that he does not believe in God and holds the question to be unimportant. His whole life unfolds without the slightest religious reference, and he declines, steadily but without hostility, the consolations of faith that others try to impose on him.
Part II: his straightforward answer to those who urge him to believe · Part II, chapter 5: his steady refusal of religious consolation
Argument
- Consider God's attributes: power, knowledge, goodness, justice, raised to the infinite. They are, trait for trait, human qualities stripped of our limits: man contemplates himself in them, magnified.
- Now this movement of projection is fully explained by human causes: the fear of death, the desire that justice be done, the need for consolation and for a protecting father. No God is needed to understand why humans believe in God.
- A hypothesis that can be accounted for without supposing it true, and that answers our desires so exactly, loses its credit: what we would have invented from scratch would look precisely like this.
Therefore So God is not in heaven but in us: a projection of humanity, whose making the history of religions describes.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the reasoning
- The projection argument moves from the origin of the belief, our fears and desires, to the falsity of its object: God would not exist since we have human reasons to believe.
- But the origin of a belief and its truth are two distinct questions: desiring that something exist proves neither that it exists nor that it does not. To infer falsity from genesis is the genetic fallacy.
- The thirsty man who dreams of a spring is not wrong to believe water exists: that a belief meets a need makes it suspect, not false. One would still have to show, on other grounds, that nothing answers to it.
Therefore So the argument shows at best that the belief is humanly explicable, not that God does not exist: projection casts suspicion, it does not settle the matter.
See the pageTracing the fear to its causeRuleAttested · Lucretius
Neither the sun nor the daylight dispels the terror of the soul, but knowledge of nature.
For , the terrors that gnaw at the soul are not driven off by exhortation but by knowledge: they arise from false opinions about the nature of things. This rule takes up his method: instead of fighting the fear, you trace it back to the belief that feeds it, a world that punishes, a fate set against you, a sign sent to strike you, and you replace that belief with the natural explanation. For nothing comes from nothing and the gods take no part in our affairs: what happens has causes, not intentions. Today it is a way to defuse anxieties built on false beliefs, by returning them to what can be explained.
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- Descriptive QuestionWhy is there something rather than nothing?
The world exists without having to exist: does accounting for this contingency require a necessary being that depends on nothing, or is the world simply there, a brute fact with no explanation?
the world - DescriptiveA first cause, or an endless regress?
Must the series of causes have a first term that depends on nothing, and why would that term escape the question we put to everything else?
the series of causes - Descriptive Thought experimentDoes the world's order have an author?
Do the order, complexity, and fine tuning of the world call for an author, or can they arise from blind processes such as natural selection?
the order of the world - DescriptiveEvil against God
Would a God both all-powerful and good let the innocent suffer, or is the evil of the world compatible with his existence?
evil in the world - DescriptiveGod's silence
If God existed and loved us, would he let those who sincerely seek him search in vain, or is his silence one more sign against his existence?
God and those who seek him - DescriptiveGod, a projection of man?
If belief in God can be explained by human needs, fear, desire, social order, must we conclude that he does not exist, or does explaining why we believe say nothing about whether the belief is true?
belief in God - PrescriptiveEpistemicDoes belief require proof?
May one believe only on the strength of proof, or is faith a legitimate venture that need not justify itself before the tribunal of evidence?
to believe