On Defining Atheism: An Essay

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Pants please me greatly. Of all the things to wear around one’s legs, jeans deserve to be head of their tribe. The best things to come out of the Fall were the promise of Messiah Jesus and the prospect of jeans. God graced Adam and Eve with coverings, an act of sacrifice amidst their shame, and I am convinced it was God’s love demonstrated by Levi’s. Furthermore, in my dresser, I do not have jeans and shorts; I have pants and half-pants. There are no shorts; I do not believe in shorts. When people wear these so-called “shorts,” all I see are peons who are not wearing pants. As I see it, the Emperor’s new fashion finally caught on, and nobody is embarrassed. When friends ask me why I do not believe in shorts, I tend to give a few reasons, but the best polemic I give is this. They are a diabolic, deficient fashion statement of the half-chastity of humanity; they remind us why we were naked and ashamed, why we blushed in the bushes of Eden, not because of what they conceal but because of what they reveal.
  But what I have with respect to shorts—is it a-shortist? I clearly do not believe in half-hearted half-pants, or at least have no good reason to favor them over pants. One might even say I simply lack a belief in shorts. Given the properly satisfied conditions of my skeptical schema, I may beget a belief in them. Until then, I remain perfectly peaceful and rightfully reserved in my a-shortism.
  Much like this dreadful controversy between pants and half-pants runs another controversy I share amongst friends. This other controversy is the dizzying double Dutch of defining atheism. Defining atheism has become, it seems, as swift and impressive as sleight-of-hand. It leaves onlookers in a sort of silly state of whimsy. They elbow their neighbor eagerly asking how it was done and whether it can be done again and again.
  The unfortunate thing is that it has been done countless times, and it is still more unfortunate how simply it was done. Some may even say it is too simple, and that is why it is so easy to repeat. Atheism lately has been defined as simply a lack of belief in a thing called God. How they arrive at this conclusion is not difficult to understand. The term theism is understood as belief in a thing called God. The prefix a- negates the content of the term succeeding it. In our case, this term is theism. Therefore, we end up with atheism, a lack of belief in a thing called God. Simple magic explained simply.
  But this definition is a terrible tangle of terms, almost a flat out contradiction. To understand the deficiency of this definition of atheism, we must understand the purpose of definitions. Definitions, as the Latin suggests, set limits around a given word or phrase or idea. When we define a term, we say of the term, “This far, and no further.” In a sense, definitions keep words finite. Suppose you and I were perusing a field of grass in front of an average middle-class house. I take a large stick and begin to draw lines around you and myself. When I finish and wipe the sweat off my beaten brow, I gaze at you with smiling lips and eyes, announcing, “This is my front yard.” In doing so, I have set limits to what is and is not my front yard. Conveniently, I have drawn you, my neighbor, outside of my front lawn. That is precisely what makes you my neighbor: my front lawn is not your front lawn, though you are more than welcome to drop by and watch my crocuses bloom in the springtime.
  Such is the teleology of definitions to set limits, to say of a thing that it cannot extent beyond the boundaries which it was given. What of this notion of atheism, then? In defining atheism we have set out to establish its character, to say what it is, and in saying what it is, learn what it is not. However, if atheism is defined as a lack of belief in a thing called God, we have abandoned our initial task to define atheism. We have said what it is not, and in saying what it is not, have learned nothing about what it is. In essence, we have said nothing worth saying.
  The negation of theism, I should add, is not something easily dealt with. It can be understood in a couple of ways. A- could mean “no” or it could mean “not.” Both glosses suggest denial, but they suggest different kinds of denial. The former gloss could refer to an amount of something: there is no milk in the fridge, there is no cheese in the pantry, there are no females in my philosophy class. The latter gloss could refer to an absence in terms of existence or traceable presence: Susan was not at the party last night, I was not in the bank when it was robbed, Karen is not at Emily’s house. The difference is subtle, but it is in fact different. Attaching the prefix a- to theism leaves us with categories like these, only one category of which I believe is worthy to be called atheism. This category is the latter one.
  In saying the latter category is most fit for the term atheism, I am saying this. What is being negated in the term theism is not the belief in a thing called God but God Himself. Atheism, then, is actually something; it can finally be defined. If it is not the belief itself that is being negated but the object of this belief, and God is the object of this belief, then we are left with a functioning definition of atheism. Atheism is the belief that God does not exist. It is a proposition-affirming stance on the nature of God, namely that He does not exist. It becomes a proposition-denying stance on the nature of God when a theist asserts that God exists. Theism and atheism rely on propositions, and propositions can either be affirmed or denied. Whether God exists or not is the proposition to determine, not the unusual yet commonly accepted stance whether one has or has not a belief in God.
  The reader may have realized at this point that I have not bothered defining some terms. Among these terms lay God and belief. I have not thought it a very pressing matter to define these terms because, quite frankly, they are impractical. There are nuances I wished to avoid about each term, namely what kind of God, whether this God is like other gods, belief that or belief in, whether belief is the same thing as knowing. I have also avoided discussing agnosticism because it is quite different from atheism being an epistemological stance. But agnosticism, atheism, and theism, like any other belief, are indeed stances. This is precisely what I have been contesting in this essay: atheism is indeed a stance on the existence of God. If we must so put it, atheism is reactionary in the sense that denies what the theist affirms. This is not a lack of anything on the part of the atheist; it is really quite the opposite. The atheist has as much a claim to buttress as the theist, because he makes a claim about the existence of God.
  To define atheism as a lack of belief is no definition at all. It is like a waiter asking you what you would like to eat from the menu, and you reply, “Certainly not the smoked salmon!” It is a terribly impractical answer to begin with what is missing rather than what is already there. No more absurd would it be if a theist was simply one who lacked belief in the non-existence of God. The formula “lacks belief in X” is a faulty first principle; it would make for a decent derivative, but not a substantial starting point. No tailor said of their designs, “I began with what I did not want and ended where I always wanted to be.” He would be an impractical tailor. No atheist ought ever to say, “I began with what I did not have and discovered what I could have.” He would be a preposterous atheist.

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