Atheism IS a Belief, Rather Than a Lack Thereof. Just Not a Belief System.

I am of the school of thought that atheism is a belief. It is either a positive belief in a negative statement or a negative belief in a positive statement, which essentially amount to the same thing.

I believe that God does not exist.

or

I do not believe that God exists.

I am not one of those who claims that it is merely a lack of belief in a god. Many atheists claim this about themselves, and I think the reason why is because they think it protects them from theistic attacks on them that may seek to claim that they have a belief system. One can have a simple belief without it being a part of a larger philosophical system.

This is why organising atheists is like herding cats - atheism is merely a claim about the existence of God. It says nothing about morality, politics, science or anything else. You have to do a lot more philosophy to derive conclusions about those things.

Let me explain my position in referring to Ernest Nagel (reprinted in Critiques of God, edited by Peter A. Angeles, Prometheus Books, 1997):

I shall understand by "atheism" a critique and a denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism... atheism is not to be identified with sheer unbelief... Thus, a child who has received no religious instruction and has never heard about God, is not an atheist – for he is not denying any theistic claims. Similarly in the case of an adult who, if he has withdrawn from the faith of his father without reflection or because of frank indifference to any theological issue, is also not an atheist – for such an adult is not challenging theism and not professing any views on the subject.

This is often defined as strong or positive atheism - the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist. In coming on to sites and forums like this, most commentators are making that explicit affirmation.

However, many philosophers disagree, holding to a weak or negative definition of atheism. Goerge Smith in his 1979 Atheism: The Case Against God, p.14, stated:

The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist.

I disagree with this as mentioned above, but the point is clear – there is disagreement on the definition of atheism – it is not universal. If one would refuse to hold a belief on the proposition 'God exists', one would be adopting a position of a Pyrrhonian Skeptic. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) states,

To deny something is merely to assent to its negation. Since the Pyrrhonians took assent, i.e., the pro-attitude required for knowledge, to involve a kind of certainty that the matter had been finally and fully resolved, they did not assent to what they took to be non-evident propositions.... The Pyrrhonians would not assent to non-evident propositions.

This is the extreme agnostic position, if you will, whereby the Pyrrhonians would refuse to make a declaration either way on a truth proposition. Uber-skepticism, no less.

Why I think most atheists are not actually weak/negative atheists is that if you asked them "Do you believe in God?" they would answer a simple "No, I believe there is no god", which is to say they hold a belief. They do not say "I'm sorry, I cannot answer that question because I actually lack any belief in that area of philosophy". Getting on the internet and arguing to toss over the existence of God or gods reflects something more than a mere lack of a belief. It is a positive, affirmative set of actions that usually end up in significant arguments. It is rare, if ever, that atheists end up these arguments by declaring "Well, I cannot adhere to any affirmative claim; I cannot assent to any definite claim!" No, many atheists rather robustly declare that there is no god. So I think that for most atheists who I come across, positive atheism best describes their position.

Michael Martin, for example, would classify the agnostic as an atheist in point of fact that negative atheism is actually agnosticism (The Cambridge Companion to Atheism Glossary – negative atheism: absence of belief in any god or gods. More narrowly conceived, it is the absence of belief in the theistic God.) He sets out the following passage (p.1):

If you look up “atheism” in a dictionary, you will find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly, many people understand “atheism” in this way. Yet this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek “a” means “without” or “not,” and “theos” means “god.”1 From this standpoint, an atheist is someone without a belief in God; he or she need not be someone who believes that God does not exist.2 Still, there is a popular dictionary meaning of “atheism” according to which an atheist is not simply one who holds no belief in the existence of a God or gods but is one who believes that there is no God or gods. This dictionary use of the term should not be overlooked. To avoid confusion, let us call it positive atheism and let us call the type of atheism derived from the original Greek roots negative atheism.

Some eliminativists even declare that the terms should not exist (such as Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation). Many atheists dislike the positive atheism definition of atheism because, as mentioned earlier, as a “belief” (in a proposition) it gets hijacked by theists and turned into a belief system and then a religion. This should not be allowed as an intellectual move. A belief in the proposition that BMWs are better than Fords is not a belief system and not a religion. Just because the proposition is about God does not make it a religion.

Whether you adhere to strong or weak atheism is, in some sense, irrelevant. Neither are belief systems, and neither give any indication as to any other philosophy involved in a worldview. Atheists disagree WILDLY over morality, from moral nihilism through relativism to subjectivism, virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism, and so on: the disagreements are huge. To claim atheism is a religion is insane. Atheists believe totally different things about everything in the world, since they are not bound to believe anything by the proposition that God does not exist, accept propositions that might depend on that premise.