#-995 Non-Belief and Disbelief
April 17, 2018Dear Dr. Craig,
Thank you for the ongoing work you and your team do at Reasonable Faith. It has been deeply meaningful to me and has brought me closer to Christ in my search for truth.
I had a question regarding the distinction between nonbelief and disbelief.
I do align with The Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s definition of atheism as “a person who maintains that there is no God.” Along those lines, I understand the argument that someone who simply claims to have “no belief” in God is not actually taking a position, since holding a position seems to require affirming some belief about the matter.
However, I’m curious about how disbelief fits into this framework. Would someone who says they “disbelieve” be expressing a form of nonbelief, or are they instead making a positive claim—that the proposition “God exists” is false—and therefore taking on a burden of proof?
Related to this, is it possible for an atheist to lack belief in God while still holding a belief about God (for example, the belief that God does not exist)? If so, does that mean that lack of belief and belief are not strictly mutually exclusive?
Thank you again for your time and insight.
Warm regards,
Paul
Canada
Dr. craig’s response
A
It’s gratifying, Paul, that you have not been duped by secularists who claim that atheism is just the lack of a belief in God, thereby reducing atheism to a mere psychological state rather than a view that is true or false.
In the philosophical literature there are exactly three doxastic attitudes that a person might take toward a proposition p: belief, disbelief, and non-belief. If a person believes that p, then he will tend, upon consideration, to feel that it is the case that p, whereas if one disbelieves that p, then he will tend to feel that it is not the case that p. If someone is in a situation of nonbelief, then he is just neutral about p, neither believing it nor disbelieving it.
So the person who disbelieves that God exists is making a positive claim that God does not exist, which would require some sort of justification in order to be rational.
Now the atheist who disbelieves in God clearly lacks belief in God. But he also has a belief about God, namely, he believes that God does not exist. It might be less confusing to say that the atheist has a doxastic state (belief state) concerning God, namely, he believes that God does not exist.
If you’re interested in pursuing these matters further, I recommend my Systematic Philosophical Theology, vol. I: On Faith (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2025).
- William Lane Craig