The Insurmountable Weakness of Explicit Atheism What exactly is an atheist? According to About atheism is often divided into two classes. The classes are weak atheism and strong atheism. Weak atheism, also known as implicit atheism, refers to “the absence of belief in any gods.” (About) Whereas, strong atheism, also known as explicit atheism, “goes one step further and involves denying the existence of at least one god, usually multiple gods, and sometimes the possible existence of any gods at all.” (About) So what exactly is this “insurmountable weakness” of explicit atheism? The definition given to a strong (or explicit) atheist says it all. Such an atheist actively denies the existence of one or more gods, or even the existence of any gods. The weakness is that in order for one to positively assert that a particular deity does not exist, that person must, in fact, be a deity themselves. That is, the atheist would have to know everything about the entire universe and anything beyond the universe. Otherwise, even if the atheist had absolute knowledge of 99.99% of the universe and anything beyond the universe, they still might not find the deity who exists in the 0.01% of the universe and beyond that the atheist does not know. It is important to note at this point, that pointing out this weakness does not prove the existence of any deity. For, by the same logic above someone might assert that a flying spaghetti monster exists and that no one could deny such without being a deity. But, the purpose of pointing out this weakness is not to assert the existence of a deity, especially the God of the Bible, but rather to show that explicit atheism is a poor choice of belief systems. Such a system of belief relies on a “leap of faith” of which many Christians are accused of having. Instead, at best, an atheist can only assert that they do not believe in a particular deity (or deities) or that they believe the likelihood of such existence is small. In such a case, the atheist ceases being an atheist and instead becomes a skeptic or agnostic. But, what, one may ask, does all this mean? That is, why does it matter and what should one do about it? The answer is to give deeper consideration and study to the following questions: 1. Does God exist? 2. If so, who is He? 3. How can I know more about Him? Showing the weaknesses of explicit atheism (and in actuality implicit atheism also) does not prove the existence of the God of the Bible in which we, Christians, believe. However, it is a step in the right direction. For more consideration on the topic of God’s existence, please visit the Apologetics Press website.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 08:44:44 +0000
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