Home » Mind & Soul » Atheism » The weak and the strong

The weak and the strong

© Francois Tremblay

Greetings and welcome to the first Atheism article on Suite 101. Perhaps you are an atheist, an agnostic, a religionist, or just somebody looking around for more information. That's allright, there's room for everyone !

To introduce this column, I'd like to start with the basics, so that people unfamiliar with the domain may understand the fundamental concepts.

First of all, what is atheism ? There is a lot on confusion on even this basic word. Some people think that atheism is a rejection of gods (or even their particular god), some others that atheism is a form of belief. In fact, atheism is commonly defined as disbelief in the existence of gods.

Something that seems difficult to understand for many people is that disbelief is the contrary of belief. In short, disbelief is the fact that someone does not believe (absence of belief) in something. It is not equal to believing in non-existence. Someone who disbelieves in gods may possibly still believe that gods may exist - he just does not believe they really do. He would still be called an atheist.

Which brings me to the distinction strong/weak-atheism, sometimes called explicit/implicit atheism (although these terms also have another use, that I cover below). Weak-atheism is disbelief in gods, but strong-atheism adds something more : it is also a belief that gods do not exist. Another way of saying this is that a strong-atheist holds that there is no possibility that gods may exist : P(gods exist)=0. This is also my personal position.

There is another distinction that can be made about atheism : explicit and implicit atheism. The distinction here stems from the fact that we are all born atheist (without any belief in gods - indeed without any precise beliefs at all). Therefore we can say that a baby is implicitly an atheist, that is, without this belief in his mind but not conscious of this lack. Anyone else is explicitly atheist, that is, conscious of what he is not believing in.


So the particular area of religious belief that we are covering here can be represented as following :

implicit atheism -> agnostic atheism -> weak-atheism -> strong-atheism

But whatever they are, they all share one characteristic : disbelief in deities (and by extension, a majority of religions).



A question may arise here. Since atheism does not imply any beliefs or positive propositions, what is there to talk about ? Why is there a Suite 101 column on it at all ?

The copyright of the article The weak and the strong in Atheism is owned by Francois Tremblay. Permission to republish The weak and the strong in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.