BEYOND ATHEISM

Abstract

This essay defends the idea of drawing a distinction between two modes of not being religious today: between what I will call atheist disbelief, on the one hand, and a-theist non-belief on the other. The former is the mode which is most often in the news. It is the position that pitches itself against religion. The latter is perhaps easily confused with agnosticism as that is popularly understood. Agnosticism in this sense is a position in which you declare yourself undecided or unsure: one is not sufficiently convinced that God does not exist to affirm a full-blooded atheism, but equally, spiritual conceptions, for example as determined by the Christian Churches, do not persuade you either. The situation as regards what I am calling a-theist non-belief is different again: it is not so much a ‘position’ at all as a non-religious ‘habitus’: the understanding of the world and the significance of your life that characterises the a-theist life is one in which religion and religious beliefs, for the most part, just do not figure or play a part. The a-theist does not have positional stance towards religious beliefs – namely a stance of disbelief – but rather, for the most part, simply has no thoughts about God. While not agnostic, the a-theist resembles the agnostic is this respect: conceptually speaking the a-theist is no closer to atheism than he or she is to religious faith. In my view, while the a-theist habitus is incredibly widespread today it is nevertheless typically overlooked in discussions of contemporary faith and atheism. Perhaps this is because it seems so comparatively unreflective and uncommitted. Nevertheless, I will champion it in this essay.