Enlightened Atheism: An Exercise In Worldview Assessment

Sketching what is, by my lights, the most plausible atheistic worldview — and why I reject it

When assessing competing worldviews, people tend to strawman those that they reject. For example, committed atheists often saddle theism with metaphysical and normative commitments that are not essential to theism (e.g., presupposing a simplistic model of God that no theist would endorse). Theists, in turn, often load atheism with metaphysical and epistemological commitments (e.g., reductive materialism) that are not essential to atheism. Worldviews are theories of reality, and we should evaluate their strongest versions to identify the most plausible, as truth-seeking demands. This post practices what I advocate: I am not an atheist and have never been inclined toward atheism. During years when I was strongly disinclined toward theism and religion, I held a deeply skeptical, dissatisfied agnosticism, not the robust rationalistic atheism common among 20th-century intellectuals. Here, I aim to sketch the most defensible form of atheism, which I call Enlightened Atheism for convenience. It is the version that seems most plausible to me, given my metaphysical, epistemological, and moral views.

I proceed as follows. First, I present the strongest atheistic case against theism. Second, I outline the positive commitments that, in my view, constitute the most plausible atheistic worldview. Third, I offer atheistic responses to some of the stronger theistic arguments against atheism. Finally, I explain why this atheistic worldview is not ultimately one I can endorse.

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1. For Atheism, Against Theism

My enlightened atheist’s case against theism rests on two primary considerations: (a) the complexity of theism and (b) the problem of evil.

Metaphysically, theistic worldviews are more complex than atheistic ones, as they include God among existent entities. Theoretically, theistic worldviews are also complex, as God is, by conception, deeply strange, unlike any entity encountered in ordinary experience. Though theists claim that positing God yields significant explanatory power, the enlightened atheist argues that this power is offset by the mysteries introduced by God’s existence.

The problem of evil is the best-known of these mysteries and provides positive reason to reject theism. The world does not appear to merely contain evil (i.e., bad features and states of affairs) but a vast quantity of seemingly pointless evil. Moreover, extreme suffering and violent death have occurred on Earth for millions of years, long before humans existed, as an integral part of the evolutionary process that produced biodiversity. While it is difficult to see why a perfect being would create and sustain a world of this sort, it is unsurprising that gratuitous evil exists if reality is fundamentally indifferent to the well-being of humans and other conscious creatures. The enlightened atheist contends that atheism’s explanatory advantage regarding evil outweighs theism’s explanatory power, which is itself very limited given the God concept’s strangeness and opacity.

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2. Filling Out the Atheist Worldview

Atheism alone is not a worldview — but everyone must adopt a worldview, and its inclusion or exclusion of God significantly shapes its content. What commitments, then, constitute the most plausible version of atheism, in my view?

I would not tie atheism to naturalism (the view that only entities and properties posited by the sciences exist), materialism (the view that only matter exists), or physicalism (the view that only entities and properties posited by physics exist). Still less would I link it to scientism, the prevalent view among some scientists that knowledge comes only through the scientific method. Many 20th-century atheists tied their atheism to these metaphysical commitments, which was a significant error in my view.

This error stems, first, from the reality of consciousness, the most obvious fact of existence, which resists characterization in natural, material, physical, or scientific terms, as commonly understood. Consciousness is an essentially first-person phenomenon, and attempts to account for it in third-person scientific terms often lead to its elimination from our ontology — the eliminativist position Galen Strawson calls the Great Silliness.¹ While Strawson advocates revising mistaken understandings of materialism, physicalism, and naturalism that classify consciousness as immaterial, non-physical, or non-natural, I would abandon these paradigms altogether. Freed from them, the atheist can endorse panpsychism, like Strawson² — or simply conceive of consciousness as non-natural, non-physical, and immaterial.

Decoupling atheism from naturalism, materialism, and physicalism also allows the atheist to affirm irreducibly normative reasons (i.e., reasons that do not reduce to natural entities), mathematical objects (e.g., numbers), and other abstracta. I consider the denial of irreducibly normative reasons untenable, as it would entail the non-existence of moral facts. Many 20th-century and contemporary atheists have been metaethical nihilists, denying objective moral truths, but this view is, in my view, as clearly false as the denial of consciousness. Torturing babies for fun is objectively wrong, regardless of anyone’s opinion, but accounting for such wrongness without appealing to non-natural, non-material, non-physical, or non-scientifically verifiable reasons is, I believe, impossible.

Finally, Enlightened Atheism would posit natural laws that are not mere regularities, possibly including teleological laws orienting natural reality toward specific ends. Such laws would render features like the emergence of life expected rather than surprising. In short, my preferred atheistic worldview is robustly non-naturalistic, denying no manifest datum of experience and including whatever is necessary to make sense of such data.

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3. Responding to Theistic Criticisms

As outlined in my post, “Fifteen Arguments for the Existence of God,” I believe there are fifteen compelling arguments for theism, and thus against atheism. My hypothetical atheist must respond to these. For brevity, I provide the strongest atheistic responses to the two classical arguments (the Ontological and Contingency Arguments) and a general response to the thirteen abductive arguments.

In response to the Ontological Argument, the enlightened atheist argues that neither “existence in reality” nor “necessary existence” are properties that can essentially inhere in a being’s essence. Moreover, no ontological argument is likely to persuade an informed atheist.

In response to the Contingency Argument, the atheist grants that reality has a necessary foundation but denies that it is God. A better candidate might be the universal wave function, as Alyssa Ney suggests,³ or the universe itself, as Spinoza held.

Regarding my thirteen abductive arguments, the atheist should concede that each lends some support to theism but argue that this support is weak—far too weak to overcome atheism’s high probability, given its simplicity and explanatory power regarding the world’s evil.

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4. Why I Reject Enlightened Atheism

The primary deficiency of the enlightened atheistic worldview is its lack of explanatory power, resulting in numerous brute facts. When asked why there is a world, consciousness, abstracta, fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, or an intelligible universe, the atheist must claim either (a) that it is metaphysically necessary or (b) that it is a brute contingency. This is intellectually unsatisfying, and we would not accept such answers in other contexts. The atheist thus becomes arbitrarily incurious when faced with questions that only reference to God can substantively address.

Moreover, the case for atheism in Section 1 is, by my lights, unpersuasive. Atheism’s simplicity comes at the cost of significant explanatory power. Simplicity favors one theory over another only if their explanatory power is roughly equal. Atheism’s explanatory power regarding evil is illusory, as it does not predict the conditions (e.g., a fine-tuned universe, consciousness, sentient beings) necessary for evil to exist, unlike theism. (For more on this, see my essay, “Pondering the Problem of Evil.”)

Theism, by contrast, yields many predictions, as we can confidently infer what a perfect being would do. As the fundamental necessity, God potentially grounds all contingent and less fundamental necessary entities. If, as some classical theists claim, God is perfectly simple, then reality itself is perfectly simple, with God as its explanation.

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Conclusion

I hope this exercise models how worldview assessment should be conducted. When evaluating worldviews, one should incorporate as much as possible of what one already finds plausible. For example, if you are a committed moral realist — as you should be — do not attribute metaethical nihilism to atheism, as it is not entailed by it.

I also hope to have shown that atheism has little to recommend it. Its only theoretical virtue — metaphysical simplicity — comes at the cost of limited explanatory power and numerous brute contingencies and necessities, unified by nothing. In contrast, theism posits God as the necessary ground of all. Perhaps reality is not fundamentally intelligible, but there is strong reason to doubt this, and thus to reject atheism, even in (what is by my lights) its most enlightened form.

1. See Galen Strawson, “The Consciousness Deniers,” The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/.

2. See Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” in Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium, ed. David Skrbina (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009), 33–57.

3. Alyssa Ney, 2021, The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).