by Stephen Shea

Created on: April 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 19, 2007

Atheism can be negative or positive. Negative atheism is lack of belief in a deity. It would be easy for a person born into a religion to lose touch with faith and become a negative atheist. A negative atheist accepts the possibility of deities, but does not believe in any particular one.

By contrast, positive atheism is the view that there is no deity. Positive atheists believe that theists have got it all wrong. It does not have to be accompanied by hostility to people of faith, but it is a less accommodating position to hold.

The foundation of negative atheism is primarily doubt. Any person of faith may experience doubt in the truth of the claims of orthodoxy. This does not make a person an atheist, however. Technically, someone who loses faith is a heretic or apostate. A negative atheist goes a bit further, relinquishing belief in the orthodoxy as a whole, rather than in one or more parts.

For example, an apostate Catholic may believe that Jesus was only a human, rather than both a human and the son of God. This would generally be a view kept private, or a silent feeling of doubt about the truth of the Trinity. A negative atheist, on the other hand, would cease to identify as a Catholic because of doubt.

Positive atheists, therefore, do not have the tatters of religious faith to structure their world. They do not simply doubt the orthodoxy. They believe it is wrong. Positive atheism is, in a way, mirroring religious fundamentalism.

The positive atheist must base a cosmology in science, whether direct observation, reports observation, or a combination. False atheists would subscribe to a non-religious cosmology out of hope or need, but believe the same way a person of faith does - or close to it.

The true, positive atheist remains open to updates and revisions. The cosmology of a positive atheist is open to revision, contingent upon new studies, and on personal reflection.

All this boils down, in some way, to truth conditions. Humans in general are lax about them. Science, however, requires strict adherence to rules about how to produce truth. One of the challenging aspects of positive atheism, as of science, is the willingness to proceed on the best knowledge available, knowing full well that it may be rendered obsolete in an instant, as more information arrives.

How do you know anything is true? We cannot possibly make all the observations ourselves. Religious truth conditions are primarily scriptural - if a book says something is true, it must be true.

Scientists and positive atheists look to the scientific method to establish truth. Direct, reproducible observations are used to make theories, out of which propositions can be tested. As propositions fail tests, theories are revised. As propositions succeed in tests, theories are confirmed.

The practice of peer review among scientists helps establish trust in the information science provides. Positive atheists may not have the technical skills to check the truth claims of scientists, but instead rely on the practice of peer review - of scientists nullifying false theories and refining incomplete ones - to establish a contingent truth.

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