And ye shall receive!

• Don’t ‘strong atheism’ and ‘atheism’ mean the same thing anyway?

No. Atheism (also called “weak atheism”) is a lack of belief in the existence of a god or gods. It is a personal proposition, that in our minds one particular belief does not exist.

Strong atheism is the position that we should affirm the non-existence of a god or gods. It is a position about reality, that there are no referents to “god” out there. Both therefore pertain to different aspects of the issue.

• Strong atheism posits certainty, but certainty is impossible.

Strong atheistic propositions do not imply certainty.

To understand this, we need to understand the difference between a claim and the confidence we put on that claim. We can make claims about a great number of things, but the nature of the claim itself does not indicate how confident we are in it.

To give a simple example, a fundamentalist Christian having a “crisis of faith” would maintain the claim that there is 100% chance that a god exists, while having less confidence in that proposition than he did before. His claim did not change: his confidence changed.

Science also affirms a great number of universals. For instance, Newton’s law of gravity is a universal. The attraction between two masses is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance: this equation is universal, it applies to all points of spacetime and all time (as long as the laws of physics exist, of course). Yet science is open to disproof or improvement of its laws and theories. And Newton’s law of gravity was indeed shown to be incomplete by Einstein’s General Relativity. So Newton’s law being universal did not make its confidence 100%: nothing in science, nor in rational thinking, is known with 100% confidence.

By the same token, a proposition such as “there is no god” may be universal, but it does not demand certainty. It demands that we prove it as knowledge, just like any other claim of knowledge.

• You can’t prove anything.

How do you define “prove”? The dictionary defines it as “To establish the truth or validity of by presentation of argument or evidence”. By that standard, a great number of scientific and technical propositions are proven. “There is no god” would be one of them.

If by “prove” you mean “establish the truth with 100% certainty”, then you’re asking for the impossible. We can’t do that, and neither can you. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything.

• Aren’t universal negatives impossible to prove?

It is usually assumed that universal negatives cannot be proven. Indeed that is the main complaint heard about strong atheism: that it cannot by definition be proven, because it is a universal negative. Usually this is associated with a pretense of omniscience. The argument is that to say that something does not exist, one needs basically to “look” everywhere, thus be omniscient.

But on the other hand, we know that no contradiction can exist, because of the laws of logic. But we can make up contradictory entities. For example, the expression “married bachelor”. A bachelor by definition cannot be married, therefore the expression is contradictory. When the term being used is contadictory, the universal negative is true automatically, like “There is no married bachelor”.

All that is needed to prove such a negative is to show that the concept in question is meaningless or contradictory. For example, an argument often used against the existence of hypothetical gods is the Argument from Evil. In this case, the evidence is that a god must be omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent, and the fact that evil exists. We do not need to know everything to know that evil exists and compare this with a god’s infinite attributes, and yet it is sufficient to argue strong atheism, because it shows that gods are incompatible with our universe.

Another means to prove a universal negative about the non-existence of X consists of finding a positive which opposes X. For instance, science disproved the existence of phlogiston by demonstrating the scientific fact that combustion is sparked by the existence of a substrate combined with oxygen, and therefore not by phlogiston.

It is therefore basically a fallacy to say that universal negatives cannot be proven. Indeed that is the main role of logic: proving universal negatives to remove all contradictions from thought. It would be surprising if universal negatives couldn’t be proven.

“There are actually two ways to prove the nonexistence of something. One way is to prove that it cannot exist because it leads to contradictions (e.g., square circles, married bachelors, etc.). The other way is, in the words of Keith Parsons, “by carefully looking and seeing.” This is how we can know that such things as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Abimonable Snowman, etc. do not exist.”

-Jeffery Jay Lowder, in “Is a Proof of the Nonexistence of a God Even Possible?”

In fact, the scientific method only admits for universal negatives – in science, you can only falsify something completely, not confirm it completely. Something is judged to be true because it stands to the test of falsifiability extensively enough to be unassailable. But failing one single test disqualifies a specific principle from being accepted.

• Isn’t agnosticism the default position?

No. Agnosticism cannot be the default position because it presumes that the word “god” is meaningful and coherent. Until a coherent meaning for “god” is presented, strong atheism will always be the default position. This is true for all concepts also.

• How could you ever address all possible conceptions of ‘god?’

Simple answer: we don’t have to, and don’t claim to.

Longer answer: In order for the issue to have any relevance at all, we have to circumscribe, even if it is meaningless, what the word “god” is supposed to refer to. Atheism and strong atheism refer to the word “god” just as much as theism does, so everyone must have a clear position on what he means when he says “I believe in gods”, “I do not believe in gods”, or “there is no god”. Most of us address a standard monotheistic conception which is composed of: