What Is Antitheism?

What Is the Question?

Antitheism is not atheism. Atheism, in its philosophical sense, is the absence of belief in God, a stance on whether theism is true. Antitheism is a stance on whether religion is good, regardless of whether it is true, and the antitheist's answer is no. The antitheist holds that theistic religion, on balance, does more harm than good, and that the world would be better without it. The question is whether that empirical and historical claim is defensible, and how to weigh religion's evident harms against its evident goods.

The IEP article on atheism treats antitheism as a subcategory of atheism in the broad sense, since the antitheist typically does not believe in God. But the two stances are separable: a person can be an atheist who thinks religion has been a net good for human flourishing, and a person can, in principle, be a theist who thinks religion does more harm than good, though the latter combination is rare. The philosophical work is to keep the truth-question and the value-question distinct.

Historical Background

Antitheism has a long pedigree. The ancient Greek poet Diagoras of Melos mocked the Eleusinian mysteries and was exiled for impiety. The Roman poet Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, argued that fear of the gods and of death was the source of human misery, and that the philosophical understanding of nature would free us from that fear. The Enlightenment sharpened the critique: Voltaire's "écrasez l'infâme" called for the crushing of the church as a corrupting political power, and the French philosophes, including Diderot and Holbach, treated religion as a tool of priestcraft and tyranny.

The nineteenth century gave antitheism its philosophical edge. Feuerbach argued that God is a projection of human nature, and that religion alienates human beings from their own best qualities. Marx called religion the opium of the people, a painkiller that dulled the suffering caused by economic exploitation and so delayed its cure. Nietzsche announced the death of God and warned that the collapse of theistic metaphysics would leave a moral vacuum that humanity must fill, by revaluing all values. Each of these thinkers was, in a distinct way, antitheist: they held that religion was not just false but harmful, a power that stood in the way of human flourishing.

The twentieth century brought the New Atheism, which carried the antitheist banner into the public square. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins argued that religion's harms, from religiously motivated violence to the indoctrination of children, were systemic and large. Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great assembled the historical indictment. The New Atheists did not invent antitheism, but they gave it a popular platform and a combative tone that defined the movement for a decade.

The Antitheist Argument

The antitheist case rests on three claims. First, that theistic belief is false or at least unsupported, which is the atheist's case and the antitheist's presupposition. Second, that religion, as a social and psychological force, causes measurable harms. Third, that those harms outweigh whatever goods religion produces, so that the world would be better without it.

The harms the antitheist cites are familiar. Religious certainty has licensed wars, inquisitions, persecutions, and witch hunts. Religion has obstructed scientific inquiry, from the trial of Galileo to contemporary resistance to evolution and stem cell research. Religion has distorted sexuality, education, and gender relations, and has lent divine authority to oppressive social arrangements. Religion substitutes authority for inquiry, faith for evidence, and obedience for responsibility, and so deforms the moral and intellectual life of believers. The combination, the antitheist says, is not a regrettable byproduct of religion but a natural consequence of taking religion seriously.

The third claim, that the harms outweigh the goods, is the load-bearing one, and it is the most contested. To make the case, the antitheist must reckon with what William James called the "fruits" of religion, the moral and psychological goods it has carried. James's Varieties of Religious Experience documented the saintly lives, the moral reforms, and the recovery from despair that religious experience has produced. The antitheist must say either that these goods are smaller than they appear, or that they could be supplied without religion, or that they are outweighed by the harms.

The Philosophical Reply

The philosophical reply to antitheism comes in several forms. The first is the empirical challenge. The claim that religion's harms outweigh its goods is an empirical claim, and the empirical literature is mixed. Studies of religious participation show positive correlations with health, prosocial behavior, and life satisfaction in many populations, though the causal story is contested. Historical studies of religious violence show that religion is usually entangled with political and economic causes, and that purely religious wars are rarer than the antitheist suggests. The honest answer, the reply runs, is that we do not know the net balance, and the antitheist's confidence outruns the evidence.

The second reply is the conceptual one. Religion is not a single phenomenon, and the antitheist's sweeping indictment lumps together fundamentalism, mysticism, liberal theology, and folk religion. The philosophy of religion has shown that these forms of religion differ enormously in their epistemic posture, their moral psychology, and their social effects. To treat them as a single harmful force is to flatten the phenomenon and to give believing readers the experience of being misunderstood. The reply recalls James's distinction between healthy-minded and sickly religion, and the long history of religious self-criticism, from the prophets through Kierkegaard, that has named religion's harms from within.

The third reply is the genealogical one. Antitheism, especially in its New Atheist form, depends on a story about how the secular age came to be, in which science simply displaced religion. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor have argued that the story is more complicated, and that the secular age is itself a fragile achievement that draws on religious sources it does not always recognize. The antitheist who treats religion as a pure evil may be cutting off the roots of the moral commitments, including the commitment to honest inquiry, that antitheism itself depends on.

Antitheism and Faith

The antitheist's relation to faith is distinctive. The antitheist does not merely deny that faith is rational; the antitheist holds that faith is positively damaging, because it insulates belief from criticism and so licenses whatever the believer takes God to command. The reply is that not all faith is fideism, and that the great religious traditions have developed sophisticated accounts of the relation of faith and reason, from Augustine and Aquinas through the modern theology of Karl Barth. The antitheist's "faith as irrational" is often a strawman, the reply runs, and the serious engagement would distinguish fideism from the reasoned faith of the tradition.

Contemporary Relevance

Antitheism remains a live option, especially among those who have been harmed by religion or who see its political power as a continuing threat. The political resurgence of religious nationalism in many parts of the world, and the ongoing violence done in religion's name, gives the antitheist case continuing force. But the cultural situation is more complicated than the New Atheist moment suggested. Religion has not withered; it has mutated, taking both healthy and sickly forms, and the philosophical task is to tell them apart, not to reject the whole.

The deeper lesson is that the value-question and the truth-question are separable, and that an honest antitheism must do the empirical and historical work that the question demands. The sweeping indictment is rhetorically effective but philosophically thin. The serious antitheist, like the serious atheist, is the one who has reckoned with the best that religion has done as well as the worst, and has still concluded that the balance is against. That position is harder to hold, and harder to argue, than the popular movement allowed.

Sources

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Atheism" — https://iep.utm.edu/atheism/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Philosophy of Religion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "William James" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Friedrich Nietzsche" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

Related Topics

• What Is Atheism? — the truth-question antitheism presupposes.
• What Is New Atheism? — the popular movement.
• Is Faith Rational? — a key contested question.
• What Is Religious Experience? — the goods religion has carried.
• Does God Exist? — the central question.
• Philosophy of God — the wider domain.