Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticism of atheism is complicated by the fact that there exist multiple definitions and concepts of atheism (and little consensus among fellow atheists), including practical atheism, theoretical atheism, negative and positive atheism, implicit and explicit atheism, and strong and weak atheism, with critics not always specifying the subset of atheism being criticized.
Criticism includes arguments based on theistic positions, and arguments pertaining to morality or what are thought to be the effects of atheism on the individual.
Read more about Criticism Of Atheism: Definitions and Concepts of Atheism, Atheism and The Individual, Morality, Atheism As Faith, Catholic Perspective, Atheism and Politics, Atheism and Science, New Atheism
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism and/or atheism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)