Negative and Positive Atheism

Negative And Positive Atheism

(Sizes in the diagram are not meant to indicate relative sizes within a population.)

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Positive atheism (also called strong atheism and hard atheism) is the form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. Negative atheism (also called weak atheism and soft atheism) is any other type of atheism, wherein a person does not believe in the existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be none.

The terms negative atheism and positive atheism were used by Antony Flew in 1976, and appeared again in Michael Martin's writings in 1990. However, usage of the strong/weak terminology has grown since the mid-1990s on the Internet, particularly due to the newsgroup alt.atheism.

Read more about Negative And Positive Atheism:  Scope of Application, Alternate Meanings

Famous quotes containing the words negative, positive and/or atheism:

    “Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “The oaks, how subtle and marine!
    Bearded, and all the layered light
    Above them swims; and thus the scene,
    Recessed, awaits the positive night.”
    —Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)

    “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)