 |
| 8-September-2026 |
- Overview from ancient Greece on
- Early modern Europe
- The Enlightenment and Victorian eras
- Late twentieth century philosophers
- International human rights law
- New Atheism meets the Internet
- EU Charter of Rights and Lisbon Treaty
- What do common or garden atheists believe?
- What do dictionaries say?
- Summary and conclusion
1. Overview from ancient Greece on
‘Atheism’ is a polysemous word, which means it has more than one meaning depending on context. Today, the three main usages are broadly (a) positively believing there are no gods, (b) passively not believing there are any gods, and (c) in human rights law, a philosophical belief or conviction protected under the right to freedom of religion or belief.
The history of the words ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’ is fascinating, and it shows how these and previous different meanings have evolved. As with many words, meanings can change over time. And dictionary definitions record actual usage of words, rather than assigning meanings to words.
The ancestor of our current word ‘atheism’ was the ancient Greek ‘atheos’. This combined the prefix a- (without) and the word theos (god), so it meant godless. It did not mean ‘without a belief in god’, but ‘without god’, in the sense of being ‘godforsaken’.
This later evolved into meaning people who denied the traditional gods, which included mostly people who did believe in gods but not in the official gods of the area or era. For example, early Pagans and Christians called each other atheists, because they didn’t believe in the right gods. In this sense, it was close to the word ‘heretic’.
The word ‘atheist’ did not evolve by adding the prefix a- to the word ‘theist’. In fact, it predates the word ‘theist’ by centuries. ‘Theist’ was first used in the 1600s during the Renaissance, and evolved independently for different reasons.
By the Enlightenment, some French materialists had started to self-identify as atheists, openly asserting their belief that there were no gods. During the Victorian era, TH Huxley coined ‘agnostic’ to describe not making claims of knowledge without adequate evidence.
In the late twentieth century, some philosophers developed the nuance of describing atheism as simply a lack of belief in gods. This created an interesting distinction between defining ‘atheists’ and defining ‘atheism’. It is easier to define an ‘atheist’ as a person who lacks a belief, while it is more abstract to define ‘atheism’ itself as merely a lack of something.
Meanwhile the UN, European Court of Human Rights, and European Union started to protect people with nonreligious beliefs, and explicitly confirmed that this includes atheists. This came under the right to freedom of religion or belief in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, European Convention on Human Rights, and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
Another shift emerged in the early 2000s as Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens inspired a new era of atheist activism. Some atheist activists used the non-belief meaning to shift the onus of proof onto theists in debates. Others, including Atheist Ireland, used a combination of the meanings: anything from positively believing there are no gods, to passively not believing there are any gods, plus the human rights law meaning of a protected belief or conviction.
This article covers all of these developments in more detail, along with how dictionaries have catalogued the evolving meanings, and how ordinary atheists, in the wild, describe their beliefs about gods. I’ve already addressed the origins of ‘atheos’ in ancient Greece, so let’s pick up our journey in early modern Europe.
2. Early modern Europe
The word atheist reappeared in early modern Europe around the time of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. In 1547, ‘Athée’ was used in French to mean ‘one who denies the existence of God and of any divinity’, and ‘athéiste’ soon followed with the same meaning.
Around 1563, Pierre Viret used the word ‘deiste’ to describe people who believed in a creator god but not in an intervening God. He did this to distinguish these people from Christians who believed in the Christian God, and atheists who denied the existence of any divinity.
The word ‘atheist’ was first used in English after 1566, taken from the French ‘athéiste’, and meaning people who denied God, or godless or impious people. Some Catholics called the Protestant Elizabethan government an ‘atheist regime’. Some Protestants called the Pope an ‘arch-atheist’.
The abstract noun ‘atheism’ soon followed. In 1587, an English translation of Philippe de Mornay’s ‘The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion’, used ‘Athisme’ and explained it as ‘utter godlessness’.
The words ‘theist’ and ‘theism’ emerged much later than ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’. ‘Theist’ is first recorded in English in 1662. Its early use was loose and could overlap with what later became ‘deism’ or natural religion.
The abstract noun ‘theism’ appeared in the 1670s. Ralph Cudworth wrote ‘The True Intellectual System of the Universe’ in 1678, where he contrasted theism with atheism. He described theists as people who believed that an eternally self-existent conscious being caused everything else. He also distinguished ‘mere theists’ from Christians who accepted revelation.
‘Theism’ initially meant broadly belief in a deity, particularly in contrast with atheism. Its meaning then became more specialised. By 1711, it was being used for belief in one God as opposed to polytheism, and by 1714, for belief in God as creator and continuing ruler of the universe, increasingly contrasted with deism.
Meanwhile, in 1705: ‘théiste’ was introduced in French, described as borrowed from English.
3. The Enlightenment and Victorian eras
By the Enlightenment era, a small number of French materialists started to self-identify as atheists. They included Denis Diderot, Baron Paul-Henri d’Holbach, Jacques-André Naigeon, Julian Offray de La Mettrie, and Claude Adrien Helvétius.
They typically used the word to describe positively believing there were no gods. In 1751, Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert’s ‘Encyclopédie’ defined atheism as ‘the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn’t constitute atheism.’
How did early English dictionaries define the word ‘atheist’? In 1755, Johnson used ‘one that denies the existence of God.’ In 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica used ‘a person who does not believe the existence of a Deity.’ In 1828, Webster used ‘one who disbelieves the existence of a God, or Supreme intelligent Being.’
In 1860, Chambers used ‘the doctrine of those who deny the existence of God.’ And in 1888, the OED used ‘One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God; historically also one who ‘practically denies’ God through conduct.’
During the Victorian era, there were some subtle evolutions. In the 1850s, Charles Bradlaugh said as an atheist he simply did not believe in gods. He meant that he could not deny something that did not have a meaningful definition, but he could deny the Christian God.
Then TH Huxley coined the word ‘agnostic’ in 1869. By this he did not mean simply ‘without knowledge’. He was capturing (broadly) the philosophical position of not making claims of knowledge without adequate evidence. This was effectively what Bradlaugh was conveying.
4. Late twentieth century philosophers
And so things broadly remained until the post-war decades, when two new parallel types of usage evolved. One came from philosophers, and the other from the European Court of Human Rights.
Anthony Flew wrote ‘The Presumption of Atheism’ in 1972. He proposed an unusual reinterpretation of the word ‘atheist’ as simply someone who is ‘not a theist’, rather than someone who asserts that God does not exist. He called the former a negative atheist and the latter a positive atheist. He then used ‘atheism’ for the corresponding positions.
Flew acknowledged that the ordinary meaning of the word ‘atheist’ was someone who asserts that God does not exist, and that to use his meaning the word had to be construed unusually.
George Smith then wrote ‘Atheism: The Case Against God’ in 1974. Unlike Flew, he started with the word ‘atheism’, which he defined as ‘the absence of theistic belief’, which was a very abstract concept. He then defined an ‘atheist’ as anyone who lacks such belief.
He divided atheism into implicit atheism, where the belief is absent without conscious rejection, and explicit atheism, where it is absent because theism has been consciously rejected. He supported this by reverse-engineering the etymology of the word as ‘a-theism = without theism’.
In 1990, Michael Martin developed this distinction systematically in ‘Atheism: A Philosophical Justification’. Like Flew, he started with ‘atheist’ meaning somebody without belief in any god. He then described ‘atheism’ as a ‘negative view, characterised by the absence of belief’. He contrasted this negative atheism with positive atheism, which meant the belief there are no gods. He also distinguished broad and narrow forms: any gods versus the specifically theistic God.
The broad ‘lack of belief’ works most naturally with the word ‘atheist’. We can straightforwardly describe a person as lacking a belief. Applying the same definition to ‘atheism’ requires an extra step. To make sense, it should really be something like ‘a view characterised by the absence of a belief’ rather than simply ‘the absence of a belief.’
5. International human rights law
Also during the late twentieth century, international human rights law was developing under the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Human Rights. These were a response to the atrocities of the Second World War.
Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 protected ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’. This included freedom to change one’s ‘religion or belief’. This became treaty law in 1966 with Article 18 of the ICCPR. These treaties are overseen by various UN committees.
Article 9 of the European Convention in 1950 gave the same protection as Article 18 of the UDHR. Protocol No. 1 of the European Convention in 1952 also required states in education to respect parents’ ‘religious and philosophical convictions’. This Convention is overseen by the European Court of Human Rights.
Both the UN and Council of Europe gradually developed protection of nonreligious beliefs. In 1960, UN Special Rapporteur Arcot Krishnaswami wrote that ‘religion or belief’ should include ‘agnosticism, free thought, atheism, and rationalism’. And in Arrowsmith v UK in 1978, the predecessor to the European Court of Human Rights accepted pacifism as a protected belief under Article 9.
This developed further in the early eighties. In Hartikainen v Finland in 1981, the UN Human Rights Committee protected school parents ‘who do not believe in any religion’. And in Campbell and Cosans v UK in 1982, about corporal punishment, the European Court set the legal threshold for philosophical beliefs or convictions. They must attain a certain level of ‘cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance’.
Both institutions explicitly protected atheists in 1993. The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 22 stated explicitly: “Article 18 protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, and the European Court explicitly said Article 9 protects atheists. In Kokkinakis v Greece, the Court said freedom of thought, conscience and religion is not only important to religious believers but is ‘also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics and the unconcerned.’
There were now three main usages for the same word: in philosophical terms, it could mean positively believing there are no gods, or passively not believing there are any gods. And in human rights law, atheists could qualify as having protected philosophical convictions.
6. New Atheists and the Internet
Another shift emerged in the early 2000s, as Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens inspired a new era of atheist activism. This was turbocharged by the emergence of the Internet as a source of information and a force for common endeavour.
The most prominent new atheists used a range of meanings for the word. Daniel Dennett saw atheism as non-belief. In ‘Breaking the Spell’, he said science can study religion as a natural phenomenon. Victor Stenger took a similar naturalistic approach in ‘God; the Failed Hypothesis.’
Sam Harris argued that the word should not exist. He did not even use the word in his breakthrough book ‘The End of Faith.’ At the other end of the scale, Christopher Hitchens, in ‘God is Not Great’, went further than atheism and said he was an anti-theist.
Richard Dawkins, in ‘The God Delusion’, created a seven-point scale of certainty covering strong theist, de-facto theist, weak theist, pure agnostic, weak atheist, de-facto atheist, and strong atheist. He said he was almost certain that God does not exist.
Some online atheist activists drew on only the Flew/Smith/Martin tradition, arguing that ‘atheism’ means only ‘without belief in gods’ and nothing else. This approach had the advantage that theists had the onus of proof for their claims in debates.
Other atheist activists, including Atheist Ireland, used a combination of the meanings: anything from actively believing there are no gods, to passively not believing there are gods, alongside the human rights law meaning which protects atheism as a philosophical belief or conviction.
Atheist Ireland promotes atheism as a more reliable worldview than theism, and lobbies politically for secularism as the basis of a just society. We also have special consultative status at the United Nations where we promote the rights of atheists and secularists.
7. EU Charter of Rights and Lisbon Treaty
Alongside the New Atheism activism, the European Union was strengthening protection for EU citizens with nonreligious beliefs, including atheists.
In 2000, the EU introduced its Charter of Fundamental Rights, which became law under the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. Article 10 of the Charter protects freedom of religion or belief, and Article 21 prohibits discrimination on grounds including religion or belief, within the scope of EU law.
Also in 2000, the EU introduced an Employment Equality Directive. This prohibits discrimination in employment and occupation on grounds including ‘religion or belief’. The Court of Justice of the EU has said this covers both religious and philosophical beliefs, which encompasses nonreligious beliefs or convictions such as atheism.
The Lisbon Treaty of 2009 also gives atheists a platform for our philosophical beliefs, through Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Under this, the EU respects the status of churches, religious associations, and philosophical and non-confessional organisations, and commits to open, transparent and regular dialogue with them. Under this process, Atheist Ireland has engaged in dialogue with the presidents of the EU and with the Irish government.
So we now have three sets of international institutions, the United Nations, the Council of Europe through the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Union, each of which protects or recognises nonreligious beliefs or convictions which include atheists.
8. What do common or garden atheists believe?
Most atheists simply live their lives as if there are no gods, and don’t engage in the ‘how-many-atheists-on-the-head-of-a-pin’ nuances described in this article.
I haven’t found much reliable research into whether atheists, more widely, make a big distinction between saying ‘I don’t believe in God’ and meaning ‘I believe there are no gods.’
The Pew US Religious Landscape Study of 2023–24, published in 2025, found that 92% of self-identified atheists said, when asked, they did not believe in God or a universal spirit. But when questioned further:
53% were absolutely certain God/universal spirit does not exist
31% were fairly certain
8% were not very/not at all certain
about 7% reported some belief in God or a universal spirit
So over half of self-identified atheists were absolutely certain that gods do not exist, and another three in ten were fairly certain. On the face of it, that’s a lot closer to ‘I believe gods do not exist’ than ‘I have an absence of a belief in the claim that gods exist’.
On the other end of the scale, 7% of self-identified atheists said they do believe in God or a universal spirit. This could reflect individual understandings of ‘God’, belief in an impersonal universal spirit, or simply the messiness of human self-identification.
This is of course just one survey, but it is a substantial one, and it supports the idea that atheists and our beliefs are pretty heterogenous.
9. What do dictionaries say?
So how do sources that record and analyse language use define atheist today? Here are some examples:Cambridge Dictionary (both): “Someone who does not believe in any god or gods, or who believes that no god or gods exist.”
- Oxford Learner (no gods): “the belief that God or gods do not exist.”
- Merriam-Webster (both): Atheist “A person who does not believe in the existence of God or any gods.” Atheism “A lack of belief or a strong disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods.”
- American Heritage (both): “Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.”
- Dictionary. com (both): “A person who does not believe in the existence of a supreme being or beings”, also “a person who believes that there is no supreme being or beings.”
- Princeton WordNet (both): An atheist is “someone who denies the existence of god”; atheism includes both “the doctrine or belief that there is no God” and “a lack of belief”.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (both and more): “The word ‘atheism’ is polysemous—it has multiple related meanings.”
- Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (no gods): “Atheism is the view that there is no God.”
- Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (both): “Atheism [is] the view that there are no gods. A widely used sense denotes merely not believing in god and is consistent with agnosticism. A stricter sense denotes a belief that there is no god; this use has become standard.”
- Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy by William Rowe (who was an atheist) (no gods): “the position that affirms the nonexistence of God.”
10. Summary and conclusion
The evolving meanings came from various motivations.
Early religious people wanted to shame nonconformists. Viret wanted to highlight the nuances of what became deism. Bradlaugh and Huxley wanted to highlight what can and cannot be known.
Flew wanted to allocate the burden of argument. Smith wanted a taxonomy of atheists. Martin wanted philosophical precision. International human rights law wanted to determine who receives protection from state interference.
Dennett, Stenger, Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins wanted to inspire a new generation to think critically and challenge the negative impacts of religion. The EU wanted to protect its nonreligious citizens. Dictionaries wanted to record actual English usage.
They were all answering different questions, so it is unsurprising that they used the same words in somewhat different ways.
To some extent, these semantic discussions are a distraction from the underlying issue that led to most of us becoming atheists: how we think and behave in relation to the question of whether a god exists and the impact of that on society.
That’s ultimately a question about reality, that has evidence for and against regardless of our internal mind processes and categorisations of words. We should be able to apply reason to that evidence and form beliefs proportionate to the best available evidence.
We’re each free to do that in our own way, and to put whatever labels we want on our own mind’s approach to that. But we can’t expect every other atheist to believe and act the same way we do.
No comments