Atheism

Atheism is the position that denies the existence of God or of any god, or the condition of living without belief in one; the English word derives from the Greek atheos, “without god,” and it is not a biblical word — Scripture addresses the denial of God without using that vocabulary. Its nearest terms are moral and religious rather than philosophical: the Hebrew nabal, rendered “fool” in the psalms, denotes a person dulled in understanding and sensibility rather than a technical disbeliever.

The line most often cited is Psalm 14:1, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt. They have done abominable deeds. There is no one who does good,” repeated almost verbatim at Psalm 53:1. In the psalm’s own framing the denial is voiced “in his heart” and is bound up with conduct — corruption and abominable deeds follow in the same verse — so the text presents it less as a neutral intellectual conclusion than as a stance that shapes, and is shaped by, how a person lives. The scope widens immediately to humanity generally (“There is no one who does good,” Psalm 14:1), which is how the passage is taken up later in the letter to the Romans.

Romans 1:19-20 makes the argument explicit: “that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them,” since “the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse.” The conclusion is forensic — denial is treated as culpable rather than merely mistaken. One way to read Job 12 alongside these texts is as a portrait of God’s prior claim on all life and thought: the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind are in his hand (Job 12:10), strength and wisdom are with him, and “the deceived and the deceiver are his” (Job 12:16); he uncovers deep things out of darkness (Job 12:22) while those who resist him “grope in the dark without light” (Job 12:25).

Christian traditions differ on how to construe this. Classically, Augustine and Calvin read the denial as the suppression of a knowledge of God that is never wholly lost, so that unbelief is both real and self-deceived; evidentialist and presuppositionalist apologetics both appeal to Romans 1, though they disagree sharply over what kind of argument it authorises. Other readers take Psalm 14:1 as describing practical atheism — living as though God were absent — rather than formal unbelief, and historians commonly note that a settled, philosophically argued atheism is a largely modern development in the West, which affects how the biblical polemic is applied. Pastoral traditions also differ over whether unbelief is best met by argument, by patience, or by prayer, and over whether doubt and denial should be treated as the same thing.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.