There is no god (strong atheism)

Strong (or "positive") atheism affirms that there is no god, not merely a withholding of belief but the positive claim that deities do not exist. This goes beyond the broader sense of atheism as the simple absence of belief in gods: the strong atheist holds that the balance of reason and evidence warrants the conclusion that no god is real. Arguments advanced for the position include the absence of persuasive evidence for any deity, the problem of suffering and evil, and the success of natural explanation in accounting for the world without appeal to the supernatural.

Philosophically rigorous defences of strong atheism include J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism (1982), which argues systematically against the classical theistic proofs and for the logical force of the problem of evil, and, in more popular form, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), part of the early twenty-first-century New Atheism movement that also included Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, sometimes called the "Four Horsemen" after a filmed 2007 conversation among the four. New Atheist writers argued not merely that god-belief was false but that organised religion was on balance harmful to society, a stronger and more polemical claim than strict philosophical atheism requires, which drew criticism even from some atheist philosophers who considered the movement's rhetoric needlessly combative.

Strong atheism is distinguished from the weaker atheism that only lacks belief, and from agnosticism, which holds the question unresolved or unresolvable. It rests on a naturalist picture of reality, that the universe is a natural system with nothing beyond it, and on the conviction that belief should follow the evidence, where its proponents find the evidence for gods wanting. As a definite affirmation about what does not exist, it marks the most assertive end of the range of non-belief, and this entry presents it as the position its adherents hold.

The philosopher Antony Flew, in his influential 1972 essay "The Presumption of Atheism," helped formalise the modern distinction between weak (negative) and strong (positive) atheism, though Flew's own argument favoured the weaker position, that unbelief should be the rational default absent positive evidence for God. Flew himself became one of the more notable reversals in modern debate when, in 2004, after decades as one of the twentieth century's most prominent philosophical atheists, he announced he had come to accept the existence of a deistic god on the basis of arguments from the complexity of biological information and the fine-tuning of physical constants, a change some fellow atheists attributed to arguments made on his behalf by others, a dispute that remained unresolved at the time of his death in 2010.