Feser's Three Varieties of Atheism

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all.  It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.

2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations.  But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it.  Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism.  An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.


It seems to me that there is another division of atheists. There are those atheists, even if they think theism is irrational, they don't think we have a good reason to make a concerted effort to "win souls for atheism." I remember in the debates against Craig, both Douglas Jesseph and Keith Parsons said that they were, of course, not trying to convert anyone to atheism.

Now we have sites like this, which looks a heck of a lot like a Chick tract. And then there's this Loftus post.