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People with what would be considered religious or spiritual belief in a supernatural controlling power are defined by some as adherents to a religion; the argument that atheism is a religion has been described as a contradiction in terms. [1]
In The Gospel of Christian Atheism, he stated, "Every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event and that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity." [4]
Albert Einstein, 1921. Albert Einstein's religious views have been widely studied and often misunderstood. [1] Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God". [2] He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. [3]
Writers disagree on how best to define and classify atheism, [8] contesting what supernatural entities are considered gods, whether atheism is a philosophical position or merely the absence of one, and whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection; however, the norm is to define atheism in terms of an explicit stance against theism.
The concept of atheism re-emerged initially as a reaction to the intellectual and religious turmoil of the Age of Enlightenment and the Reformation, as a charge used by those who saw the denial of god and godlessness in the controversial positions being put forward by others.
C. S. Lewis suggests that all religions by definition involve faith, or a belief in concepts that cannot be proven or disproven by the sciences. Not all religious people subscribe to the idea that religion and science are mutually exclusive (non-overlapping magisteria) as do some atheists including Stephen Jay Gould. [138]
In the United States, the majority of the "Nones", those without a religious affiliation, have belief in a god or higher power, spiritual forces beyond the natural world, and souls. [48] Even 23% of self-identified atheists believe in a higher power, but not a god as described in the bible. [49]
Considered one of the founding fathers of existentialism, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a critic of Christian theology. [2] Arguing that morality itself is a human construct as opposed to the laws of nature, which are inherently morally neutral, Nietzsche divided morality into two types: slave morality and master morality. [ 3 ]