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Respondents to religious-belief polls may define "atheism" differently or draw different distinctions between atheism, non-religious beliefs, and non-theistic religious and spiritual beliefs. [180] A 2010 survey published in Encyclopædia Britannica found that the non-religious made up about 9.6% of the world's population, and atheists about 2.0%.
In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. [2] [3] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. [3] [4] Atheism is contrasted with theism, [5] [6] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists. [6] [7]
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]
Atheism is commonly understood as non-acceptance or outright rejection of theism in the broadest sense of the term (i.e., non-acceptance or rejection of belief in God or gods). [ 5 ] [ 6 ] Related (but separate) is the claim that the existence of any deity is unknown or unknowable; a stance known as agnosticism .
Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god. [ b ] In the 20th century, globalization contributed to the expansion of the term to refer to disbelief in all deities, though it remains common in Western society to describe atheism as ...
'I don't believe in God, I believe in science,' atheists often argue. But that doesn't mean their thinking is evidence-based.
Implicit atheism and explicit atheism are types of atheism. [1] In George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God, "implicit atheism" is defined as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it", while "explicit atheism" is "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it". [1]
Negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism, is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not necessarily explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism, also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that additionally asserts that no deities exist ...