Why do atheists these days have a habit of saying “I’m not claiming that God does not exist. I simply lack belief in God”?
And why is this such a big deal that Atheism in general is being redefined to mean this ‘lack of belief in God’ rather than ‘belief that no Gods exist’?

I think there are a couple of reasons.

Why do atheists often try to avoid making the claim “God does not exist” in debates?

Christian debaters can bring quite a large cumulative evidential case, ranging across many fields of study and allowing answers to many of the biggest possible questions people wonder about. These include arguments supporting the existence and nature of God based on:

• The sudden beginning of the universe from nothing.
• The strangely objective laws of reason and mathematics and the way the laws of nature can be consistently measured and predicted by them.
• The nature of human consciousness and ability to use said rationality to discover true ideas.
• Apparently objective moral values and duties requiring a basis; a law-giver or standard of justice.
• The information content of DNA and the unimaginably intricate working machinery of living cells and organisms.
• The fine tuning of the universe for order, complexity and life.
• Some specific examples from the Bible of writers obtaining detailed foreknowledge of unusual and externally verified later events centuries later.
• The surprisingly strong historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

…and others. The arguments are powerful enough to debate individually, but put together they very strongly support that the original cause of everything must be external to space/time/physics (aka ‘super-natural’, eternal etc), personal, intelligent, moral, immaterial, and have other characteristics consistent with the God presented in the Bible.
(note: I’m in the process of collecting the details of these and other arguments together for a post, but I’m not able to dedicate too much time to the site yet so it’ll be a while. Of course you can always check other places, eg ColdCaseChristianity.com)

If the atheist wants to actually make the case that gods do not exist, they can’t get too far without being asked:

1. What additional evidence they have to support for their claim (not ‘proof’, just evidence in support)
2. Also how they can explain the features of our universe under their own theory. And this is not easy. Atheists do not technically have to hold to naturalism (loosely the idea that anything that exists can be discovered by the scientific method applied to the natural world) but in western culture people identifying themselves by the label ‘atheist’ do tend to be naturalists. It’s tough for a naturalist to have well-evidenced explanations for non-physical phenomena like consciousness, justice, or spiritual beings, because we don’t have a good way to directly observe them using physical instruments.

Click here to expand: Further explanation and examples:

Even the popular and relatively physical possibility of ‘other universes’ outside our own is out of reach because we don’t have any measurement method to observe what is going on outside of our universe – or even know if there is an ‘outside’. Indirect observations of their alleged effects are possible (in fact, that is how the arguments for God’s existence work) but without being able to make direct measurements, naturalistic explanations typically either deny the phenomenon (eg morality, justice) or attribute it to poorly-understood physical causes even (eg conciousness).

• Atheists do hope and expect humanity to develop this ability with more progress and thus gain the capacity to explain more and more phenomena, and that’s fine even if it does leave them with some maybes for now. But until such evidence actually turns up, the naturalist’s difficulty in a debate is that their Christian opponent already has an answer for all those things ready to go and evidence to put forward in support of that explanation: The Christian debater is able to point out that since God is a personal being he is able to communicate and interact with his creation, so reasonable answers for all kinds of these tricky metaphysical questions can be given if it can be shown God has in fact communicated. They then move into a few of the clearest examples of predictive prophecy from the Bible, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, reliability of the text etc, to marshal evidence that God has in fact revealed himself as suggested.

• And if the atheist in question does hold to some form of supernatural reality (eg non-physical human conciousness or perhaps some moral standards that do not depend on any person’s opinion, like the sanctity of human life) they are going to have to explain the origins of those realities, and then hold up that explanation to the Christian one and compete on whose explanation fits all the facts best.

Atheists can, of course, dispute either the evidence or the arguments the Christian is bringing. This is much more comfortable territory for them, because they can stick to fields that naturalism has more to say about and go on the attack instead. And that’s an important part of debating, otherwise everyone could just make stuff up. But the problem is this, the Christian case is substantial enough that the atheist’s opponent can often say "Tell you what, even granting your objection, how do you explain all the other facts…even just the ones you don’t dispute? eg space and time having a beginning, objective rationality, your own conciousness and ability to rationally affirm or deny truth claims?" and it’s back to answering hard questions again.

Example – the atheist might try a popular naturalistic explanation for the origin, fine-tuning for life and unlikely ‘reasonableness’ of our own universe:

"Infinitely many universes may exist, each like a bubble ‘pinching off’ from a larger structure as part of a timeless ‘multiverse’. So many universes would then exist that every possible variation and combination of features does occur somewhere. And of course, we must be in one of those universes whose laws and features suit the existence of complex and rational life forms, else we couldn’t be here asking the question! So there is one possible explanation which doesn’t require God. We don’t need to invoke any deities, they are unnecessary.”

This is a good start for a God-free origins hypothesis, it explains many of the most obvious features of our universe, such as its beginning, fine-tuning for order, complexity and life, and even the rational nature of its physical laws. But when placing it for consideration alongside the case for God and compared directly, some questions can be asked by the Christian debater:

1. Have you noticed you are proposing a ‘super-natural’ eternal creator, just like I am? Sure, yours is impersonal, but the multiverse concept certainly takes you outside the realm that any ‘natural laws’ of our universe can explain, since you need those laws to vary across different universes in order to make our rational, ordered, moral universe seem less remarkable. So your proposed multiverse is ‘super-natural’, timeless, immaterial (as far as materials within our universe are concerned) and immensely powerful. You just think your ‘eternal, supernatural, immaterial first cause’ is impersonal. We’ll get back to that, but it’s helpful that you have conceded many of my other points…

2. Do you have any evidence to support your hypothesis that doesn’t also support mine? What testable predictions can you make from your multiverse hypothesis? In what ways does your idea explain the known features of our universe better than a supernatural, timeless, immaterial, personal, intelligent, rational, moral creator?

3. Your multiverse hypothesis requires the existence of not just a super-natural cause for our universe, but also an infinite number of other universes! That’s quite a large number of additional things you require to exist just in order to allow your supernatural creator to be impersonal and unguided rather than personal and deliberate. Without at least some supporting evidence, surely this ‘impersonal creator plus infinite other universes’ hypothesis has a date with occam’s razor? It’s not quite “Universes all the way down” but it’s close!

4. Now let’s focus on the evidence for the cause of our universe having the features of personhood, and so test whether this multiverse idea needs to have any other characteristics in common with the Biblical God….

This kind of difficulty is surprisingly even an issue for the very down-to-earth historical debate about the resurrection of Jesus, as although it’s pretty easy to just say you aren’t unconvinced (when was the last time you saw someone rise from the dead?), all attempts at actual alternative explanations have been woeful at explaining even the minimal historical facts agreed by virtually all scholars. Whereas the Christian explanation that it actually happened and the gospel writers are reliable witnesses actually marries up brilliantly with those historical facts and other lines of evidence.

Of course it is absolutely valid for the atheist to dispute that some of the features of the universe used as evidence by the Christian are not real phenomena, but illusions or fictions. This reduces the number of phenomena an atheistic explanation needs to fit and is definitely an option. However, sometimes the implications are often pretty hard to swallow:

• eg Atheists could and often do say that apparent objective moral truths are illusions only based on societal preferences, but the implications are rather concerning. "So you think slave trafficking/ is not really objectively wrong, it’s just a cultural idea or an illusion? Do you think we should try to stop slave traders then, or not, and why?" or "So it is actually immoral to advocate against a majority stance and try to change it? Should the abolitionists have been punished for going against the majority pro-slavery thinking of the time? If not, why not?” or "So when who individuals or groups have differing preferences or needs, who in practice gets to decide which should be prioritised? The most powerful? The most popular?" and many other questions. Having to face a sequence of these (especially in front of an audience!) is unpleasant since affirmative/negative/unsure/delayed responses may all be wildly unpopular or may allow the opponent the opportunity to point out a contradiction.

• eg naturalism currently has no reasonable way to explain human consciousness and free will as objective realities so atheists often deny these as subjective illusions, but that also causes massive problems if they want to affirm that their own human reasoning is able to perceive objective reality or find objective truth…which could rather deflate their persuasiveness to say the least!

It is still possible to discount some issues, but it’s not without problems, and as stated above

Being asked to suggest alternative explanations and then defend those claims is something that a wise atheist would rather avoid. They know they can hit harder and do much better when they can make accusations and criticisms of Christianity without being asked how they would explain the same facts.

So, if an atheist has to give their own expanation for things, they will have to make do with their own position containing lots of ‘maybes’, which is awkward if they also want to respond in a very sceptical manner to the various arguments and evidence the Christian is bringing!

This means best route for atheists has been to say ‘I’m not convinced by your case’ and keep being sceptical but try to avoid offering alternative explanations. This is very effective because there are some aspects of Christianity which are culturally unpopular so if the atheist can focus on the attack he can focus on these, pure scepticism actually works better the more confident you sound and the more quickly you dismiss the opponents’ arguments (which is rhetorically handy since confidence is also quite persuasive), and ‘not convinced’ is something completely internal and subjective that the atheist can say in front of almost ANY evidence without any possibility of being challenged on it!

The advantages of the ‘Lack of Belief in God’ move:

But what to do when challenged about refusing to offer any explanations to compete with their opponent’s? That’s where the ‘lack of belief’ redefinition comes in.

1. When asked how their worldview explains certain evidence, it’s really convenient for the atheist to be able to say "you don’t understand my perspective. I’m not sure. I’m not making the claim that God doesn’t exist. I just lack the belief that he does exist, and your so-called-reasoning hasn’t given me any good reason to believe differently”. And then they happily get back on with criticising and mocking the Christian worldview and acting like it’s unreasonable or irrational, whilst not having to face any critical examination themselves. "You’re making the claim. It’s up to you to convince me, and I’m just not convinced." This allows the atheist to claim that they don’t know any competing explanation for the evidence, without the normal cost of being forced to make that admission by their opponent. They can even make their admission of ignorance imply that it’s their opponent’s fault for not being convincing enough! So by saying ‘they simply lack belief in God’ the atheist can, for a bargain price, avoid having to offer a position or explanation of their own, avoid having any burden of proof at all, and make their opponent’s case look unconvincing! This is the main reason to redefine atheism as ‘a lack of belief in God(s)’ – it’s an impenetrable shield against the burden of proof.

2. The second advantage is pretty big, too. An atheist debater who goes the ‘lack of belief in God’ route even has the freedom to raise the ‘bar of scepticism’ to arbitrary heights (sufficient to appear unconvinced by pretty much any claim or evidence), and it won’t come back to bite them because they aren’t putting forward their own claims that might otherwise fail by the same unreachable standards.

If the atheist can pull off the ‘lack of belief’ move it pretty much allows them to be the person who can declare whether their opponent’s evidence or arguments are admissible for consideration (a bit like a judge in a court case). It enables them to identify themselves alongside the undecided audience member as an earnest truth seeker (jury). And since noone expects the debaters themselves to be impartial, it still enables the atheist to pretend they are just playing the debate role they have been given whilst mercilessly mocking their opponent for not ‘convincing them’ to change their mind (that’ll be executioner!). As debate tactics go, ‘lacktheism’ is a corker!

The problem with using ‘I simply lack belief in God’ in formal debate:

I think we all find it a little suspect, and here’s why:

• People who genuinely aren’t sure about the answer to a question – actual undecided people – don’t take part in regular public debates to defend one particular answer to that question! How is it these ‘undecided’ atheists are always in the ‘God does not exist’ chair?

• And a truly undecided person also wouldn’t mock the opposing viewpoint with as much enthusiasm as atheist debaters do.

Both of those activities require exactly what the ‘agnostic atheist’ claims they lack: confidence of the answer to the question!

Some people are genuinely undecided, and that’s fine. And some of those undecided people have heard this ‘atheists simply lack belief’ argument coming the other way and been convinced that being undecided means holding to atheism by default.

The question to ask:

Whether debating or just in a conversation, if an atheist is disagreeing with the Christian position (which is fine) but also claims that they simply lack belief and genuinely don’t know whether God exists, this implies something. It must mean they also aren’t convinced by arguments that God does not exist. If they ‘lean’ at all towards either the existence or nonexistence of God, they are making a claim about their assessment of the evidence and carry at least some burden of proof for that leaning. So if they want to claim they genuinely lack belief in God, that means they think the arguments both for and against the existence of God are equally compelling, or equally non-compelling.

So I think the best response to the ‘I simply lack belief in God’ move may be to act surprised and say:

"Really? You mean you can’t decide at all?
You mean to tell me you either think there’s no evidence against the existence of God, or perhaps you think there is equal evidence supporting and against God’s existence? If you are unsure, those are the only options, so which is it?

I’m not sure any professing atheist who will go for one of those, since being able to act all knowledgeable and evidence-based is what they like best! But that is what ‘lacking belief in God’ means! It means not knowing of any evidence either way, or thinking the evidence they have seen so far is balanced, is the truly undecided position. I feel like forcing a debate opponent to admit that would unmask the ‘lacktheist’ tactic and may force them to either state some evidence they think supports the idea that God does not exist (opening them up to cross examination and also comparison with the Christian case), or look more and more unreasonable for rejecting all the Christian evidence despite professing to have no evidence going the other way.

(Possible wiggle-out-of-it option? I guess the ‘atheist’ could profess some sort of intellectual or ‘moral’ position against the idea of being able to come to a conclusion at all (compulsory agnosticism), but then we can ask them how they came that view, and they do have a burden of proof for that. And I can ask if we should apply that same standard to other areas of life (like making purchasing decisions, or ) and if not, why not. In a formal debate the audience has come expecting us to answer the question in the debate title, so we can also ask them to defend their pre-agreed position regardless of their personal stance using the evidence they know, for the benefit of the audience. Then perhaps we could schedule another debate about this ‘compulsory agnosticism’ claim of theirs.)

If this was in a formal debate I would also like to ask how many debates they have participated in…and then how many of those debates they argued for the Christian point of view. I suspect the answer may be rather ‘unbalanced’ for someone who really claims to be undecided and not taking a position. It’s also worth pointing out they have agreed to formally take the opposing position, so for the benefit of our audience, so how about they present the evidence against the existence of God they know about and offer the best atheist arguments they know regardless of their personal position, and maybe the debate will help them decide personally too. If they seriously claim not to know any evidence against the existence of God, I’d probably ask whether they would like to sit in the ‘undecided’ seats with the rest of the audience and swap with someone who can think of some evidence against my position!

What about informal conversations?

If the atheist taking this position is just in conversation rather than formal debate, it’s more possible the person could be truly undecided. In that case asking whether this is due to not knowing any evidence either way or feeling it is balanced is still a helpful question. It may cause the person to re-evaluate their position, or it may help them realise they need to search for more information and weigh it up, rather than being convinced by atheists that they should think, speak and act like atheist ‘by default’.

I’d ask if they would they like me to present arguments and evidence in support of God/Christianity, then they could ask questions or raise objections, and perhaps we could meet again later after they’ve had a think or looked for some arguments and evidence against my position?

So what do you think? I’m interested if any atheists here agree or disagree with the ‘lack of belief’ rather than ‘belief no gods exist’ position, and especially whether there is an effective answer to the question I proposed in the section ‘the question to ask’.