The Charge and Why It Sounds Plausible
The accusation arrives in several flavours, but the core claim is always the same: atheists, particularly the loud and published variety, are simply mirror-image fundamentalists. They have replaced God with science, replaced scripture with Dawkins, and replaced the preacher’s certainty with the blogger’s contempt. They are, the argument goes, just as dogmatic, just as closed-minded, and just as arrogant as the creationists they spend their evenings ridiculing. “Dawkins is the Falwell of atheism” is the sharpest version of this, a line that gets repeated in newspaper columns, undergraduate seminars, and the kind of dinner-party conversation where balance is mistaken for wisdom. The charge is superficially clever, and like all superficially clever arguments it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissal, because the serious answer is more damaging to it than the dismissal would be.
The plausibility of the charge rests on a pattern-match that looks convincing at low resolution. Both the religious fundamentalist and the outspoken atheist hold their views with apparent conviction. Both are willing to state, in public and at length, that the opposing position is wrong. Both attract followers, sell books, and generate controversy. If you squint hard enough and refuse to examine the content of either position, they do look symmetrical. The entire rhetorical move depends on maintaining that squint, because the moment you look at the actual structure of the two positions, the symmetry dissolves entirely.
This essay is the detailed answer to the charge, not the dismissive wave. We will examine what fundamentalism actually means as an intellectual posture, distinguish it carefully from the position most atheists actually hold, show where the burden of proof genuinely sits in these debates, and examine the Dawkins-Falwell comparison on its actual merits. Along the way we will take seriously the version of the objection that has some genuine force, because there is one, and conceding it clearly is the honest thing to do.
1. What Fundamentalism Actually Is
The word “fundamentalism” has a precise historical origin and a precise intellectual meaning, and the charge against atheism depends on blurring both. In its historical origin, fundamentalism refers to a late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant movement in the United States that arose explicitly in reaction to Darwinian evolution and higher biblical criticism. The movement took its name from a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915 called “The Fundamentals,” which asserted the inerrancy of scripture and the literal truth of doctrines including the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, and the substitutionary atonement. The defining feature was not mere conservatism or mere religiosity. The defining feature was that these beliefs were held as non-negotiable precisely because they were understood to be revealed truths immune to revision by ordinary evidential means.
The intellectual meaning of fundamentalism, which has since been extended beyond that Protestant context to describe analogous postures in other traditions, is the disposition to hold a set of core beliefs in a way that is structurally closed to counter-evidence. The fundamentalist does not merely believe strongly; the fundamentalist believes in a way that has been insulated from ordinary epistemic challenge. Evidence against the core belief is not permitted to function as evidence. It is reinterpreted, denied, or dismissed as a temptation or a deception before it can reach the point where it might actually require the belief to be revised. The belief is, to use the philosopher’s term, unfalsifiable by design. Not accidentally unfalsifiable because nobody has thought of the right test, but deliberately unfalsifiable because the believer has committed in advance to not letting any test count against it.
Bertrand Russell identified this structural feature with characteristic precision. “We may define ‘faith’ as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence,” he wrote. “Where there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith’. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.” Russell was identifying the epistemic structure of religious faith, not mocking the emotions themselves. The problem with faith, in this analysis, is not that it involves feeling strongly. The problem is that it treats the feeling of conviction as a substitute for the justification that conviction normally requires. Fundamentalism is faith in this sense carried to its logical extreme: the conviction becomes so identified with the believer’s identity and community that no external challenge can reach it at all.
The question we need to ask about atheism, then, is whether it shares this structural feature. Not whether atheists feel confident, not whether they argue loudly, not whether they are sometimes blunt about religious claims. The question is whether atheism, as a position, is held in a way that is closed to revision by evidence. The answer to that question is decisive, and we will arrive at it clearly.
2. Strong Atheism, Weak Atheism, and Where Most People Actually Stand
Before we can answer the question about evidence and revisability, we need to be clear about what atheism actually claims, because the charge of arrogance frequently runs together two quite different positions as though they were identical. The distinction between strong and weak atheism is not a piece of philosophical pedantry; it is essential to the whole argument, and ignoring it produces almost every misconception that the fundamentalism charge depends on.
Weak atheism, sometimes called negative atheism, is simply the absence of belief in gods. It is the position of someone who has encountered the various arguments for the existence of a deity and found none of them convincing. This person does not assert confidently that no god exists; they simply report that the arguments and evidence presented to them have not met the standard required for belief. This is worth dwelling on as a claim, because it is an extraordinarily modest one. To say “I do not find the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the argument from design, or the testimony of scripture convincing” is not to make a grand metaphysical assertion. It is to report the outcome of a rational assessment. The juror who finds a case for the prosecution unpersuasive has not thereby claimed that the defendant is definitely innocent; they have simply assessed the evidence presented and found it insufficient to justify a verdict of guilty.
Strong atheism, or positive atheism, goes further and asserts that no gods exist. This is a stronger claim, and it is the one that requires more careful defence. Most sophisticated atheists do not hold this position in its strongest possible form, though they are routinely accused of doing so. What they typically hold is something more like the following: given everything we know about the universe, its origins, its structure, its indifference to human suffering, and the repeated failure of prayer and divine intervention to produce measurable effects, the probability that any version of a personal, interventionist deity exists is sufficiently low that the working assumption of non-existence is the rational one. This is not the same as claiming certainty. It is the application of ordinary probabilistic reasoning to a very large and very thoroughly examined question. You would not say “I know with absolute certainty there is no teapot orbiting Mars” but you would not waste much time planning around the possibility that there is one. The atheist’s position on God is structurally similar, and the confidence expressed is not arrogance; it is calibration proportionate to evidence.
Richard Dawkins addressed this in “The God Delusion” with his seven-point scale of belief, on which he placed himself at approximately six out of seven: “de facto atheist” rather than certain that no god exists. This is a position of high confidence grounded in evidence, not certainty grounded in faith. The distinction matters enormously for the fundamentalism charge. Dawkins has written explicitly that his atheism is revisable, that a sufficiently compelling piece of evidence for divine existence would change his position, and that this revisability is precisely what distinguishes his stance from religious faith. When critics ignore this and describe his confidence as equivalent to fundamentalist certainty, they are misrepresenting his actual position rather than engaging with it.
You can explore the philosophical landscape of these positions in more detail in our overview of what atheism actually means and how it has developed historically, but the point essential to this argument is the following: a position held with high confidence on the basis of accumulated evidence, and held in a way that remains explicitly open to revision if better evidence emerges, is the structural opposite of fundamentalism. Not merely different in degree, but different in kind, in the same way that a navigational instrument that corrects its readings when conditions change is categorically different from one that has been fixed to report a single bearing regardless of where the ship is heading.
3. The Falsifiability Test: What Would Change Your Mind?
The cleanest way to distinguish confidence from dogma is to ask a single question: what would change your mind? The answer reveals the epistemic structure of a belief more reliably than any amount of analysis of its content. Ask it of a fundamentalist and ask it of an atheist, and observe what happens.
Ask a Young Earth creationist what evidence would convince them that the Earth is more than six thousand years old. The honest ones will tell you there is no such evidence, because they already know from scripture that the Earth is young, and any apparent evidence to the contrary is either a product of Satan’s deception, a result of the Flood rearranging the geological record, or a demonstration of God’s power to create things with the appearance of age. The claim is not merely that the evidence happens to support their view; the claim is that no conceivable evidence could overturn it. This is fundamentalism in its purest form: a belief held not merely despite contrary evidence but in a way that is architecturally shielded from it. The architecture is the defining feature, not the strength of the conviction.
Ask a thoughtful atheist what evidence would convince them that a god exists, and they will generally answer the question directly. J.B.S. Haldane’s remark, that Precambrian rabbits in the fossil record would falsify evolution, captures the spirit of the scientific and sceptical disposition: name the evidence that would require you to revise, and then go and look honestly for it. Most atheists will say something along the lines of: reproducible, independently verified miracles that could not be explained by natural processes; a divine entity communicating specific, verifiable information that was not available by natural means at the time of communication; a discovery that consciousness genuinely cannot be explained by physical processes in the brain, combined with credible evidence that it persists after death. These are demanding standards, and the atheist will insist they are demanding for good reasons, but they are stated standards. They identify the conditions under which the position would be revised. That is the epistemic opposite of the fundamentalist posture.
The fundamentalism charge thus collapses at precisely this point. Fundamentalism is defined not by the strength of a conviction but by the insulation of a conviction from evidence. A conviction that tracks evidence is not fundamentalist however strong it becomes, because it remains subject to revision if the evidence shifts. This is why we do not call a physicist a fundamentalist for being highly confident that the speed of light in a vacuum is approximately 299,792 kilometres per second. The confidence is the correct response to very strong evidence very thoroughly examined over a very long period. The atheist’s confidence about the non-existence of gods is, at least in structural terms, more like the physicist’s confidence than the fundamentalist’s faith. One can dispute the strength of the evidence on which it rests. One cannot accurately describe the stance as fundamentalist without redefining the word to mean something it has never meant.
4. Where the Burden of Proof Actually Sits
Part of what makes the arrogance charge stick in casual conversation is a widespread misunderstanding about who bears the burden of proof in arguments about the existence of God. The misunderstanding goes like this: since the atheist is denying something that billions of people believe, the atheist is making the bolder claim and therefore carries the heavier burden. This sounds intuitive, but it gets the logic of evidence exactly backwards, and it is worth following the logic carefully because this inversion is one of the most consequential errors in popular thinking about religion.
The burden of proof, in any rational inquiry, rests with the person making the positive existential claim. If someone asserts that a new entity exists, whether a subatomic particle, a chemical compound, or a deity, the burden falls on them to provide evidence for the existence of that entity. The person who withholds belief pending the provision of such evidence is not making a competing claim that requires its own justification; they are simply declining to believe something that has not been demonstrated. This is not arrogance; it is the default rational position, the intellectual equivalent of the null hypothesis. The absence of evidence is not, of course, decisive evidence of absence in all cases, and the atheist who claims otherwise is making an error. But absence of evidence is the appropriate reason not to believe something in the first place, and withholding belief on those grounds requires no special justification.
Christopher Hitchens condensed this into what became known as Hitchens’s razor: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The formulation is polemically sharp, but the underlying point is epistemologically sound. When someone asserts that there is an invisible dragon in their garage, the listener does not bear the burden of proving there is no dragon. The person making the claim bears the burden of providing evidence sufficient to justify belief in the dragon. The default position is scepticism, and that scepticism is not arrogance. It is the rational stance toward any unverified positive claim, whether that claim involves dragons, teapots in orbit around the sun, or an omnipotent deity who takes a personal interest in the sexual practices of people on a small rock circling a middling star in an unremarkable galaxy among billions.
The charge of arrogance against atheism implicitly reverses this burden by treating theism as the default and atheism as the deviation. But theism is not the default. The universe requires no hypothesis of divine authorship to be coherent; the coherence of the universe without such a hypothesis is one of the most robust findings of modern physics, cosmology, and biology. The default position, in the strict epistemic sense, is the absence of belief in unverified entities. Theism is the deviation from that default, and it bears the burden of justification accordingly. To demand that the person who withholds assent explain themselves, while treating the person who makes the positive claim as simply expressing a reasonable view, is to have the entire logic of evidence the wrong way around.
This does not mean the atheist has nothing to explain. The questions that theism attempts to answer, why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe has the physical constants it does, why consciousness exists and what it ultimately is, remain genuinely open and genuinely interesting. Acknowledging that these are hard questions is not a concession to theism; it is honest philosophy. But “we do not yet have a complete physical explanation for X” is not evidence that X has a supernatural explanation. The gap in our knowledge is not evidence for God; it is merely a gap in our knowledge. The history of science is an extended record of gaps being filled by natural explanations that previously seemed impossible, and the pattern gives us rational grounds for betting heavily on that outcome continuing, even where we cannot yet supply the explanation.
5. The Confidence-Arrogance Conflation and Why It Matters
Underlying much of the fundamentalism charge is a conflation of confidence with arrogance, and it is worth examining that conflation directly because it does real intellectual damage far beyond the specific debate about religion. Arrogance, properly understood, is the claim to knowledge or authority one does not possess, combined with a refusal to be corrected. Confidence is the appropriate expression of a well-founded belief, proportionate to the evidence supporting it. These are not the same thing, and treating them as synonymous generates a kind of epistemic false modesty that is not a virtue at all. It is a vice dressed in the language of humility.
Suppose someone says they are highly confident that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, that biological species evolved through natural selection acting on heritable variation, that the universe began in a state of extremely high density approximately 13.8 billion years ago, and that there is no credible evidence of any deity intervening in the physical world. Is that person being arrogant? Only if arrogance means “expressing confidence in a conclusion supported by overwhelming evidence,” at which point the word has been drained of any useful content, because we would have to apply it equally to anyone who expresses confidence in any well-established scientific finding. We do not typically describe the geologist who is confident about stratigraphy as arrogant, or the virologist who is confident about viral replication mechanisms, or the historian who is confident about the date of the First World War. Confidence proportionate to evidence is not arrogance. Confidence disproportionate to evidence, or held in deliberate defiance of counter-evidence, is.
The demand that atheists express perpetual uncertainty about the existence of God, even in the face of the accumulated evidence from physics, biology, cosmology, neuroscience, history, and comparative religion, is not a demand for intellectual humility. It is a demand for performed uncertainty that does not reflect the actual epistemic situation. Performing uncertainty you do not genuinely feel, as a social nicety toward those who feel differently, is not intellectual honesty. It is its intellectual opposite. The person who performs this uncertainty while privately maintaining the evidence-based position is not being more respectful of believers; they are being less truthful with them, and condescension disguised as respect is not a marked improvement on honest disagreement.
There is a version of the arrogance charge that has more genuine force, and we should acknowledge it plainly. If an atheist moves from “the evidence for God is insufficient” to “anyone who believes in God is intellectually defective,” they have made a genuine error. The evidence for God is insufficient, but the reasons people believe in God are complex, psychologically deep, socially embedded, and frequently intertwined with experiences of genuine beauty, comfort, community, and meaning. Someone who has been raised in a tradition from birth, who has found in it a framework for grief and mortality, who has never had access to the kind of education that makes alternative frameworks available, and whose entire community reinforces the belief, is not intellectually defective for holding it. Criticising the belief is entirely legitimate. Mocking the believer is cheap, and also strategically stupid if your goal is actually persuasion. The best version of atheist argument holds to that distinction consistently, and the most serious voices in the sceptical tradition have done so, despite the caricature that suggests otherwise.
6. The Dawkins-Falwell Comparison: A False Equivalence Examined
The comparison between Richard Dawkins and Jerry Falwell, or between the New Atheism broadly and religious fundamentalism, deserves to be treated as the empirical claim it is rather than the clever rhetorical move its proponents intend it to be. Let us examine it on those terms, because the examination is brief and the conclusion is not favourable to the comparison.
Jerry Falwell led the Moral Majority, an organisation that campaigned for the legal imposition of conservative Christian values on American society, lobbied against equal rights for gay people, opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools, and used its political influence to shape legislation affecting millions of people who did not share its views. Falwell’s beliefs were grounded in his reading of scripture, which he treated as inerrant and therefore immune to contradiction by scientific evidence or philosophical argument. He was explicit about this. He used his considerable institutional power to restrict the freedoms of people who did not share his faith, and he did so with the expressed conviction that God’s word authorised him to act in this way.
Richard Dawkins wrote books arguing, on the basis of evidence and reason, that the claims of religion are false and that religion as an institution has done considerable harm. He made no attempt to restrict the legal freedoms of believers. He sought no legislation requiring anyone to become an atheist. He did not campaign for the removal of religion from private life or from the freedom of individuals to believe and practise whatever they choose. He argued, in the public sphere, that religious claims are wrong and that people ought to think critically about them. That is the entirety of his supposed “fundamentalism”: writing books and giving lectures containing arguments that readers are entirely free to assess, accept, or reject. The question of in what world these constitute equivalent activities is not a rhetorical question; it is an analytical one, and the honest answer is that no coherent account of equivalence can be constructed between them.
The comparison is not merely imprecise; it is a category error of significant proportions. Falwell exercised institutional power over non-consenting people. Dawkins exercised freedom of speech in an open market of ideas. Falwell’s beliefs were structurally closed to revision by evidence. Dawkins’s beliefs are explicitly open to revision and he has said so repeatedly in print. Falwell’s movement sought to restrict science education in public schools. Dawkins has spent decades advocating for exactly the kind of science education that produces people capable of evaluating evidence independently. These are not symmetrical positions wearing different coloured jerseys; they are positions of entirely different epistemic and political character, and conflating them requires a principled refusal to notice the differences.
The person who makes the Dawkins-Falwell comparison typically does so to signal their own sophistication, their ability to see past tribal loyalties and perceive the symmetry that partisans cannot. But this kind of false balance is not sophistication; it is the absence of analysis dressed as its product. Genuine intellectual balance means assessing each position on its merits and calling a comparison accurate only if it actually holds. The Dawkins-Falwell comparison does not hold on its merits. It is the product of a superficial pattern-match between “person who argues strongly for position X” and “person who argues strongly for position Y,” without any examination of the evidential basis of X and Y, their revisability, or the means by which their proponents seek to advance them. Once you perform the examination, the comparison evaporates.
Beyond being factually wrong, this false equivalence has a systematic bias that makes it something worse than a mere analytical error. The effect of calling atheism “just another fundamentalism” is to render the atheist’s critique of religion illegitimate by association, without engaging with any of the actual arguments the critique contains. It is a way of dismissing the argument by labelling the arguer, which is ad hominem in a sophisticated disguise. If the arguments of Dawkins, or Hitchens, or Harris are wrong, they are wrong for reasons that can be stated, and those reasons should constitute the counter-argument. “You sound like a fundamentalist” is not a counter-argument. It is a rhetorical move designed to produce the social effect of dismissal without the intellectual cost of genuine engagement.
7. The Institutions Are Not Symmetrical
There is a further dimension of the fundamentalism charge that needs examining: the institutional one. Religious fundamentalism is not merely an intellectual posture; it is a posture embedded in institutions that have real power over real people. Fundamentalist churches, madrassas, yeshivas, and their equivalents do not merely hold beliefs in a structurally closed way; they transmit those beliefs to children before those children are capable of evaluating them, they enforce conformity through social and sometimes physical means, and they exercise political power in ways that affect people far beyond their own communities. The intellectual posture and the institutional structure are inseparable; one reinforces the other.
Atheism has no equivalent institutional structure. There is no atheist equivalent of the Vatican, no atheist equivalent of the network of madrassas funded by Gulf states, no atheist equivalent of the fundamentalist church that disowns its members for asking awkward questions or expels its children for entertaining doubt. Atheist organisations exist, and some of them are more effective than others at advocacy and community-building, but they exercise no power over non-members, they do not transmit belief to children as a condition of belonging, and they do not punish those who reach different conclusions. The comparison between a set of arguments advanced in public by private citizens and an institutional complex with centuries of accumulated power, political influence, tax exemption, and control over the education of children is not a comparison between two things of the same kind, or even of similar kinds.
Robert G. Ingersoll, the great nineteenth century American freethinker, observed that any church which imprisons a man for making an argument against its creed will simply convince the world that it cannot answer the argument. The history of religious institutions is full of exactly that response to intellectual challenge: not the counter-argument but the suppression of the argument and the punishment of the arguer. Atheism has no equivalent history, because it has no equivalent institutional power, and because the intellectual disposition of the atheist is structurally oriented toward argument rather than toward the elimination of dissent. The atheist who is proved wrong by a better argument updates their belief. The institution that feels threatened by a better argument has historically reached for the prison, the stake, or the social exclusion of the person making it.
The asymmetry in institutional power runs almost entirely in one direction. The atheist who refuses to perform religious belief can lose employment in education in many countries, face social ostracism, be disinherited by family, and in some parts of the world face legal sanction up to and including execution for apostasy. The fundamentalist who refuses to entertain the arguments of atheism faces no such consequences from secular institutions; liberal democracies do not punish people for holding supernatural beliefs, however extraordinary those beliefs are by the standards of evidence. The power relationship is not merely asymmetrical; it is structured so consistently against the atheist that describing the two as equivalent in any sociological sense requires a remarkable inattentiveness to the facts.
Russell captured the precise mechanism of this asymmetry with characteristic directness: “A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable as teachers of the young.” This remains true in ways that are simultaneously obvious and underacknowledged. The person whose scepticism about religion disqualifies them from teaching in a faith school, or from holding certain public offices, or from being treated as a trustworthy member of their community, is not experiencing the consequences of an intellectual position on equal terms with a theist who holds the opposite view. The terms are not equal, and pretending they are, in the interests of a tidy symmetry, is not analytical rigour. It is the opposite.
8. New Atheism and Its Genuine Failings
Intellectual honesty requires that we take seriously the version of this criticism that has genuine substance, rather than spending all our time on the version that is simply wrong. There is a version that has genuine substance, though it falls well short of establishing that atheism is fundamentalism or that atheist confidence is epistemically equivalent to religious faith.
Some of the popular atheism produced in the decade following the publication of “The God Delusion” and “God Is Not Great” was characterised by a tone that was unnecessarily dismissive of religious experience, a tendency to treat all religious beliefs as equally irrational without sufficient attention to the diversity within traditions, and occasionally by a failure to take seriously the genuine functions that religious community performs for people and the genuine philosophical depth of the best theological arguments. None of this makes the core atheist position wrong, and none of it makes the evidential case against theism weaker. But some of it made the case less well than it could have been made, and a critic who focuses on the worse examples of popular atheist writing is not engaging with a straw man.
The criticism of New Atheism that carries genuine weight is not that it was arrogant in the fundamentalist sense but that it was sometimes rhetorically overconfident in ways that made it less persuasive than it could have been. There is a difference between the rigorous form of the argument, which grants the intellectual seriousness of the strongest theological positions before dismantling them, and the popular form, which treats all religious believers as simply confused and all religious thought as simply silly. The rigorous form is more honest, more persuasive, and more respectful of the actual difficulty of some of the questions involved. The popular form sacrificed those qualities for rhetorical ease, and it suffered for it in influence if not in book sales.
Additionally, some online communities loosely associated with atheism, though not representative of its intellectual tradition or its most serious advocates, developed a clubbishness and in-group contempt that was socially unattractive even when the underlying positions were defensible. These communities sometimes treated the rejection of religion as a sufficient intellectual achievement in itself, without the curiosity, reading, and genuine humility that the actual intellectual tradition of freethought requires. This is a failure of culture rather than of the underlying argument, but it is a genuine failure and it gave the fundamentalism charge more traction than the argument itself ever warranted.
None of these concessions, however, establish the main charge. The bad online culture of some atheist communities does not make atheism fundamentalist any more than the bad online culture of some scientific communities makes science dogmatic. The relevant question is always whether the position is held in a way that is closed to evidence, and the position, as a matter of philosophical fact, is not. The relevant question about individual advocates is whether they engage seriously with the strongest opposing arguments, and the most serious of them do, consistently. A movement’s worst representatives are not a reliable guide to the movement’s intellectual content, and the critics of atheism who deploy the online-forum atheist as though he represents Hume’s epistemology are being no more rigorous than the atheist who deploys the Westboro Baptist Church as though it represents the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
9. The Epistemic Virtue at Stake
What we are really arguing about, beneath all the surface noise of the fundamentalism charge, is a question about epistemic virtue: what is the right way to form and hold beliefs? The atheist position, properly understood, is a commitment to a particular answer to that question, and the answer is worth stating clearly because it is the thing the fundamentalism charge most needs to obscure.
The right way to form a belief is to assess the available evidence, consult the best available reasoning about what the evidence implies, hold the resulting belief with a confidence proportionate to the strength of the evidence, and remain genuinely open to revising the belief if better evidence or better reasoning emerges. This is not a complicated prescription, but it is demanding in practice, because it requires the believer to be willing to be wrong, to actively seek counter-evidence rather than merely welcoming confirmatory evidence, and to treat the revision of a belief not as a personal failure but as the system working correctly. A mind that revises its beliefs in response to evidence is functioning well. A mind that cannot revise its beliefs in response to evidence has, in the relevant domain, ceased to function as an instrument of inquiry.
This epistemic stance, which is the stance of atheism at its best, is not a creed. It does not specify what conclusions you must reach; it specifies how you must assess the evidence before reaching any conclusion. The person who applies it rigorously and arrives at theism is in a better epistemic position than the person who adopts atheism as a tribal identity without doing the reasoning. This is not a concession that the evidence favours theism; it is a statement about the priority of method over conclusion. The method, applied honestly and rigorously to the best available evidence about the existence of gods, leads to the conclusion that the evidence is insufficient and the sceptical position is justified. But it is the method, not the conclusion, that defines the epistemic virtue, and the atheist who has internalised the method is in exactly the position Russell described: holding convictions with only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants.
The fundamentalist is in the opposite position: holding a conclusion immune to evidential revision, and using the method, insofar as any method is used at all, only to find justifications for a conclusion that has already been fixed. These are not merely different conclusions; they are different relationships to the idea of truth, and mistaking them for the same thing is the central intellectual error of the fundamentalism charge. You can read more about why this commitment also means atheism cannot function as a religion in its own right in our piece on why atheism is not a religion, which deals with the related but distinct charge that secular humanism is just a replacement creed. The short answer there is the same as it is here: a disposition to revise beliefs on the basis of evidence is not a creed; it is the alternative to one.
10. Confidence Without Humility Is a Problem; Humility Without Confidence Is a Surrender
There is a version of intellectual humility that is worth defending and a version that is worth resisting. The version worth defending is the recognition that one’s reasoning is fallible, that evidence is sometimes ambiguous, that experts disagree in ways that should be taken seriously, and that the history of human knowledge is a history of confidently held positions being overturned by better evidence. This kind of humility is not a concession to any particular religious claim; it is simply good epistemic practice, and the best atheist thinkers model it consistently. The scientists and philosophers who have done the most to establish the sceptical case have generally been the first to acknowledge the limits of current knowledge and the provisional character of current understanding.
The version worth resisting is what might be called performative agnosticism: the pose of perpetual uncertainty adopted not because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous but because expressing confidence is socially uncomfortable in a culture that has evolved a powerful norm of deference toward religious belief. This pose is not intellectual humility; it is a form of intellectual evasion dressed in the language of open-mindedness. When someone says “well, nobody can really know whether God exists,” they are not always reporting a genuine epistemic state. Often they are performing a social role: the reasonable person who does not take sides, who does not offend, who does not stake a claim that might require defending in public. That performance comes at a direct cost to honesty, and honesty is the thing the whole enterprise of rational inquiry is supposed to be in service of.
The demand that atheists be less confident is sometimes a demand that they be less honest. The evidence we have, accumulated over centuries of scientific inquiry, philosophical analysis, and comparative religious study, very strongly supports the conclusion that no deity of the kind described by the world’s major religions is intervening in the physical world or communicating with human beings in any detectable way. The honest response to that evidence is to say so, and to say so clearly. To soften the conclusion for social reasons, to dress it in unnecessary qualifications, to perform a greater uncertainty than one actually feels, is not to be more intellectually virtuous. It is to be less truthful in the interests of social comfort, and that trade should be recognised for what it is rather than celebrated as epistemic modesty.
There is a version of this argument that even some religious thinkers have recognised from within their own traditions. The theologian Paul Tillich distinguished between “faith” understood as an unconditional commitment to what is ultimately real and the lesser varieties of religious certainty that mistake contingent historical doctrines for ultimate truth. He would have had no more patience than Russell for the fundamentalist who insulates their God-claim from evidence. The point for our purposes is simply that even within theological traditions there is recognition that certainty of the wrong epistemic kind is an intellectual vice, and that the atheist who demands evidence is not obviously more vicious in this regard than the fundamentalist who refuses it. Demanding evidence is not a hostile act; it is the condition of any serious inquiry into any serious claim.
11. Answering the Theist Version of This Charge
There is a specific variant of the fundamentalism charge worth addressing separately: the version advanced not by genuine moderates or genuine agnostics but by theists who use it as a rhetorical move to immunise their own beliefs from criticism. The pattern runs as follows. The theist accuses the atheist of arrogant certainty, positions themselves as the humble believer who merely has “faith,” and thereby attempts to shift the conversation away from the merits of the theistic claim and toward a meta-argument about the atheist’s attitude. This is a move designed to evade rather than engage the substance of the argument, and its regular deployment in public debate has made it one of the most consequential rhetorical diversions in contemporary discussions of religion.
What is particularly striking about this variant is that it involves a significant misrepresentation of the nature of theistic certainty. Many religious believers, particularly those in conservative or fundamentalist traditions, are not in fact humble about their God-claim. They are highly certain of it. They are certain enough to build their entire lives around it, to structure their moral reasoning on its implications, to vote on its basis, to raise their children within its framework, to refuse medical treatment that conflicts with its prescriptions, and to regard those who deny it as morally or spiritually deficient. This is not an attitude of humble uncertainty. It is an attitude of considerable certainty, and the fact that it is labelled “faith” rather than “knowledge” does not make it epistemically more modest. Calling a confident assertion “faith” and then claiming that this somehow exempts it from the ordinary scrutiny applied to confident assertions is not humility; it is the attempted purchase of immunity through vocabulary.
We have addressed the broader pattern of theistic certainty disguised as humility in our piece on the smug certainty of the theist, and readers interested in the rhetorical anatomy of this particular move may find it useful. The short version is this: calling one’s own certainty “faith” does not make it less certain, just as calling another person’s evidence-based confidence “arrogance” does not make their argument weaker. The labels are not the argument. The evidence is the argument, and the evidence is what both parties should be discussing.
The theist who accuses the atheist of arrogant certainty while simultaneously holding, with sufficient certainty to base their entire life on it, that a specific deity created the universe, loves them personally, has a plan for their life, hears their prayers, and will judge them after death, is in no position to lecture anyone about epistemic humility. They may, of course, be right about all of that. But if they are, they should be able to say so on the basis of evidence, and the evidence should be examinable by anyone. If the evidence is examinable, then the atheist’s assessment of it is a legitimate and indeed necessary act, not an act of arrogance. The response to an assessment one disagrees with is to produce better evidence or a better argument. The response is not to describe the person doing the assessing as a fundamentalist.
12. What the Charge Reveals About the Culture of Debate
The persistence of the “atheism as fundamentalism” charge tells us something interesting about the culture in which religious and secular arguments currently take place in Western liberal democracies. That culture has developed, over several decades, a powerful norm against the robust criticism of religious belief. The norm is not consistently applied: religious ideas are treated with a deference that is not extended to political ideologies, medical claims, historical arguments, or any other category of belief. The person who asserts that a particular economic policy will generate prosperity is expected to provide evidence and is criticised sharply when the evidence does not materialise. The person who asserts that a particular prayer will cure cancer is extended a respectful silence, and anyone who points out that the evidence for prayer’s efficacy is precisely nil is accused of being insensitive, aggressive, or, when the charge is sophisticated enough, fundamentalist in their scepticism.
The charge that atheism is fundamentalism is in part a product of this asymmetrical norm. When the atheist refuses to observe it, when they insist on treating religious claims as claims of the same epistemic type as any other, subject to the same standards of evidence and the same scrutiny, the refusal itself is experienced as aggressive. The fundamentalism charge is the response to that perceived aggression: you are being as dogmatic as the people you criticise, it says, and it says it in order to restore the norm of deference by discrediting the person who is violating it. But the norm of deference is not a principle of inquiry; it is a social convention, and it has costs that are rarely acknowledged by those who enforce it.
One of the costs is that ideas which cannot survive evidential scrutiny are protected from it by being placed in the category of “sincere religious belief,” which is treated as beyond the reach of ordinary rational assessment. This protection does not serve believers well in the long run, because it prevents the kind of internal reform and intellectual development that genuine engagement with criticism typically produces. It does not serve non-believers well at all, because the ideas protected in this way frequently have consequences for public policy, education, medical practice, and the treatment of minorities that affect everybody regardless of their beliefs. John Stuart Mill stated this mechanism with characteristic clarity: “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.” The religious belief that is placed beyond evidential scrutiny by the social norm of deference is exactly this: a belief that has been granted exemption from the justificatory burden that every other belief must bear, and which has used that exemption across centuries to consecrate prejudices that would otherwise need to be publicly defended and, if insufficient, abandoned.
The atheist who insists on applying ordinary standards is not being arrogant. They are refusing to grant an exemption that was never logically justified in the first place. The fundamentalism charge is, in this light, not merely wrong as an empirical description of the atheist’s epistemic posture. It is actively dishonest as a rhetorical move, because it uses the language of epistemic virtue to enforce an exemption from epistemic standards that the belief being protected could not survive without. Identifying this does not require hostility to believers. It requires only that we look honestly at what the charge is doing and who it serves.
13. Science, Method, and the Secular Tradition
One of the defining features of the sceptical and secular intellectual tradition, from Hume through Russell to the contemporary figures working in philosophy of science and cognitive science of religion, is its commitment to method as prior to conclusion. This distinguishes it not just from religious fundamentalism but from any dogmatic system, religious or secular, that allows conclusion to drive method. The person who has decided in advance what is true and then assembles evidence in its support is not doing inquiry; they are constructing a legal brief. The person who allows the evidence to determine the conclusion, however uncomfortable that conclusion might be, is doing something categorically different.
Scientific method, properly understood, is not a set of conclusions about the world. It is a set of procedures for arriving at conclusions that are reliably tracking reality rather than merely tracking the preferences of the investigator. Those procedures include the requirement that claims be falsifiable, that experiments be repeatable, that results be peer-reviewed and independently verified, and that the strongest version of the competing hypothesis be engaged with rather than the weakest. These procedures have no ideological content in themselves; they have the same relationship to ideology that a weighing scale has to the goods being weighed. The scale does not prefer one outcome over another; it reports what is there. What science has reported, after applying these procedures to the questions most relevant to theism, is that there is no detectable supernatural agency at work in the physical universe, that biological complexity is fully explicable by natural selection and related mechanisms, that the universe had a natural origin whose details we are still working out but whose general character is not mysterious in any supernaturally interesting way, and that human consciousness, for all its remarkable complexity, is a product of physical processes in the brain rather than evidence of a non-physical soul.
The atheist who cites these findings in support of their position is not substituting science for religion as a new faith. They are reporting what an unbiased method has produced when applied to the relevant questions. The fundamentalist who rejects those findings is not making an equally valid methodological choice; they are refusing to let method determine conclusion in the relevant domain. That refusal is the definition of the epistemic stance we call fundamentalism, and the distinction between the two postures could not be drawn more sharply without becoming formally symbolic rather than substantive.
This is the point at which the charge of “scientism,” which often accompanies the fundamentalism charge, tends to arrive. The accusation is that the atheist is treating science as the only valid source of knowledge, thereby excluding whole domains of human experience, including moral, aesthetic, and existential experience, from consideration. This would be a serious charge if it were accurate, but it generally is not. The atheist position, as held by the most serious figures in the tradition, is not that science is the only source of knowledge. It is that science is the most reliable method we have for determining facts about the external world, and that claims about external-world facts, including the existence of supernatural entities, should be evaluated by the standards appropriate to such claims. Moral philosophy, aesthetic experience, and existential reflection are not external-world-fact claims of this kind, and the secular humanist has as much to say about them as anyone. The charge of scientism is usually deployed to create the impression that the atheist has nothing to say about meaning, value, or the good life, which is both historically inaccurate and philosophically illiterate as a criticism of the actual tradition.
The secular tradition has produced some of the most sustained and serious attempts to think about meaning and value in the history of philosophy, from Epicurus and Lucretius through Spinoza, Hume, and Mill to the existentialists and the contemporary philosophers of mind. That tradition does not derive its conclusions about the good life from supernatural sources, and it does not claim to. It derives them from reason, experience, evidence, and the accumulated understanding of what produces human flourishing and what produces human misery. This is not a poverty of resources; it is a remarkable intellectual inheritance, and the charge that it amounts to a kind of creed or fundamentalism mistakes the method for the conclusion once again. The method says: follow the evidence. The conclusion follows from applying the method honestly. Calling the result dogma simply because the method was applied consistently is a confusion about what the word means.
14. Faith as an Epistemic Category and Why the Distinction Matters
We have been circling a distinction that deserves its own direct treatment: the distinction between faith as an epistemic category and confidence as an epistemic category, and why conflating them is at the heart of the fundamentalism charge’s success in ordinary conversation. These are not merely different words for the same thing. They describe structurally different relationships between a mind and a belief, and the difference is one of the most important in the whole domain of epistemology.
Confidence, in the epistemic sense, is a degree of belief proportional to the evidence. When someone is highly confident that the Earth orbits the Sun, they are reporting that the evidence in favour of this claim is overwhelming, that every independent method of investigation confirms it, that no credible counter-evidence exists, and that the probability of the claim being false is vanishingly small. The confidence is responsive to evidence; if evidence emerged that seriously challenged the claim, the confidence would appropriately diminish. This responsiveness is the defining feature of rationally held confidence, and it is what distinguishes it from faith in Russell’s sense.
Faith, as Russell identified it, is conviction held in a way that is not proportional to evidence and is not responsive to counter-evidence. The faithful person does not say “I am highly confident God exists because the evidence strongly supports this.” They say “I believe God exists” in a way that is understood to be immune to evidential challenge, because the very fact that the belief is held by faith is taken to confer a dignity that ordinary evidential challenge cannot touch. This is not a criticism of the emotional or communal content of religious faith; those aspects may be genuinely valuable in ways that have nothing to do with their truth-value. It is a description of the epistemic structure, and it is the epistemic structure that determines whether a belief is being held in a fundamentalist way or not.
When atheist confidence is described as “faith in science” or “faith in reason,” the description is either metaphorical, in which case it is harmless but imprecise, or it is meant literally, in which case it is simply wrong. The atheist’s confidence in the findings of science is responsive to evidence about the reliability of scientific method: the extraordinary predictive success of physics, the practical applications of chemistry and biology, the consistent ability of the scientific community to identify and correct its errors, and the absence of any comparably reliable alternative method for determining facts about the external world. This confidence is evidence-based and in principle revisable if the method turned out to be systematically unreliable in ways that current evidence does not show. Calling that “faith” evacuates the word of its meaning by applying it to any confident belief regardless of its epistemic structure, and the person who does this has not made an argument; they have simply performed an act of relabelling.
The distinction between faith and evidence-based confidence matters beyond the immediate debate about religion, because it tracks a distinction that every functioning society needs to preserve: the distinction between claims that can be publicly examined and revised and claims that are placed beyond examination by their status as revealed or sacred. The first kind of claim is the currency of open societies; the second kind is the currency of closed ones. The fundamentalism charge against atheism attempts to blur this distinction by suggesting that all confident claims are structurally equivalent, but the blurring serves only one party to the debate: the one whose claims cannot survive the kind of public scrutiny that the distinction would require.
Conclusion: Confidence Is the Correct Response to the Evidence
The charge that atheism is just another fundamentalism, that insisting there is insufficient evidence for God is as arrogant as the assertion that God has spoken directly to humanity through an ancient text, that Dawkins is the Falwell of atheism, is not a sophisticated philosophical observation. It is a category error maintained by refusing to examine the one thing that would dissolve it immediately: the epistemic structure of the positions being compared. Fundamentalism is a belief held in a way that is structurally closed to evidence. Atheism, properly understood, is a belief held in a way that is structurally open to it. The fundamentalist cannot be argued out of their position because the position has been designed to be argument-proof. The atheist can be argued out of theirs, and will tell you exactly what it would take to do so.
Confidence is not arrogance when it tracks the evidence. The accumulated evidence of physics, biology, cosmology, neuroscience, history, and philosophy strongly supports the conclusion that the gods described by the world’s major religions do not exist and are not intervening in the physical world. Saying so clearly, and saying it without the apologetic qualifications that social convention demands but honesty does not require, is not arrogance. It is the appropriate expression of a well-founded belief, stated with the directness that well-founded beliefs deserve.
The burden of proof has never rested with those who withhold belief in unverified entities. It rests, as it always has, with those who assert that such entities exist. The atheist who asks for evidence is making the epistemically modest claim that a positive assertion requires positive support before it can rationally compel assent. That this assertion has been made for thousands of years, by billions of people, with great sincerity and with enormous cultural authority, does not shift the burden. Numbers and sincerity have never been substitutes for evidence, however much the prevalence of a belief might feel, from the inside, like confirmation of its truth.
What distinguishes rational inquiry from dogma is not the presence or absence of confidence. It is the presence or absence of genuine openness to revision. The atheist position is open to revision: state the evidence, make the argument, and a genuine sceptic will follow it wherever it honestly leads. The fundamentalist position is closed to revision by design, and that design is not a feature; it is the defining defect. To call these two postures equivalent is not to be even-handed. It is to be wrong in a way that serves one side of the argument while disguising the service as neutrality.
The honest question is not whether the atheist sounds like a fundamentalist. The honest question is whether the evidence supports the theistic claim. If it does, the atheist will update. If it does not, no amount of re-labelling atheist scepticism as arrogance will make the evidence appear. The universe remains what it is regardless of how we feel about the people who describe it plainly.