How To Think More and Better

How To Think More and Better

Nonbelief

William B. Irvine's avatar
William B. Irvine
Aug 21, 2025
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Do you believe in God? More precisely, are you a theist who believes in the existence of God,* or are you an atheist who believes there are no gods?

Different people will answer this question in different ways. Ask a Thinker, though, and they are likely to raise an eyebrow. This is because the question is defective, inasmuch as it commits what logicians refer to as a false dichotomy. It assumes that there are only two possibilities—either believing that God exists or believing that God doesn’t exist—when there is in fact a third possibility: You can be undecided with respect to God’s existence, in which case you will count as neither a theist nor an atheist, but as an agnostic.

A Thinker might go on to inform us that the agnostics in this third category themselves fall into two subcategories. Some agnostics don’t have beliefs with respect to God’s existence for the simple reason that they haven’t given the matter any thought, much as you’ve probably never considered whether a red mitten…

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