How To Be An Agnostic

Bad Faith

what many atheists might think, their denial of certain kinds of
divinity is, in fact, exactly the same denial any reasonable theist
would make too. The difference comes because the atheist stops
there, whereas the theist will go on to see whether anything
affi rmative can be said about this unknowable God. In other
words, if theists would deny most of the things about a deity
that atheists deny too, then when does the point come at which
theists affi rm something that atheists would still deny? The pos-
itive thing that theists would assert, and that atheists presum-
ably would not, Turner believes, is that the world is created. The
world is not ‘just there’, as the atheistically inclined Bertrand
Russell put it.
Of course, the belief that the world is created does not mean
that the theist can offer anything about how the world is
created. Neither does it make any difference to the way that,
say, the sensible theist will want to do science; this is not an
argument for Intelligent Design. However, there is more entailed
by the atheist’s denial than merely the assertion that the world
is brute fact.
The difference comes because if the atheist denies that the
world is created, they also resist the idea of existence as gift.
Turner explains it this way:

In saying that the world is created out of nothing, you are

beginning to say that the world comes to us, our existence

comes to us, from an unknowable ‘other’; that is to say, you

are claiming that existence comes to us as pure gift, that for

the world to exist just is for it to be created.

One might think about the difference this makes in a thought
experiment. Imagine a customer who logs onto their bank
account one morning and sees an unexpected balance of $1
million. Being an upright individual, they alert the bank.
However, after an investigation, the balance stays the same: no
mistake has been made, they are told. The customer can reach
one of three conclusions. The fi rst is that the money is a gift