Atheism / Secularism
Atheism is the position that no gods exist; secularism is the political and cultural position that public institutions should be organised independently of religious authority. The two are related but distinct: a non-atheist can be a political secularist; an atheist may or may not endorse a programmatic secularism in public life. This entry covers the broad anti-theistic and anti-clerical positions that the Works layer references collectively.
Worldview
No gods exist; supernatural agency is illusory; religious institutions, while sometimes producing real goods, do not warrant the epistemic or political authority they have traditionally claimed. Human life is to be made meaningful within a naturalistic framework.
Moral Implications
Moral norms are grounded in human capacities and needs rather than divine command. The atheist-secularist ethical tradition has been variously naturalist, humanist, utilitarian, and existentialist.
Practical Implications
Atheism and secularism have shaped the modern European Enlightenment, French *laïcité*, post-1789 republican political traditions, twentieth-century state-atheist regimes (in their authoritarian forms), and the late-twentieth-century secularisation of much Western European intellectual culture.
I. Time
Time, for atheism and secularism, is the cosmological time of the natural sciences — the deep history of the universe from the Big Bang through cosmic, geological, and biological evolution to the present, with the future projected by the same naturalistic methods. There is no eschatological closure imposed by divine judgement and no providential narrative ordering events toward a transcendent end. Human lives are finite spans within this much larger temporal field, and secular meaning is made within that span rather than secured by any promise of personal post-mortem continuation.
Attributes
II. Space
Space, for the atheist-secularist, is the physical universe as the sciences describe it — vast, ancient, governed by impersonal laws, indifferent to human purpose. There is no sacred geography in the supernatural sense, though secularism may well treat particular places as historically and culturally significant. Carl Sagan's 'pale blue dot' image captures the characteristic secular response: humility about humanity's cosmic position combined with renewed attention to the fragile planetary home we actually inhabit. Space is the indifferent stage on which human meaning has to be made.
Attributes
III. Matter
Matter, for atheism and secularism, is substantival and is what there ultimately is — no separate spiritual substance, no divine fiat sustaining contingent being, no creation ex nihilo standing behind the material order. The natural sciences describe what is real, and whatever else we want to talk about (mind, value, meaning) must in the end be a feature of material organisation rather than of any second realm. The materialist commitment is internal to the secular outlook even where individual atheists hesitate to call themselves reductive physicalists.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Persons are embodied, finite, mortal organisms in a universe without supernatural agency. Meaning is made within human life rather than received from a transcendent source.
Attributes
V. Energy
Energy is treated by the secularist as a real physical quantity governed by the natural laws the sciences have established, conserved within closed systems and convertible between forms. There is no divine animating energy beyond these physical relations, and the apparent vitality of living things reduces to (or supervenes on) the energetic processes that biochemistry and physiology describe. The secular outlook treats energy as one of the basic features of an entirely natural cosmos, with no further metaphysical category required to ground it.
Attributes
VI. Information
Information, for the secular naturalist, is a real but emergent feature of physical configurations — neural patterns, genetic codes, social and cultural transmission — rather than a separate metaphysical substance or a divine logos. The growth of human knowledge is treated as a natural-historical achievement, made possible by evolved cognitive capacities and cultivated through the institutions of science, scholarship, and public reason. Religious revelation is demoted from a privileged information channel to one historical phenomenon among others. Truth is hard-won by the methods that have proved themselves rather than received from above.
Attributes
Works that name Atheism / Secularism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
How Atheism / Secularism resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 6 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 1 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
3 mainstream positions
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 2 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.