ABSTRACT
Atheism is supposed to be the denial of theism, but I have located a curious thing: two philosophers, Edwin Curley and Daniel Dennett, whose atheisms do not deny the theism of a third philosopher, John Bishop. This situation is possible because the trio is equivocating on the words ‘God’ and ‘faith’: there are many notions of God and faith, and the ones that Curley and Dennett deny are distinct from the ones Bishop affirms. In fact, their equivocation is deep enough that Bishop turns out to be an atheist in Curley’s and Dennett’s sense, and conversely and even more remarkably, Curley and Dennett, though not quite theists in Bishop’s sense, are committed to something close to what Bishop would call ‘God’, even if they probably would not call it ‘God’ themselves.
In this chapter, I bring together this trio’s views for the first time. I suggest that our trio’s dialectic is an instance of a wider phenomenon in the field of atheists not engaging a small but growing cadre of ‘new theists’. I argue that this disconnect is a loss for both sides and encourage atheists and new theists to enter into conversation.
