On What Atheists Say There Is

“Does God exist?” On the surface, this may appear to be a rather straightforward – not to say easy – question.  But the disagreement between those who answer “yes” and those who answer “no” is not straightforward at all.  It is, rather, “one of those fundamental disagreements that extends to how the disagreement is to be characterized,” as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed. Atheists and theists not only disagree about whether God exists; they also disagree about what it means to disagree about whether God exists.