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== Theistic responses to weak atheism ==
== Theistic responses to weak atheism ==
''See also:'' [[Criticisms of weak atheism]] and [[Definition of atheism#William Lane Craig on attempts to define the word atheism|William Lane Craig on attempts to define the word atheism]]
Weak [[atheism]] is often construed by theists as a highly negative and destructive point of view that lacks a positive alternative. As Jacques Maritain wrote:
Weak [[atheism]] is often construed by theists as a highly negative and destructive point of view that lacks a positive alternative. As Jacques Maritain wrote:
:"By negative atheism I mean a merely negative or destructive process of casting aside the idea of God, which is replaced only by a void. Such a negative atheism can be only shallow and empirical, like the [[atheism]] of the libertians of the seventeenth century: it hollows out a vacuum at the center of the universe of thought which has taken shape for centuries around the idea of God, but it does not bother about altering that universe; it is concerned merely with making us live comfortably in the empirical freedom of doing whatever we want. On the other hand, negative atheism can be deeply and metaphysically lived: in which case the void it creates at the center of things extends to and lays waste our whole universe of thought; the freedom it claims for the human ego is absolute independence, a kind of divine independence that this ego, like Dostoievski's Kirilov, has no better way of affirming than by suicide and self-destruction."<ref>Jacques Maritain, ''On the Meaning of Contemporary [[Atheism]]'', The Review of Politics, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 267-280, July, 1949.</ref>
:"By negative atheism I mean a merely negative or destructive process of casting aside the idea of God, which is replaced only by a void. Such a negative atheism can be only shallow and empirical, like the [[atheism]] of the libertians of the seventeenth century: it hollows out a vacuum at the center of the universe of thought which has taken shape for centuries around the idea of God, but it does not bother about altering that universe; it is concerned merely with making us live comfortably in the empirical freedom of doing whatever we want. On the other hand, negative atheism can be deeply and metaphysically lived: in which case the void it creates at the center of things extends to and lays waste our whole universe of thought; the freedom it claims for the human ego is absolute independence, a kind of divine independence that this ego, like Dostoievski's Kirilov, has no better way of affirming than by suicide and self-destruction."<ref>Jacques Maritain, ''On the Meaning of Contemporary [[Atheism]]'', The Review of Politics, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 267-280, July, 1949.</ref>