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"It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows."
Atheism in a clockwork universe ostensibly overseen by a completely noninterventionist divinity is one thing, but what about a world that's practically the playground of the mythic forces that created it?
While some authors do this as an honest philosophical exercise, it's pretty much always done for laughs. A self-styled hardline atheist that just happens to live in a high fantasy setting brimming with both huge pantheons of gods rampaging around the landscape constantly causing all sorts of things to happen, and the worshipers that pray to (and immediately hear back from) said pantheons of rampaging deities. Maybe they don't believe in the gods at all, and are totally nuts, maybe they're completely in denial about the existence of gods, or maybe they're feigning disbelief in hopes of ending their worship and bringing about some kind of Götterdämmerung or whatever. Sometimes the character himself is a god (typically a loony one). Sometimes this is a direct attempt to discredit science by comparing it to religion: Instead of using the scientific method, as a scientist does, the strawman atheist relies himself on a devout faith — in this case a faith that " science" holds all the answers, despite obvious proof to the contrary.
The trope can be justified in some ways. It's relatively common to have a character who openly acknowledges the existence of beings of great power, but refuses to accept their divinity (either because he believes them to be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens using technological trickery, or because he differentiates between a "real" god and a supernatural being that is merely very powerful). For instance, in The DCU (see below) there's no practical difference between, say, angels and alien energy beings. The main difference often comes down to whether or not they should then believe in an afterlife, which has more personal implications. On the other hand, in a world where magic is commonly known to be real, it becomes a lot easier for con artists to pull the wool over the eyes of innocents, so a skeptic to differentiate between "real" magic and "fake" magic can come in handy. After a certain point it can devolve into semantics.
A subtrope of this is the atheist who's plucked out of the normal world and forced to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural, usually only accepting it after something wildly impossible is done to them (like being turned into a dragon and back in C. S. Lewis' Voyage of The Dawn Treader or having the flesh burned off his bones and regrown in Niven & Pournelle's Inferno). (Even then, it took a long time for the protagonist to drop the idea that it was a theme park for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.)
Compare Agent Scully.
Compare also with No Such Thing As Space Jesus and No Such Thing As Wizard Jesus. See also Crossover Cosmology and Negative Continuity for two possible justifications. See also Arbitrary Skepticism and Grumpy Bear.
Don't confuse this with the Nay Theist, who knows supernatural forces exist, but thinks they should mind their own business and leave mortals alone.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Near of Death Note follows his own set of morals, bringing us this quote:
"Nobody can tell what is right and what is wrong, what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a God, and I had his teachings before me, I would think it through and decide if that was Right or Wrong myself."
- In One Piece's Skypeia arc, Zoro says he doesn't believe in God. Considering the main enemy in that arc is apparently God, (It's later revealed that he isn't, and it's just a title for the ruler of Skypeia) this just adds to how badass he is.
- Addtionally, he says he does not believe in dragons when talking to Ryuma (who is famous for decapitating a dragon with one strike), despite meeting all the other weird creatures he's seen in the Grand Line (which in the anime includes a dragon).
- More than that, the crew finds the dragon breeding ground so technically they meet lots of dragons.
- Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh says Screw Destiny to the long history of Duel Monsters and of his rivalry with Yugi, even when he is told outright and went through the entire Millennium World arc. Of course, he goes on to found Duel Academia, a school existing solely for the purpose of being a roach motel for Eldritch Abominations, but not until the main Yu-Gi-Oh series itself is over.
- Kaiba is a very special case. It's not so much that he refuses to believe in the supernatural... it's just that he refuses to care. Well, again, not until the series is over, anyway. Even then it's more "There's a lot of weirdos out there, but my school can play the game better than them, because I made it."
- Kaiba actually seems to be unable to fully accept the supernatural when he DOES think about it, part of his motivation in the Battle City Arc is to win to prove that it doesn't exist.
- Mr. Satan/Hercule of Dragonball Z was completely oblivious that the superpowered main characters were stronger than him, thinking it all to be a trick (I don't think he did the research on Roshi, Tien, and Goku...) and later on a dream. After the Cell saga, it becomes a Kayfabe put up by Goku and his fellows. Mr. Satan ends up bribing Android 18 to throw a fight against him so as to maintain the illusion that he's the strongest. By the end of the series, with among other things, holding the leash of an ice cream-loving Eldritch Abomination and his beloved daughter marrying the strongest man on the planet, he's fully in the know but helps maintain The Masquerade so as to keep the general population blissfully unaware of the constant danger they're usually in.
- Edward Elric claims to be agnostic. This despite the fact that not only has he met God, but had a few body parts stolen by it.
- This might be more showing off because in the same chapter Ed states that his loss of body parts and Al's body is due to trying to enter God's domain. Also the actions of the Truth are mainly presented as a being punishing humans for their ego.
- It's fair to note that the creature he meets is the being who guards the gate that holds all of the knowledge of the universe. He is never stated to be the creator of the universe, nor a being to be worshipped. His actual statement ("I am what you call the world. Or perhaps the universe, or perhaps God, or perhaps truth, or perhaps all, or perhaps one, and I am also... you.") is more to imply that he doesn't have a true name or form (he is a definition-less creature roughly in the shape of a man). This doesn't make atheism impractical in the setting.
- Father states that the Truth is in fact God, or the closest facsimile in the setting, so its valid to interpret the Truth as such. Ed seems to view it as a divine being whenever he speaks of it.
- Father isn't necessarily correct. The existence of Greed proves that he can be wrong from time to time.
- One of the hardest things for newcomers to Umineko No Naku Koro Ni to get their heads around is that the main character is having a very intense and logical debate denying the existence of a witch that haunts his family's mansion... with the witch in question. And his only tools in this debate? The magic text she grants to him.
- As of the fifth arc, Battler is being even sillier about this. He's still denying the existence of witches even though he's currently the Golden Sorcerer.
- Actually, in EP 6, He's part of the pro-witch side, since he's the new GM
Comic Books
- Ted Knight, Starman, who hung around the JSA for a long time but was still convinced that science explained all of it... somehow. Depending On The Writer, it sometimes did (for a certain definition of "science", anyhow...) And most of the actual "gods" in the setting were actually Sufficiently Advanced Aliens anyway.
- The modern Mr. Terrific in the Justice Society of America is an atheist, and he was questioned about this and gave the example mentioned (that there were godlike, or close enough entities running around who didn't call themselves gods). In the DC Universe, he has a point. The Guardians of Oa, for instance, are pretty much close to gods but no one from an advanced civilization calls them that. Self-styled gods like the New Gods, who include people like Darkseid, Big Barda and Scott "Mr. Miracle" Free are anything but omnipotent and can be killed. As far as he (and probably others like Batman) figures, every god is just a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and not a god god.
- Of course, said gods really are "god" gods; are related to the gods of Olympus and other mythlogies/religions who also exist, and actually are in direct contact with the Source (an aspect of God himself). That should just be pointed out.
- It's worth pointing out that Mr. Terrific is inconsistently written. Sometimes he has excellent reasons for his beliefs and sometimes he doesn't, Depending On The Writer. Some writers like to use him as a Strawman Atheist.
- This is all really kind of stupid when you realize he became the second Mister Terrific after being told the lifestory of the first by Spectre — WHO IS THE WRATH OF GOD
- To be fair to Terrific II, there's been (pseudo) scientific explanations for gods (say hello to the beings from New Genesis!), and a lot of godlike aliens, things with delusions of grandeur. He probably thinks that there's a rational explanation for Spectre and his creator, it just hasn't been found yet.
- Also, Spectre isn't exactly open about his job title. It took how many years before we readers learned?
- As in the intro this comes down to semantics — the only thing that really puts him off "irrational" explanations seems to be the afterlife aspect of this, specifically the possibility that he might meet his dead wife again (and their unborn child).
- Doctor Terrance Thirteen, the Ghost Breaker, is The DCU's preeminent Flat Earth Atheist (literally), earnestly believing that aliens (like Superman), magicians (like Doctor Fate) and supernatural beings (like the Spectre) simply don't exist at all. Needless to say, he's treated unilaterally as a joke. Ironically, in his original appearances before continuity held sway, the ghosts and magicians he went up against always were fake and his skepticism was presented as a virtuous trait; but when continuity started drawing all DC books into one reality, he was first shown the spirit of his dead father by the Spectre, then he was teamed with the very mystical Phantom Stranger, and from then on he was always wrong, simply because the Stranger's very existence demanded it be so. Dr. 13 currently lives outside of the time stream, aware of his own fictional nature; he is teamed with an alien, a vampire, a French caveman, and a talking vampire gorilla with Nazi leanings, his daughter is a rather powerful witch, and he believes none of this.
- In an issue of DC's Checkmate, a wizard describes magic to an atheist skeptic as "the cheat codes to the universe."
- In an issue of Planetary, The Drummer uses almost the exact same explanation to Hand Wave magic into the realm of his infomancer powers.
- In the Marvel Universe, Science Heroes like Iron Man and Hank Pym acknowledge that Thor might be an actual God (though they tend to think of him and all other mythological beings as closer to Sufficiently Advanced Aliens; Thor was actually retconned to be this by Warren Ellis, but who knows if it stuck) and that characters like Doctor Strange, The Beyonder, and the Scarlet Witch are doing something beyond their comprehension. That doesn't mean they're comfortable with not understanding what's going on, don't stop looking for ways to explain it, or that they're specifically religious. The closest we ever get is one or two incidents of straight-up desperation praying after all viable options have been exhausted.
- Quasar started out his series as an athiest/antitheist, but after the seminal "Cosmos In Collision" storyline a couple of years in, he became more of an agnostic ("Maybe I'm not the atheist I thought I was. Maybe I just haven't discovered the god that's right for me..."). This was likely helped by the fact that in said storyline, he died and was resurrected. It should be noted that God in the Marvel Universe is called The One-above-all whoappeared to the Fantastic Four as Jack Kirby, a person they know.
- Touched on by the City Of Heroes comic books. A sizable portion of the eponymous city has been overrun by zombies powered by the magics of ancient evil "gods", another group of mages literally summon ghosts and devils and gods regularly within city limits, and one of the major canon heroes literally makes his armor out of demons. Many heroes still scoff at the concept of Prometheus and Zeus when talking to the former is an important part of making the local phlebotinum work again.
- The hero of The Savage Dragon remained an atheist even after being sent to Hell (by a villain's magic), witnessing a fistfight between God and Satan, and having a conversation with God. His rationale throughout the whole ordeal was that it was just some weird dream. Later storylines have involved Godworld, a planet housing every god of every pantheon, but these gods are treated like any other superpowered menace, with the question of their legitimacy being unimportant to the story.
- Brainiac 5 of the Legion Of Super Heroes. In the postboot continuity he scoffs at his teammate Shikari's feelings about finding a way home during the "Legion Lost" storyline. (In his defense, though, the setting he lives in is at the "sufficiently advanced technology" stage or close to it.)
- The snarky Loveable Rogue drow elf Downer from Kyle Stanley Hunter's comics Downer: Wandering Monster and Downer: Fool's Errand calls himself an atheist, depite the fact that he lives in a Dungeons And Dragons world rife with magic and deities. Downer is a thief, a mercenary and an outcast from mainstream drow society because of his inability to access even the most basic inborn magical abilities that other drow elves have, but mainly because he harbors a special hatred for the Church of Lolth the Spider-Queen, the sadistic goddess that rules over most of drowkind. Downer does not acknowledge or follow any Higher Power, which poses a problem for him as no normal cleric will heal his injuries or resurrect him when he dies; when Downer's foot was shot off by a gun, he went to a necromancer to get a replacement. Downer has been killed several times, twice he was raised from the dead by his boss in the Thieves Guild (quite possibly with the help of a rogue cleric or archivist), and once by an artifact called the Ulolok, an avatar of Chaos, an "entity capable of reshaping the multiverse". On the cosmic chessboard where powerful players were vying for control of the Ulolok and ascension to Godhood, Downer was the wild card, because he was not interested in that power for himself. Sent to deliver the Ulolok to its destination, he first went along with it, but after having being pushed around too much for his taste, he instead went rogue and decided to keep the Ulolok (his little pet "piglet" as he called it) out of everyone else's hands. Ironically, in the end it was Downer himself who ascended to become the God of the Game (for about five minutes) when the Ulolok channeled its power through a slain Downer.
- Batman has an... "interesting" place to fit in here. Many people have tried to pin down Batman's religion, but the only real consensus is that, whatever it is, it's Lapsed to be sure. Especially in recent comics, Batman will acknowledge the existence of "ghosts," "magic," etc., but does not believe they are anything super-natural; even magic has rules and laws, and it only takes sufficient study to find out exactly what those are, according to him.
- As appeared once somewhere on this very wiki, Batman's philosophy goes "If there is a God, he'd better have a really good explanation for this crap."
- Oddly, in the Elseworlds story Crimson Mist (in which VampireBatman, stake removed, goes on a rampage and revokes the Joker Immunity of everyone except the already-dead Joker), we did get something religious out of Batman. (Of course, it's an Elseworlds story, and as such is 100% non-canonical). Gordon expressed the old "may God have mercy on our souls" about-to-die sentiment, and Bats' narration basically said "well, probably on yours, but not mine."
- Goofy, who is usually the most naive and gullible individual in the Disney pantheon, turns into a very persistent sceptic every time he gets a visit an old-style witch named Hazel. No matter how many fantastic tricks Hazel does for him, he absolutely refuses to belive that she is a real witch who can do real magic.
Film
- Not quite atheism, but in Erik the Viking the Christian Missionary who accompanies the Vikings on their quest staunchly refuses to believe in the Norse Gods and mythology... even when they're standing outside the gates of Valhalla. Of course, he can't see it, because he doesn't believe in it, but it certainly causes a great deal of frustration with his crewmates. Turns out to be a plot device when the Missionary is the only one who can leave Valhalla to save them all, since he doesn't believe in it.
- In a somewhat Fridge Logical example, Han Solo from Star Wars. At the start of Episode IV he doesn't believe in the Force, despite the fact that the Jedi were a major power in the galaxy up until about 18 years ago.
- Han's wife, brother-in-law, and all three of his children: all Jedi. Apparently the Force likes irony.
- Don't forget the guy on the Death Star who said, "Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels' hidden fortress—" at which point he is cut off by Darth Vader crushing his windpipe with the Force. However, that could be interpreted as him doubting the power of the Force, rather than its existence.
- Well, he does call it "sorcerer's ways", and not "magic tricks", which does suggest he believes in the Force, but thinks it's not that powerful.
- In the Expanded Universe, the Emperor made atheism the official (un)belief of the Empire to discourage belief in the Force and hopefully prevent the return of the Jedi.
- In Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, the title character gets attacked by a mob of atheists. "You don't know us, because we've never talked to you before!" Yeah, it's a weird movie.
- At the start of Ghostbusters 2, the Ghostbusters have been shut down as frauds and many characters don't believe in ghosts. This is despite New York being attacked by a giant marshmallow man at the end of the first movie.
- The Wizard Of Oz: A man made of tin who's been sent by a wizard to kill a witch with a talking lion doesn't believe in ghosts.
- Why would he? No one dies in Oz. Just ask his old head.
- In the B Movie Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, the eponymous women come to accept that their various nature gods are false after they fail to kill the human astronauts. At the end, they declare the humans' dead robot to be their new god. This ignores the fact that their prayers to the gods, although failing to kill the humans, did cause volcanic eruptions and floods, and killed the robot that they accept as the "strongest god".
Literature
- This crops up a lot in Discworld, where atheists are often hit with lightning on clear and sunny days. The main philosopher on religious nature was "Charcoal" Abraxas (whom you could recognize by the burning smell). Note that Pratchett goes on to create a world of flat earth atheists anyway: Two characters in a total of thirty-odd books are pious for more than being the butt of jokes, one with a healthy dose of strawman. Recurring characters sidestep the lightning issue by the way that the supernatural works on the Disc — knowing that something exists is not the same as believing in it — and treat the gods with indifference and varying amounts of disdain. The gods are generally portrayed as decadent fools who couldn't lift themselves from irrelevance to save the world, and their priests as hedonist fraudsters.
- This is a little unfair. The culture of Ankh-Morpork is distinctly English, and in England it's not the done thing to make a very great public deal about one's religion. The population at large seem to regard the churches as reliably there for births and weddings and deaths, in the same way as the Church of England. Well, unless some showboating conman has recently unearthed a vast fortune supposedly as a gift from the gods, anyway.
- Perhaps not all that unfair — Terry Pratchett is a member of the British Humanist Association
 and while (unlike certain other fantasy writers) he never lets his views on religion override his stories, I don't think it is out there to say faith gets a pretty rough treatment in Discworld books.
- It's certainly fair to say that organised religion gets put down an awful lot in the books (especially Small Gods — go figure), but faith itself is dealt with quite respectfully. Even the staunchiest of anti-theists in the books, Granny Weatherwax, has faith, not in any particular deity, but faith in general.
- Feet of Clay features Dorfl, a golem who will only believe in gods when they can be proven by rational debate. Offler decides to settle this by hitting him with a lightning bolt but Dorfl simply shrugs this off, saying, "I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument". It seems that Dorfl is the gods' worst nightmare — a ceramic atheist. Fireproof!
- In Small Gods, one Ephebian philosopher says (paraphrased) "Once in awhile we get another philosopher in here talking about how the gods don't exist. Then we find their sandals, still smoking with a little sign saying 'Yes we do.'"
- The gods also aren't very fond of being fooled with. A footnote in Hogfather describes one philosopher indulging in the Discworld equivalent of Pascal's Wager... only to wake up in the afterlife surrounded by a lot of deities with pointed sticks who don't like smart-asses.
- In The Science of Discworld, the wizards experimentally create a little round world in a glass container (Earth). Finding that it seems to run on scientific rules rather than gods and magic confuses most of them but delights Ponder Stibbons, who has always been a secret fan of logic.
- Let's not forget atheist Sergeant Simony in Small Gods, who tells the manifested god Om, "Don't think you can get round me by existing!"
- Om himself comments to the effect that an atheist's (such as Simony) belief in a God's non-existence is more desirable than a person who doesn't care. He also compliments Simony on his determination.
- Granny Weatherwax is something of a Flat Earth Skeptic. Despite possessing vast magical powers, most of the "witchcraft" she actually uses involves simple tricks, herbal remedies, and "headology" (like psychology, except its focused solely on manipulating people [for their own good, according to Granny]). At one point she catches a sword in her bare hand, and is highly critical of the onlooking Muggles for assuming she used magic instead of, say, a piece of iron tucked into her palm. Of course, she actually did use magic to stop the sword from cutting her, but she doesn't feel that excuses the crowd's Skepticism Failure.
- Given the stated fact that the Discworld is flat and full of gods, the Omnians could be considered Round-Disc Monotheists along the same theme as Flat Earth Atheists.
- They do eventually give up the Monotheism...sort of. Om is no longer the only god, just the "only god worth worshipping."
- That would be monolatrism.
- In the last The Chronicles Of Narnia novel, The Last Battle, a group of dwarfs who had turned atheist after being burned by the cult of "Tashlan" manages to trap themselves in an inverted Lotus Eater Machine effect when they were brought into Heaven during The End Of Narnia As We Know It.
- The scene is an excellent examination of the Christian point-of-view regarding those who refuse to believe in God not out of any rational position but merely because "We can't be sure, and we don't want to be taken in."
- In defense of the dwarfs, they actually can't see any paradise or heaven or Aslan, so from their point of view it's perfectly rational not to believe in it.
- Which is, of course, the philosophical conundrum of the scene: do the dwarves disbelieve because they can't see, or can they not see because they refuse to believe? In The Great Divorce Lewis argues that this kind of self-justifying spiritual vicious circle, taken to its ultimate extreme, is exactly what Hell is; a continuous refusal to accept the Heaven that's being offered.
- Richard from The Sword Of Truth series denounces the concept of an afterlife where people are rewarded or punished for their actions, because "nobody has ever come back from the grave to describe conditions in the next life." This despite having personally conversed with the spirits of the dead at least three times, and having been adopted into a tribe whose culture revolves, at least in part, around seances to communicate with the spirits of one's ancestors. In one of these, he accidentally called up one of his own ancestors, his evil father (whom Richard had killed), who then escaped back into the world of the living and started wreaking even more havoc. So the character clearly knew better. I wonder who was really talking here?
- I hate to defend Goodkind here, since his writing very obviously does become Anvilicious at a certain point in the series, but in this case I'm pretty sure Richard was talking about that specific details organized religions pass out about what happens when you die. Remember that while spirits, both good and bad, are met, and the Keeper (read: Devil) is considered a real force, there are no specific guidelines or descriptions as to what Heavan and the Underworld are like, or what decides who goes where. All we really know is that making deals with the Keeper buy you a ticket straight to the Underworld (though apparently you can be redeemed), and that being kind and self-sacrificing make you a good spirit upon death. The religion that Richard was speaking out against in the books followed absolutist morality and warned of specific things (like our world's common fire-and-brimstone interpretation of Hell), and that's what he was speaking out against... people who talk about the afterlife without actually knowing about it. Remember that Richard himself, for all his pages-long speeches on morality and ethics, never once describes the afterlife he knows exists, or promises heaven for the good and hell for the bad. He keeps his preachings solely to the world he lives in, because that's the only one he and the people he talks to can interact with and see. It's not really a Flat Earth Athiest unless he's discounting his senses and experiences: in the context of what he says, he just doesn't include them as relevant.
- In David Eddings' Elenium, the Elene people believe in only one God and their religion is almost exactly like the Catholic Church. Their God doesn't respond directly to them and they never see him. However, they do live on a planet with about 1,000 other gods. What is really weird is when the Church Knights (the military arm of the Church) need magic to fight magic, they get four priests from four of the other gods (who, again, the Church says don't exist) to teach them magic. And that magic is basically praying to the other gods (who according to them don't exist) for spells. Other races of people do find the Elene religion strange that way, especially the ones who actually meet their gods. Amazingly enough, Eddings gets it to work.
- This gets even more funny when the protagonists actually meet one of these other gods, who proceeds to tell them that their god is pretty boring at parties. Indeed, their god is acknowledged by other gods as being both real and incredibly powerful. He just never does anything.
- And funnier still when one of the highest ranking members of the Knights makes a comment to one of the Cardinals that maybe they didn't have to go outside the faith for their magics and basically gets told to just roll with it. Of course, that said churchman was once a Knight himself... The Elene God may have had the right idea, as it is repeatedly mentioned by other Gods that he is by far the most powerful thanks to his countless worshipers. That many of the Church Knights seem not to care much about their own God could be seen as funny or worrying.
- Funnier still was the character who told a goddess to her face that he was an atheist, even though he knew that she was a goddess. Granted, he meant that he wasn't affiliated with any particular religion, not that he didn't believe in gods.
- It becomes downright hilarious when you consider that the Big Bad of the first trilogy, whose armies were the entire reason the Church Knights learned magic in the first place, was another god. As was the Big Bad for the first two books of The Tamuli. Which includes, at one point, a reference to untold millions of other gods, a very Pratchettian horde of small unworshipped ones.
- Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever from the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant is a good example of the subtrope of the atheist dropped into a supernatural world. It takes him the whole first trilogy to accept that The Land isn't just a figment of his imagination.
- And even then he doesn't stop believing the Land is a hallucination. He just concludes that it's an important hallucination.
- Fred Clark has pointed out that one primary character in the Left Behind series of novels was in Jerusalem when Israel was attacked with every single conventional and nuclear weapon Russia and Ethiopia possessed. The nukes exploded harmlessly "high in the atmosphere"; planes and conventional missiles were struck down by giant hailstones and fire from the sky, but fell only "between buildings and in deserted streets and fields"; and in the end, "not one casualty was reported in all of Israel". And not a single character considers the possibility that this — it can only be called a miracle — might be the result of divine intervention: "Here you have God appearing center stage," Clark says. "A direct, incontrovertible divine miracle witnessed by millions. Absolute, doubt-destroying, skeptic-shattering proof of the existence of God. There's freaking divine flame in the sky. Yet it produces nary a ripple of wonder, awe or spiritual searching. Alone among the millions who witnessed this event, Buck Williams is slightly prompted to be more 'spiritually attuned.'"
- To be fair it could be anything from aliens to obscene coincidence to secret government technology, in the eyes of a witness. More importantly (for version of Christianity these authors hold to) witnessing a miracle without being explicitly shown who or what caused it wouldn't be likely to cause anyone to suddenly acknowledge that they are sinners, that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, which is the essential principle of Salvation that Fundamentalist Christians hold to. In fact, since the miracle resulted in the protection of Jerusalem, if it were to drive an atheist to believe in God, it would be far more likely to steer them towards Judaism than Christianity.
- Not acknowledgeing they're sinners isn't the issue. Its not considering that this may be evidence for god. And in the unlikely event that anyone did believe secret government technology could do this without a single casualty they've either thought about it for a long time or they're an idiot who's refusing to consider god. Most real athiests are smarter than that.
- Early in Perdido Street Station, Issac expresses just such sentiments.
- Dragaerans or at least the ones Vlad interacts with display signs of this — since they know that the gods are essentially only very powerful sorcerers, they believe in their existence but are less inclined to worship them. This is particularly true of Aliera, who is the daughter of one of the goddesses, Verra. Vlad gradually moves into the category, faced with the odd dichotomy between being taught to worship Verra and that she is constantly watching over him (this may actually be true), but royally pissed at how she has screwed around with his life. The gods themselves — or at least the one who we hear the most from — are somewhat testy at being regarded this way, stating that everybody is wrong about what gods are. Blood gets mentioned, and there's some strong hints that a better definition of godhood may be forthcoming in future books.
- At one point, the extremely powerful, undead sorceress Sethra casually mentions that it's something you can learn, and, she says, "I was once offered godhood." The strong implication being that she turned it down.
- In Stephen King's novella The Mist, the main character refers to a group of "rationalists" who refuse to accept that something very strange and dangerous is happening out in the eponymous mist as "The Flat Earth Society." I don't think the term comes up in the movie, though.
- Mau, the hero of Terry Pratchett's Nation, refuses to believe that the gods are anything more than superstition and lazy thinking — despite being periodically shouted at by the spirits of his ancestors, and courted by Locaha, the god of death. As the old priest points out, though, this may be more anger that the gods have so thoroughly let him down than genuine atheism — after all, being the sole survivor of a tsunami has left him pretty goddamn traumatised.
- The gods themselves seem more like ineffectual echoes than genuine powers of the universe, so disbelieving them can be seen more as disbelief in their hype of themselves, rather than in their subjective existence (all observations of gods in the book is subjective — no omnipotent narrator's solution is presented).
- "Why do they want gods? We need people. That is what I believe. Without other people, we are nothing."
- The Tolnedrans in The Belgariad worship a God that loves money, which sent them down a road to love money more than Gods, so that they're effectively atheist businessmen, and their God couldn't be happier with them. Most Tolnedran characters will cling to their atheism no matter how much the world's supernatural elements prod at them, including a scene where General Varana spends an entire tactical meeting facing away from the other commanders so that he won't have to see the sorcerers he's working with shapeshifting and casting spells.
- Further proof of this trope by the Tolnedren's, according to any Tolnedran, and the entire Tolnedran government, there is no such thing as magic, yet there are also specific laws making it illegal to use the very magic the law makers agree does not exist.
- In The Dresden Files, Sanya is a Russian man who was once possessed by a Fallen Angel and offered redemption and a kickass magic sword from the hand of the Archangel Michael himself. Yet to this day, he claims it might have been Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, a dream he's currently having in a coma, or a hallucination of some sort. On the complete other hand, he takes the existence of Demons, Faeries, and Wizards without much question.
- To be fair, the demons are just beings from another dimension called The Nevernever, the fairies are just creatures from another dimension called Fairie, and Odin, the valkries, and most other gods exist as well. While angels and demons in the christian sense exist, there's still no telling whether God is just this universe's equivalent of the Fairie Queens, or if he really is the creator of all universes and everything in them. Plus, you kind of have to believe in things you've personally killed.
- Even more funny: Queen Mab acknowledges the existence of god. No mention of he's a creator, but she acknowledges he exists and has personal opinions on all his Archangels (she likes Uriel).
- The Mi-Go, HP Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, appear to be an entire race of these, at least according to some Cthulhu Mythos materials. Though they live in a world overflowing with monstrous, supernatural beings with horrific powers, rather than worshiping them as gods like most mortals aware of their existence, they plan to use their science to either control or destroy these entities. In contrast to the hopelessness that surrounds any human confrontation with the Mythos' various cosmic horrors, you get the feeling that the Mi-Go might just have some chance of pulling it off, probably because, unlike humans, their science is not inhibited by old-fashioned limitations like ethics. When you think about it, they may just be the scariest damn things in the entire Mythos.
- Alternatively, they may just have Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. After all, many if not all of the 'supernatural' entities of Lovecraft's creation are themselves 'only' alien lifeforms that humans — and insane cultists in particular — simply easily mistake for gods or demons.
- Jayce in the Instruments of Humanity series considers himself an agnostic even though he belongs to an order founded by angel and has met and killed many a demon himself. He claims it's because he's never personally met an angel or knows anyone who has but he does know that holy water, sacred ground and blessed weapons work because he uses them on a regular basis!
- Jalil in the Everworld books is a teenaged atheist from this world sucked into a world where various mythological deities are real. He's fairly smart about it, but more-or-less claims them to be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and/or that the laws of physics in this world are just different and assumed to be "magic."
- Interestingly, this series plays with the trope with another character: April, a devout Christian brought to Everworld. While she seems more open to displays of the obviously supernatural, she also claims the various deities aren't "real gods" while at the same time having a small crisis of faith.
- Jalil's issues are further examined by the other characters' opinions. The acid-tongued, magic-loving Senna in particular has a few interesting things to say about it. "No wonder you don't believe in God or gods: Thou shalt have no other gods before Jalil."
- Allan Carpentier, the hero of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, believes that the world he finds himself in is just a copy of Dante's Inferno built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. By the end of the first book he has become convinced otherwise but has yet to decide whether or not God Is Evil.
- In Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, all the characters are robots (though that word is considered obscene). Most of them, based on design schematics and such, believe that they were created by human beings. A few, however, believe in the holy doctrine of Evolution, and its prophets Darwin, Dawkins, and Gould.
- In Warbreaker, Lightsong is a god who doesn't believe in his own religion. He has an epiphany towards the end. Another character, Siri, is married to the God King but doesn't believe in him. In both cases, though, they believe in the existance of the potential deities, just not their divinity.
- In Towing Jehovah by James Morrow, God Is Dead and his two-mile corpse is floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The Vatican hires a disgraced oil tanker captain to tow God's body to the Arctic where it can be kept on ice before it rots away or is devoured by sharks. One of their primary antagonists is the Central Park West Enlightenment League, who upon hearing the news, try to destroy the corpse with bombs to remove concrete evidence of a deity. One of their members does remark if they were truly committed to scientific reasoning they should try to study the corpse and accept the possibility they'd been wrong all along, but the majority reject her.
- Given how vastly the notion of God physically floating dead somewhere reduces His stature, you'd think it would be the Vatican not accepting and indeed trying to destroy the evidence.
- In Caitlin R. Kernan's novels, the characters spend a suspicious amount of time fervently denying anything supernatural is happening... including when they're blasting ghouls into chunky salsa with shotguns. Former psychic detective Deacon Silvey is a repeat offender.
- In the Kitty Norville series, the Masquerade was broken in the first book of the series. Kitty's House of Horrors is the seventh book, set about four years after the start of the series, and is probably the first time the reader meets a person who doubts the existence of the supernatural. Author Conrad Garrett argues that people who claim to have supernatural powers are frauds or crazy, that video footage of a werewolf shapeshifting is CGI, and that CDC reports on were-people and vampires are the result of collusion with drug companies who want to make money off the conditions. He only changes his mind when he sees Kitty shapeshift.
- In Christopher Stasheff's Her Majesty's Wizard, an agnostic from Earth is transported to another world where he discovers not only his magical powers, but the unequivocal Judeo-Christian deity (God) and opponent (Satan) who directly and consistently interfere in human affairs. Priest's blessings have direct and easily detectable effects, the hero interacts directly with his personal devil who tries to drag him into hell, he runs into at least one saint who tells him what to do after transporting him from a wrecked church into a fully restored one and back again, the act of being knighted by a king (who rules by divine right, and who happens to be mostly dead at the time) actually confers martial abilities, and at the end after the chief bad guy is defeated we see hordes of devils stream out of the sky and compete for his soul, only being banished by the intervention of priests. Stasheff pointed out in the afterword that medieval people saw God and the Devil everywhere in their daily lives, and this book is an attempt to show that where most fiction of this type completely ignores this aspect of their lives.
Live Action TV
Theater
- In Hamlet, the title character gives a speech in which he calls death "The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns" in spite of the fact that he's spoken with the ghost of his father. Plot Hole, anyone?
- Well, a good part of Hamlet's indecision and inaction stems from his questioning whether he genuinely saw a ghost or had a vision, rather than just hallucinating or being misled. The fact that he believes that "no traveler returns" from the afterlife would definitely contribute to his doubt of the ghost's reality, so he may well escape this trope.
- The problem with this is that the ghost was seen by at least four other people — Barnardo, Francisco, and Marcellus and Horatio before Hamlet ever encounters it, which strongly suggests against the hallucination theory, and Horatio is not only Hamlet's dearest friend but a rational scholar.
- More obviously, there's the popular conception that ghosts never did go to "the undiscovered country" — they're only sticking around because there's Unfinished Business, and they don't return when they cross over. Dying and becoming a ghost would thus not be representative of what death and the afterlife are like.
- To confuse the matter, Old Hamlet explicitly states that he is "Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires". He's either in Hell or Purgatory, but Hamlet forgets when he monologues about his own fear of death.
- Which makes this yet another example of Shakespeare introducing Protestant vs. Catholic theology into his plays. If the Catholics were right, there is a Purgatory, and ghosts exist — those dead but not in either Heaven or Hell, allowed to wander and deal with Unfinished Business (usually at night or between certain hours, according the folk Catholicism of the 1600s). If the Protestants (including the Church of England) were right, there is no such place as Purgatory, and the dead go immediately to the afterlife. The so-called ghost could be his father's dead spirit, in the religion of Denmark at the time. Or, in the religion of England and Wittenberg (where Hamlet had been living), it could be a demon with the purpose of tempting Hamlet junior into the combined sin of regicide and avunculicide.
Tabletop Games
- A few Dungeons And Dragons settings have examples of this.
- The Eberron setting avoids this trope entirely. Divine Magic is the product of faith, Arcane Magic is just a force of the world. Someone with the proper training could have divine magic if he believed enough. It's even possible for clerics to turn from their religion and keep their spells. In fact, some mortals (and undead) have set up faiths centered around them, and their clerics get divine magic. Gods do not take physical form (except for one, The Traveler, and even then its more the stuff of myth, like in ancient Greece). There are miracles who COULD be the work of the gods, but that is opened to interpretation. In the setting, the actual existence of gods is up to a character's belief, as the gods do not act as proactively as they do in the Forgotten Realms, for example. Fiends are the original occupants of the material plane, and their religious implications are downplayed. Angels and Devils are just outsiders. There are even some books that suggest the gods are based on the legends of certain Dragons.
- In the Forgotten Realms, there are still atheists. This is despite the fact that gods regularly take physical forms and rampage around the country side, and that new gods rise while others die in every decade. Really, the existence of gods would be no more questionable then that of President Obama... Incidently, there's a Fate Worse Than Death reserved for Atheists (and those who, ironically, decide to worship the Overgod Ao).
- Or if they believe in the existence of the gods in general but doesn't choose a specific patron deity. Or their patron deity happens to be dead. Or if this patron deity rejects the worshipper for whatever reason. The fate in question: Ones soul is strapped to the Wall of the Faithless and slowly digested by it over the course of milennia.
- In the new edition, an entire continent as well as two countries has been brought over from a world where gods haven't existed for about 30,000 years, so anyone from there might have a justification.
- In The World of Greyhawk, Oerth, the native clergy of the Flanaess is opposed by the so-called Sceptics movement established primarily in the County and Duchy of Urnst. The more extreme members of the movement believe that the gods of Oerth are pure fiction and that their clerics are frauds, with clerical magic not granted by divine sources but coming from within like arcane magic or psionics. The more moderate Sceptics admit the existence of beings called gods, but they claim that these gods did not actually create Oerth and furthermore many of them started out as mortals who ascended to demigod status and later to godhood. Therefore the Sceptics deny these gods their faith. They're little more than a fringe group, and the one time a Sceptic gained political power, it turned out to be a disaster — one of the previous Dukes of Urnst drastically raised church taxes when he took the throne, caused a series of riots in the nation's capital, and ended up dying when no cleric would heal him after he was wounded in battle with mountain raiders.
- Since Planescape is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting this is common, although the Athar tends to be more Nay Theist than this, there are others who are not. (the fact that the Powers, while existing, aren't neccessarily the prime movers and shakers of the setting helps) there is also an adventure involving killing a god by *inducing* Flat Earth Atheism: A Mind Control device that you could use to give a suggestion to the entire population of a prime-material plane that their God did not exist... Which would make that belief come true.
- In Ravenloft, atheism is common in Lamordia, a domain where mad-scientist-style skepticism prevails. In other domains, heretical philosophers sometimes speculate that divine magic is actually derived from the Dark Powers, rather than the gods it's commonly attributed to; however, as most ordinary people have never even heard of the DPs, theirs remains a minority opinion. (Out of character, it's left up to the DM to choose.)
- In Warhammer 40000, the Emperor of Mankind wanted to eliminate all religious beliefs from the Imperium and make mankind trust in science and logic. All was going well until some of his sons sided with the Chaos Gods and started a galactic-wide rebellion. The cosmic irony is that after these events the Emperor became the official divinity of the Imperium, and it seems he is now forced to work by his faithful people to save mankind from extinction...
- The Tau also qualify — they believe in the power of logic and science, and refuse to believe in the idea of the truly supernatural, even after repeated battles with Chaos, the Eldar, and the Sisters of Battle. Bear in mind that these races employ, respectively, daemons and humans mutated by the Dark Gods (and sometimes both in the same creatures), living avatars of a war god present as figures of molten iron carrying a giant sword and an ever-bleeding hand, and what can only be described as divine magic to the point of one of their heroines self-resurrecting and having a few beings tantamount to angels.
- There are alternative explanations (they're wrong, but that doesn't mean they don't exist). Mutant humans could have been physically modified like Space Marines, some forms of daemon could be aliens with teleport gear, and Soulstorm, if it existed, would have shown the Tau hunting for the technology behind the Battle Sister acts of faith (needless to say, without finding it).
- Um, isn't it less that the Tau don't believe in things like Chaos and psykers and more that they're unfamiliar with them? Being inherently less psionic than humans, there are no Tau psykers, so they've never had any experience with things like daemons. They aren't disbelievers, they're outright ignorant. Hence the short story where a Tau army believes they slew Slaanesh- they had no idea about the existence of Chaos Space Marines at the time, so they were unware that Slaanesh was the name of that band's patron deity as opposed to their commander. It's this ignorance that makes them so dangerous in the eyes of the Imperium; they consider the Tau Too Dumb To Live.
- In Warhammer, the citizens of the Empire (no, not that Empire) largely refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Skaven, a race of maniacal subterranean ratmen. Clearly in a world populated by Dragons, Giants, Lizardmen, the living dead, and goat-headed mutants, three-foot-tall intelligent bipedal rats are just too much. All this after the Skaven have openly attacked the Empire (mostly Middenland) a number of times, and just recently have tried to NUKE Middenheim, Middenland's capital.
- According to some sources, the problem is not of their existence, but the idea that they have their own civilization instead of being just another form of mutant beastman.
- The Skaven myth is one of the more dubious points of the setting — there are supposed to be more Skaven than humans, they like to abduct cattle and/or humans for slaves and chow, they've fought several wars and they're openly acknowledged by the elves and dwarves allied to the Empire as well as some other human nations directly at the Empire's borders.
- The RPG sourcebook about the Skaven tried to make some sense of it and summed its report up with the words "There are two myths about the Skaven: The first is that they don't exist. The second is that anyone believes in the first."
- You also got Necoho the Doubter, the chaos god of... atheism...
- The Palladium RPG Beyond The Supernatural featured Nega-Psychics, whose unbelief was so strong it actually (if ironically) disrupts any magic or psionics around them. In Rifts, however, where it's kind of hard to disbelieve a dragon staring you in the face, it became more of a matter of defiance.
- Similarly, GURPS has the Mundane advantage, which at its highest level will enforce dull normality around its owner by turning werewolves and aliens into guys in rubber masks and magic into cheap fireworks.
- The same thing appears in Unknown Armies. There is an NPC whose skepticism is so strong, he has an antimagic aura. Which, in turn, makes any attempt to prove the existence of the Unnatural to him impossible.
Video Games
- Planescape: Torment has the NPC Fall-From-Grace who, in a world brimming with gods and monsters and other such things, is agnostic. She's the party cleric. She's also a chaste succubus and proprietress of a brothel that doesn't involve sex. It's that kind of game.
- Note that Planescape is a Clap Your Hands If You Believe setting, where belief literally shapes reality (and clerical magic is just one form of reality-shaping). Grace draws her power from the Sensate Philosophy.
- In Metal Gear Solid 2, Ocelot loudly decries the existence of the supernatural, despite the fact that he used to work with an Ax Crazy floating psychic, a shaman with flying tattoos, an arguable vampire who could pin people to their shadows, a ridiculously old man who only comes to life in battle and can communicate with forest spirits, a man who could shoot bees, and a ghost; once manipulated an elaborate chain of events involving two (arguably three) non-floating psychics; and is routinely being possessed by a ghost living in Ocelot's transplanted arm. However, this line was added by the translator; in the original Japanese, he only says that technology can replicate the supernatural.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4, however, and as specified in the database, the "possessed by his arm" thing turned out to be real during the events of MGS2, but fake in MGS4. In between he has the arm removed, but he maintains the illusion through hypnosis and NANOMACHINES. Apparently possessing/getting possessed by people is in the blood. Oh, and Vamp's powers are equal parts nanomachine/badassery.
- There happens to be an
atheist antitheist in Black And White. None of the godly power you throw at him can persuade him. But that's all right, tossing him about is quite amusing.
- What's rather interesting to note is that he was a significant source of belief anyway, if used properly; while he claimed not to believe in you, you could pick him up anywhere he was — even if he was outside of your control, which is something you can't do for anything else in the game, except for your creature. He also extended a small radius of influence around him, so in effect, he was a believer, he just didn't like you.
- While not god, in the 3rd Ace Attorney, Edgeworth's disbelief in Spirit Channeling is odd, seeing as how he has sat across from a dead women (who he prosecuted the murder of!) in court...
- It's possible this is less honest skepticism and more a kind of willful denial, due to the role that spirit channeling played in the DL-6 trial. It's easier to believe that spirit channeling is fraud than to accept that his father's departed spirit was called back to testify about his own murder and they still couldn't get a conviction...
- The 08 version of Prince Of Persia featured a protagonist who didn't believe in either of the two gods, despite the all the demons he fights and seeing one of said gods try to escape from his prison. When you see inky blackness spilling into the sky and corrupting the planet, and then deny that your antagonist is real, you're just being thickheaded.
- In World of Warcraft, Gnome characters are limited to classes that practice mundane martial arts (warriors and rogues) or arcane magic (magi and warlocks). The reason? They are a race of primarily atheists who can't play any class that requires faith in a higher power, such as the Light or nature spirits. Despite living with and fighting alongside priests, paladins, druids, and the like.
- Gannayev from Mask of the Betrayer adamantly refuses to believe that gods exist and has been known to get into massive bitchfights with the priests of Kelemvor over it (one of which you get to jump into. We suggest you don't try to prove Gann wrong, if you value your relationship-related stat boosts). He persists in this delusion even after he meets not one but two gods in person (or switches to Nay-Theism, he doesn't claify which).
- To be fair, Gann seems to think they are simply very powerful spirits, in line with Okku, the so-called Bear God who freely admits he's just a powerful spirit.
- The player character in Morrowind ends up as a sort of atheist god: NP Cs think you're a god, but you seem unconvinced.
- The Dwemer fit this as a species of Flat Earth Atheists. They acknowledge the existence of powerful beings such as the Daedra, but do not accept them as gods. It's not an unreasonable stance to take in truth.
- One Dwemer tale tells of a Dwemer who tricks Azura with a box containing a mirror. After she correctly guesses what the box holds, he opens the box and the mirror makes it appear as if the box was empty, 'proving' she is fallible and so not a god. He dies that night, a smile on his face. Of course, the Dunmer tell a different story: Azura sees through the tricks and strikes him down there and then... I prefer the Dwemer version.
- In the sequal, Oblivion, Ilsi God-Hater appears to be this at first. turns out she actually worships Mehrunes Dagon, and doesn't want anyone to guess.
''"The gods don't do a damn thing. Do they even exist? How could anyone tell? Daedra Lords, sure. They exist. They do things. Bad things, mostly, but things you can see. The gods? They don't do a damn thing. So why do we build big chapels and sit around and mumble, and ask them to save us from this and that? It's stupid. And chapels and priests and folks grovelling on their knees, they're stupid, too."
- The plot for the tenth Touhou game, Mountain of Faith, involves a god attempting to collect the faith of everyone in Gensokyo because she believed the dwindling faith its inhabitants had in its deities would cause massive chaos (that said faith would be an enourmous boost to her power was apparently just a bonus). Considering gods in Gensokyo not only have human-like forms but regulary chat with humans and youkai alike (or pelt them with danmaku, whichever seems more fun), either its inhabitants are this trope or don't find it necessary to have faith in beings that are readily defeated by a Cute Witch and a Miko.
- Ghostbusters again! By the time of the Video Game, the events of the two films — including two massive ghostly uprisings in New York, a God of Destruction in the form of a marshmallow mascot attacking the city, the Museum of Natural History being engulfed by goo, and the Statue of Liberty taking a stroll through Manhattan — mean that everyone believes the Ghostbusters are the real thing... except Obstructive Bureaucrat Walter Peck, who continues to believe they're nothing but dangerous frauds pulling an impossibly elaborate hoax. It's implied he might be a Gozer cultist that's just faking it to cover his sinister true motivations. Turns out he's not, and after the events of the game, which include another Gozer attack, a supernatural event at the Museum of Natural History at which Peck is personally present and is actually possessed, an island rising out of the Hudson River then sinking back into it again, another massive ghostly uprising — this time including Central Park turning into a massive otherworldly graveyard, and being personally abducted by the ghost of Ivo Shandor who had been possessing the Mayor and personally witnessing the first half of the Ghostbusters' battle with him... he still thinks they're nothing more than dangerous frauds that need to be shut down.
- Final Fantasy X has Rikku, who in world of crazy creatures and the like, refuses to believe that the "Farplane" is actually the afterlife, insisting that it's just an illusion. This is a belief of all Al Bhed, in fact.
- It's possible, maybe even probable, that her view is incorrect, but it's not crazy, or even obviously wrong. It doesn't strike me as unambiguously clear who's right about this.
- In Star Ocean, after you've visited the king of Van and been told the legend of the Demon World, Iria and Ronixis (your two teammates who are from a scientifically advanced Earth) have a private talk about gods and demons and superstition, and why they shouldn't just accept the supernatural elements of planet Roak and instead look for logical explanations. This flies in the face of the fact that Iria can shoot energy from her hands, while Ronixis has put aside his starship captain comission to become a powerful Heraldric mage who calls down lightning and fire on his foes.
Web Original
- Spider Cliff: Eliza, and to a lesser extent Barlow.
- In a Shortpacked! strip, a transformer claims to be an atheist. This wouldn't be a problem, except they live on their planet-sized creator.
- This is actually based on Jetfire's personality in the comics. It's a long-running implicit joke that he believes in some odd kind of evolution which is obviously ridiculous (although the levers-and-pulleys thing was actually canon at one point). The above comic is not exaggerating.
- The fact that he was made by a very intelligent designer (Shockwave) in the marvel comics makes this even funnier.
- Likewise, Dreadmoon of the Insecticomics is an atheist and skeptic. Somehow he manages to reconcile this with the fact that his commander has an immortal spark, people can and have been brought back from the dead, and they have done battle against the powerful minions of a chaos god who is the closest thing Transformers have to the Devil.
- And now they're doing battle against the chaos god himself. This does not seem to have caused any crises of faith.
- Cleric from 8-Bit Theatre. In his line of work he can't afford to show favourites.
- According to a recent strip the gods like this attitude since they know he isn't trying to suck up to them.
- 1/0 featured the character Marcus, who became so angry at the comic's creator Tailsteak that he willingly acquired a fourth wall — an inability to hear Tailsteak, see the comic's layout, have real-world knowledge, basically to realise in any way he was a character in a comic. Marcus remained stolidly convinced he was the Only Sane Man despite Tailsteak's continuous creation of life, inventing laws of physics, and generally interfering with the comic's world in an obvious fashion. Ironically, to rationalise all the ghosts and golems and such, Marcus eventually had to create his own increasingly-convoluted religion. Eventually, he reaches such levels of Strawman Political (very clearly representing atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, and polytheism at various points) that Petitus chews out the Christian author for his Anvilicious Author Tract.
- Roger, the main character of Go Fish, is a great example of this trope. Despite being recruited to be a god's contact on Earth, meeting various gods and angels, and actually visiting the realm where the gods live, he still identifies himself as an atheist in a recent comic.
- In The Last Days Of Foxhound, Psycho Mantis, who is a psychic, refuses to believe in ghosts. Lampshaded in the last 3 panels here.
- Exterminatus Now: After getting chewed out by Virus for trying to arrest a
Jehovah's Dagohma's Witness, Eastwood reveals that he does not believe in gods, demons, or the supernatural, despite personally witnessing the existence of such as part of his job. "It's easy. All it takes is a little faith."
- In Sluggy Freelance Kent refuses to believe in vampires even after seeing several for himself. It's later theorized, however, that Kent does realize vampires are real, but admitting that would also mean admitting he was wrong. Ain't no way that's gonna happen.
- Dibunquer in Bruno The Bandit, somewhat modelled after James Randi. He debunks everything in a world that is obviously full of magic, though he also represents a sensible sceptical viewpoint sometimes. Eventually he realises the truth, which is that magic does work in the world except when he destroys it by making people disbelieve it, but that doesn't ultimately deter his sceptical ways any. He eventually disbelieves a manifestation of Ailix to His face, but still comes across as more reasonable than the pope, who first gets the inspiration to start revering rubber duckies (Ailix got summoned in the middle of a bath, and the pope fixates on what He happens to have on Him at the time instead of what He's saying) and then gets all "sceptical" himself when Ailix asks him to change his ostentatious ways. Can you tell it's a satire yet?
- The mechans of Tales Of MU are proponents of the scientific method in a world where, when you try to eff the ineffable, the ineffable effs back.
- Tales Of MU also has a god, Arkhanos, who encourages their followers to not be 100% sure of said deity's (or any other deity's) godhood. Or gender, for that matter. Arkhanites like to point out that while divine magic works and gods have made well-documented appearances, it's possible that they're simply much better at magic than "mortals."
- The best example of this is Steff, who is a follower of both Mechanism and and Arkhanism despite being in a relationship with both a half-demon and a semi-divine harvest spirit who regularly converses with her creator deity.
- It can be argued that the scientific method should still work in that setting — if you demonstrably have gods and magic, you simply need to account for them in your theories because anything else would be unscientific. Of course, Mack is not the most unbiased of narrators in the first place...
- It should also be noted that the MUniverse contains multiple religions, each with its own distinct (and is some cases conflicting) mythology/theology, all of which are apparently real. So it's fairly easy to see how people might get confused. To quote the author:
In most fantasy worlds, because "the gods are real", there’s one set of myths which are only myths in that they’re mythic in scope... they’re essentially true and everybody knows them and agrees on them, and if there’s any dissent it’s a big story point because either the dissenters are eeeeeevillll or they’re secretly the good guys. Even if the elves have one set of myths and the dwarves have another, it’s only because they have different gods and their myths only deal with their corner of the world. With everything else they fight about, you rarely see the dwarves and elves falling out because one believes the world was made from the bones of Fireaxe Grimbeer and the other thinks it was fashioned in seven days by Emostar Vaguelygay, because those gods are real in the story and therefore not subject to this kind of disagreement. I don't really buy the logic there. Our world is made of real and we can’t often agree on any two things inside it. Ignoring the possibility of any actual divine/supernatural stuff existing in our world, all of our conflicting myths and legends came about because of real, (at one time) verifiable events: wars, people, seasons, animals, whatever. Adding another class or two of things to those lists wouldn't change the essential nature of the beast, which is that 1) we like to make stuff up when we don’t know something and 2) we frequently don't know shit.
- The shared universe Metamor Keep has Virmir, a powerful mage who doesn't believe gods exist in a world where priests summon the gods to bargain with them for favors on a semi-regular basis. Even more ironically it's suggested that his grandfather is some kind of demon or minor god.
- Though Metamor's resident priestess seems to share some beliefs with the Arkhanites mentioned above.
Western Animation
- In The Simpsons, although God and Jesus Christ have been shown to exist, and Homer has had numerous run-ins with the Almighty, he's still able in the episode "HOM-R" to construct a mathematical proof of God's nonexistence while trying to devise a flat tax proposal. This is of course just another of the many times where the show openly ignores continuity for the sake of a quick joke.
- In the South Park episode "Cartmanland", Kyle loses faith in God. This is despite the fact that the boys have met Jesus and Satan in the past. In one episode, they even meet God itself. Although, it could be that he just believes that God doesn't care, as opposed to God doesn't exist. Never mind that he is Jewish, while knowing that Jesus exists and has holy powers. Also, it is South Park.
- Additionally, Mohamed, Buddha and Joseph Smith also exist and have
holy powers superpowers. They Fight Crime!
- The real God is, for lack of a better description, a bunyip.
- Mandy is rendered immune to the Tooth Fairy's powers by revealing, to his face, that she doesn't believe in him.
- Brian of Family Guy is a professed atheist despite the fact that God and Jesus are frequently seen in Quahog and the former once smited the family with Exodus-like plagues. However, it is Family Guy. And he is an Author Avatar.
- What's interesting is in the episode "If I'm Dyin', I'm Lyin'" Brian is the one who points out the plagues to Peter and then slaps him declaring that the reason things are happening is "God...is...pissed!"
- Not to mention in the "Surfin' Bird" episode, Jesus had dinner at the Griffin household, among other interactions.
- This reached its height of ridiculousness when Jesus showed up at the Griffin house again just to tell them that all religions are crap. Brian then gloated that he'd been proven right... because Jesus said so.
- Albeit it's only in the second episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one wonders how Sokka can express such skepticism as Katara states that the Avatar reincarnates through the four nations, when Sokka's new best friend is the Avatar.
- To be fair, in a world where people can control elements, believing in a person born with the power to control all 4 is fairly easy, but believing that he or she is the reincarnation of the previous guy is another thing. Regardlessly, he quits doubting the existence of spirits once he actually spends time in the spirit world and goes from denial to flat out not caring.
- Pick any Christmas movie or Christmas Special in which Santa Claus is real and actively delivers presents to a large fraction of the world's children, yet the vast majority of adults do not believe in him. Let me review the situation: Mysterious packages show up under Christmas trees that Mom and Dad certainly don't remember buying. Little Sally in the hovel next door ends up with an expensive doll in her stocking despite her parents barely being able to afford necessities and keeping the doors locked for fear of burglars. Yet despite these otherwise inexplicable occurrences, people dismiss Santa as a fairy tale or "stuff for babies."
- Worse, in the Christmas movies/specials where Santa Claus not only exists, but doesn't even actually hide his existence — to the point where you'd easily be able to see the man just by waiting outside on Christmas Eve, or even by telephoning the North Pole.
- The same would apply to the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, where they also actively deliver presents to children.
- Doc Saturday from The Secret Saturdays actively disbelieves in magic despite being married to someone who uses magic (and wields a magical fire sword), having a son with supernatural powers, and continually doing battle against things like evil alternate reality doppelgangers, killer salt monsters, and an evil Large Ham out to conquer the world by unleashing a mythical god of evil.
- In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Squidward says he doesn't belive in ghosts (or more specifically the Flying Dutchman), which is odd considering the Flying Dutchman appeared to the entire town in the Halloween episode and Squidward was zapped over and over and tortured by the Flying Dutchman in another episode.
- To be fair though, Spongebob has almost no continuity worth mentioning.
- Another Batman example comes from the Batman Beyond episode "Revenant". An invisible force is terrorizing the school, which Terry's friends think is a ghost. This conversation ensues:
Bruce: These people believe anything they can't explain is magic.
Terry: Naturally, you don't believe in that kind of thing.
Bruce: Of course, I do. I've seen it all. Demons ( Etrigan), witch boys ( New Batman Adventures ep "The Demon Within"), immortals ( Ra's al-Ghul), zombies ( Solomon Grundy). But this thing ... I don't know. It just feels so ... high school.
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