The Epistemic Circularity Of Atheism

By Leo Gura - July 2, 2025

Atheism is epistemically circular and irrational. Here’s how:

An atheist starts by assuming that God is a silly idea held by dumb, indoctrinated, irrational people. Then, any time this atheist encounters talk of God, he sees the person talking about God as dumb, indoctrinated, and irrational. His mind is too closed to imagine the possibility that some of the people talking about God are not dumb, indoctrinated, nor irrational, but actually speaking truth from direct experience. So any argument the atheist hears from anybody talking to him about God is interpreted by the atheist as coming from an obviously irrational person. The atheist therefore never takes seriously any arguments or explanations of God because obviously they must be false since God cannot be real. So every discussion of God the atheist hears further validates in his mind that he is right and that God is silly and irrational. This reaches such a degree of circularity that even if the atheist ever experiences God first-hand, for himself, he will dismiss the experience as madness, mental illness, or hallucination — because obviously God cannot be real. The atheist is willing to accept anything before accepting that God is real — including his own madness.

In this way atheism becomes an self-sealing epistemic bubble which feels completely real and rational from inside the atheist’s mind, but has no reality whatsoever. It never occurs to the atheist to go back and doubt or question his original assumption. It never occurs to the atheist that his initial assumption is shaping how he sees and interprets all evidence and arguments for God. If you assume God is silly, irrational, unscientific, and impossible, then any evidence or argument you encounter for God will be interpreted by your mind as silly, irrational, unscientific, and impossible. To escape this self-reinforcing epistemic trap you must gain enough consciousness and objectivity to see that whether God exists or not is an open, empirical question. Whether God is unscientific or irrational must be seen as a legitimate open question, not assumed! But atheists do not have enough epistemic objectivity to see the question that way. They just assume that God is impossible. From there, all their thinking and interpretation is confirmation biased. Ironically, this entire epistemic mechanism of atheism is irrational, since it is irrational to not objectively question one’s metaphysical assumptions and to trust interpretations based on unproven assumptions.

The solution to this problem is to be truly neutral and unbiased about your starting assumptions. You cannot start inquiry by assuming that God is a silly thing. You have to treat it seriously, otherwise you are introducing prejudice into inquiry. You have be seriously open to the possibility that the person you’re speaking to understands reality better than you, even though from your POV the person seems irrational. You have to take seriously the possibility that people seem irrational to you not because they are irrational, but because you are projecting your irrationality onto them.

Grasp this doozy: If you are irrational, rational people who try to talk you out of your irrationality will seem irrational to you while you feel rational to yourself.

Irrational people do not feel irrational to themselves, they feel rational to themselves. And to them, rational people feel irrational. So you cannot avoid irrationality in this simple-minded way that atheists attempt. As an atheist you should be skeptical of your own claims to rationality. After all, how do you know your mind isn’t tricking you into believing that you are rational when you aren’t? Why don’t you doubt whether your mind is portraying your own rationality accurately to you? See, the atheist is actually a piss-poor skeptic. Because a serious skeptic would doubt his own rationality. Of course this is something atheists never do. Atheists just assume that atheism is rational. No. It isn’t. There is nothing rational about being epistemically prejudiced. That’s what atheism boils down to: prejudice against a certain kind of worldview. This is why you cannot talk an atheist out of his worldview. Because it was a prejudice from the start. Talking people out of atheism is like talking people out of racism. You can’t do it because they will never even admit they are prejudiced. To them their prejudice just feels like objective reality. A Nazi genuinely feels that whites are objectively superior to blacks and Jews. And an atheist genuinely feels that God is impossible. There’s no solution to this level of pigheadedness.

See, a hardcore atheist reading this post will interpret it as a post written by an irrational, unscientific, delusional, indoctrinated, religious excuse-maker. That’s what happens when you assume you’re smarter than everyone else. As it turns out, atheism is smarter than fundamentalist religion, but it is not as smart as mysticism. The atheist is so fixated on the first part of that statement to the exclusion of the second.

If you care about truth, you have to actually take seriously the possibility that you are wrong. There is an even deeper, broader circularity at work here, which is this: Your mind assumes that it’s right. Then your mind look out at the world and interprets everything you see to fit the idea that you are right. Any point where you are wrong, your mind dismisses as wrong because your mind always assumes you’re right. And so in this way you always feel like you’re right, simply because your mind is blind to all the ways you are wrong by assuming everyone pointing out your wrongness is wrong.

“But Leo! What about you? Why don’t you assume that you’re wrong?” I already did. I used to be an atheist. How do you think I broke free? By taking seriously the possibility that I was wrong.

I consider that I’m wrong all the time. So much so that it would it sicken most people. You think I reached my position by believing? NO! I got here by doubting. God is realized by doubt, not belief. When you doubt all human ideas to death, the end result is God. The problem with the atheist is that he’s a shitty, prejudiced doubter, and too epistemically unconscious to understand it — and anyone who comes along to correct him in this matter, he will dismiss as an irrational religious idiot. This is called biting the hand that feeds you.

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