Atheists reject that God exists and agnostics do not know if God exists. What is the word for people who do not care if God exists? Does some word moonlight for that or is there a specific term (apart from the usual adjectives like indifferent, etc.)?
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By "don't care" do you mean are indifferent to the possibility that God exists or believe that the existence (or not) of God makes no discernible difference to the world as they know it? I doubt that a single word can cover both possibilities.– FortiterCommented Mar 7, 2013 at 12:52
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@Fortiter: The first one.– BravoCommented Mar 7, 2013 at 13:03
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3Here is an article that may be of interest to you: Atheism = untheism + antitheism– Kit Z. Fox ♦Commented Mar 7, 2013 at 22:15
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3 Answers
There is a portmanteau word apatheism (combining apathy and theism/atheism) which may suffice, providing the agent noun apatheist.
The Wikipedia article lists this indifference as pragmatic atheism, practical atheism and apathethic agnosticism, any of which may be preferable to a portmanteau neologism.
answered Mar 7, 2013 at 10:47
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Upvoted. But I would also point out that I find "apatheist" offers succinctness and fairly decent interpretability. Commented Mar 7, 2013 at 11:02
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2And then there's those who are both: The Church of the Apathetic Agnostic Motto: We don't know, and we don't care.– T.E.D.Commented Mar 8, 2013 at 3:20
I've heard "apatheist" used in this sense.
An additional category that may fit the "I don't care" category—besides the apathetic position that "I am bored by and lack interest in religion"—is the position that "the central subject that religion purports to address (namely, God) is inherently incomprehensible and thus irrelevant to human life." This view has been elaborated under two terms: theological noncognitivism and ignosticism. Wikipedia has entries for both terms, as well as for the umbrella term nontheism, which seems to apply to any theory that denies a positive faith in God's existence.
Fundamentally, the theological noncognitivist and the ignostic deny the importance of theological questions; they "don't care" because they have concluded that nothing knowable or meaningful lies at the core of religion to care about.
answered Mar 7, 2013 at 19:41
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With all due respect to you and the Wikipedia authors, theological noncognitivism and ignosticism are terms that are used by only a few authors, and are unlikely to be understood outside the context of discussing their work. This kind of a position is, in fact, much better known in the version formulated by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic than in the versions mentioned in the Wikipedia, but Ayer did not give that position any particular label. The position is, incidentally, that religious claims are literally meaningless, not merely unimportant or irrelevant to human life.– jsw29Commented Aug 24, 2020 at 23:12