Unfortunately, much of the rest of the volume simply confirms the impression, if not the fact, that atheism needs theism to give it life.
So a global denial of their veridicality would amount to an ontological claim that is, if not synonymous with atheism, at least antagonistic to theism.
Interestingly, atheism contributed towards cronyism, while the relationship between age brackets and responses were mixed, with no clear pattern.
This problem could tip the scales toward atheism if the delimiting defeaters for the problem of evil failed to delimit the implications of divine hiddenness.
I shall now consider the most spectacular cases, where the charges of atheism and occultism did their work.
That is a bit like regarding atheism a form of heresy.
To many, experimental talk of souls seemed to smack of precisely that atheism which these natural philosophers claimed to have refuted.
It articulated a set of values that conservatives wanted desperately to disavow, combining anti-government rhetoric, staunch pro-capitalism, and atheism into a particularly noxious mixture.
