Glossary

Agnostic: One who believes that we cannot prove the existence or the non-existence of deity. Many agnostics believe that we cannot know anything about deity or deities at the present time, but that this could conceivably change in the future. A "hard agnostic" feels that such knowledge will always be beyond human understanding.
Atheist: A person with a lack of a belief that deity, in the form of one or more supernatural gods or goddesses, exists. A "hard atheist" asserts that gods do not exist; a "soft atheist" simply lacks belief, but does not assert nonexistence.
Deist: One who believes that God created the universe but then left it alone to operate on its own principles, principles that human reason and science can discover.
Dogmatic: An authoritarian approach to ideas, emphasizing rigid adherence to doctrine over rational and enlightened inquiry.
Humanist: A person who emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation, while rejecting supernatural, authoritarian, and anti-democratic beliefs and doctrines.
Monotheist: One who believes there is only one god, or that the gods of different religions are really just different manifestations of the one true god.
Naturalist: One who believes that nature operates according to natural laws, without spiritual intervention.
Objectivist: Someone who believes that reality exists outside of the mind and that existents retain their identity no matter what human beings or other conscious creatures think or feel about it (often stated as "wishing doesn't make it so").
Pantheist: A person who believes that God is the universe and the universe is God — or, more generally, that the universe is divine.
Polytheist: A believer in more than one god.
Positivism: The philosophy that we should admit as knowledge only that about which we can be absolutely certain, that is, what is immediately graspable or empirical.
Rationalism: The idea that reason and logic should play a major role in human life.
Realism: The idea that we can and do possess reliable knowledge, both perceptual and conceptual, that we can and usually do perceive the actually existing physical world.
Reason: The use of the rational methods of inquiry, logic, and evidence in developing knowledge and testing claims to truth.
Relativism: The idea that truth and value are relative to an observer or group of observers (similar to Subjectivism).
Religion: Any specific system of belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, and a philosophy of life.
Scientism: The philosophy that the methods of the natural or phsyical sciences are universally valid, and therefore should apply to the social sciences and humanities as well.
Secularism: The principle that there exist no gods or purely spiritual entities.
Skeptic: An individual with an attitude of questioning and thinking and of not taking conventional wisdom on faith. A skeptic questions most everything that is not immediately obvious, and remains open-minded in forming conclusions based on evidence.
Social Darwinism: The principle that "the survival of the fittest" applies to human ethics and politics just as it does to biological evolution.
Solopsism: The belief that knowledge is so subjective that all one can really know is oneself, that one cannot know if physical reality or other human beings even exist.
Spiritualism: The belief that there do exist spiritual entities in the world, or that there exists a spiritual world or realm above or beyond the physical world.
Stoicism: The idea that true virtue or excellence lies in not being affected by outside events and in not experiencing passions or emotions; impossible to attain, but still the natural human state of living according to reason.
Subjectivism: The philosophy that knowledge and values are in no way based on reality, and that knowledge and values are relative (similar to Relativism).
Theist: One who believes in the existence of a god or divine powers.
Transcendentalism: The belief that there is an aspect of reality that is higher than, or transcends, our everyday life and world.

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