The Relationship of Atheism and Theism

"Of course there could be a society without any sense of that they do not believe in the God of Abraham. There are many such today. But the intervening issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated...If so it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition that cannot be only described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief [in a specifically defined God]...

--Charles Taylor, A Secular Age p.269.

"Atheism does not stand alone. The term and the persuasions which cluster around it take their meaning from the divine nature which has been asserted by the religions and the philosophies, by the superstitious practices and mystical experiences of those who adhere to the divine existence...The conflict between [atheism and theism] is mortal because of a more general unity of meaning. If the antagonism does not bear upon a single subject there is no contradiction. Affirmation and denial are only possible if the subject remains the same. This subject is determined not by the atheist but by the theist, by the going beliefs...by the sense of the divine which is the issue of religious and philosophical sensibility and argument, or by the proclaimed personal God of the monotheistic religions. Any or all of these can be objects of skepticism, denial, or uncommitted opinion, but outside these affirmations the correlative negative loses any meaning whatsoever...Theism and atheism are not merely an accidental conjunction, a successive conjunction of contradictory opinions A bond of necessity stretches between them: atheism depends upon theism for its vocabulary, for its meaning, and for the hypothesis it rejects."

--Michael J. Buckley At The Origins of Modern Atheism p.14-15

"Trinitarian thinking does not mean the simple rejection of atheistic critiques. On the one hand it says 'yes' to them. It learns something from them. Trinitarian thinking understands that atheism in this form has indicated serious problems with traditional theism...the doctrine of the Trinity then identifies the Christian God whom atheism has misidentified as the God of theism. If the doctrine of the Trinity enables theology to incorporate the atheistic protest and then reject the God atheism negates, then Trinitarian theology provides the basis for a response to atheism."

--W, Waite Willis Jr. Theism, Atheism, and the Doctrine of the Trinity p.5-6.