D&D 5E Atheism in DnD

[mlund]

I think you are overstating the availability of such sources of information in a typical D&D world. Maybe in a place like Sharn, Waterdeep, or Mount Nevermind a regular person might have a chance of brushing up with people with the understanding, reputation, and inclination to share their observations

Sure, your ignorant backwater peasants surely don't have any real knowledge of the existence of anything further away than the neighboring duchy and may not believe in snow or pineapples depending on where he lives. That's not the issue at hand. The cultural elite to which adventurers migrate are a completely different story.

Moreover, it isn't like you have to come across a first-hand observer. Wizards and other arcane researchers have a tendency to investigate claims and write books. Magic can actually find departed souls in the afterlife and even drag them back to the material plane on a temporary or permanent basis. Again, you could deny these recorded experiments and expert findings as fraudulent, but that's not ignorance - it's delusional conspiracy theory.

Also, it doubt the usual 0-lvl peasant has enough of an education or at least breadth of perspective to even understand an argument of that kind.

Peasants are lucky to be literate. They also lack any sort of educated basis for much skepticism of clergy that can heal mortal injuries etc. in the name of these supposed "gods."

There's no scientific proof there. It's hearsay. It's all literally "going to someone or something and asking them". As far as I know, there isn't a spell in D&D that actually tells the absolute truth.

That's not a rational argument. That's like saying "there's no scientific proof" of the Higgs-Boson because you didn't get to see the operation of the Large Hadron Colider and the reports of the people who conducted the experiments are "hearsay." It's a complete misunderstanding of the entire concept of scientific proof. If Mage A can go Plane Shift a group of observers to the outer planes and find a particular departed soul and Mage B can reproduce the experiment and results then Bob's your uncle.

And there are, in fact, spells in D&D that compel those who speak to speak only the truth to the best of their knowledge. They could still be delusional or ignorant, but their not deliberating fabricating the claims and stories you interrogate them about.

The underlying point here is that most claims about the afterlife are verifiable by third-party magicians, and those experiments, while rare, are simple to document.

Of course, that does depend on the setting. It's fine to create a setting where piercing the veil, as it were, is impossible even by mortal magical means. It's just not the case with the Realms or Greyhawk or the default D&D rules.

Marty Lund

 

[prosfilaes]

Magic can actually find departed souls in the afterlife and even drag them back to the material plane on a temporary or permanent basis. Again, you could deny these recorded experiments and expert findings as fraudulent, but that's not ignorance - it's delusional conspiracy theory.

What does finding departed souls in the afterlife--I'm not sure which spells you're referring to, exactly, but anyway--have to do with the existence of the gods?

They also lack any sort of educated basis for much skepticism of clergy that can heal mortal injuries etc. in the name of these supposed "gods."

You drop someone like me (but not a D&D geek) into one of these worlds, and I might have such skepticism, especially if I ran into a sorcerer first. Both in real life and in thaumaturgy, there's a rule that what you think limits you, actually limits you. Is the cleric really getting power from the gods, or is he really a sorcerer who believes he gets his power from the gods (or a sorcerer who claims he gets his power from the gods--there's an entire nation-state ruled by fake clerics in Golarion)? Sorcerers can't cast healing--well, maybe, but a bard who casts just like a sorcerer but has to sing while casting can heal (and in Pathfinder, so can an oracle and a witch.)

If Mage A can go Plane Shift a group of observers to the outer planes and find a particular departed soul and Mage B can reproduce the experiment and results then Bob's your uncle.

You do know there are a heck of a lot of people who can speak to the dead in the real world. Even if Mage A and Mage B were so convenient as to perform the experiment, and I don't particularly see the concept of scientific reproducibility being a big one in D&D worlds, most of us don't believe their counterparts in the real world.

In any case, and? There's a big difference between souls and gods.

And there are, in fact, spells in D&D that compel those who speak to speak only the truth to the best of their knowledge.

Saving throws, spell resistance, and I'm sure I could find a half-dozen spells and magic items to help people evade that. Heck, have the supposedly compelled be an illusion with the caster outside the zone. And again, that's only works worth anything if you have a Spellcraft high enough to know what Zone of Truth is and that it's being cast.

The underlying point here is that most claims about the afterlife are verifiable by third-party magicians, and those experiments, while rare, are simple to document.

In a world where scientific knowledge is at some level universal to anyone who finished high school (freely offered to all) and hundreds of thousands of people have the knowledge to understand it, there's still a lot of people out there to deny any scientific truth that makes them feel uncomfortable. In a D&D world, where any real magical knowledge is pretty limited, and only a tiny percentage of people can cast these spells, and many might kill you for bothering to ask for something as silly as a test of their power, why would it be unreasonable for a number of people to not believe the gods are real?

 

[Cristian Andreu]

Sure, your ignorant backwater peasants surely don't have any real knowledge of the existence of anything further away than the neighboring duchy and may not believe in snow or pineapples depending on where he lives. That's not the issue at hand. The cultural elite to which adventurers migrate are a completely different story.

Moreover, it isn't like you have to come across a first-hand observer. Wizards and other arcane researchers have a tendency to investigate claims and write books. Magic can actually find departed souls in the afterlife and even drag them back to the material plane on a temporary or permanent basis. Again, you could deny these recorded experiments and expert findings as fraudulent, but that's not ignorance - it's delusional conspiracy theory.

We are speaking about magic that is uncommon, performed by people that are uncommon, in worlds with extremely limited and unreliable means of divulgation. Furthermore, we're speaking of Medieval levels of scholasticism here when it comes to spellcasters and their knowledge, and that's in the very best of scenarios, not post-Industrial Revolution peer-reviewed intellectual networks with an established and expansive reach within a society that has adopted Empiricist values at its core.

The degree of exposure this type of information could get to the general public would be minimal (certainly not something most low-level PCs would get, unless they happen to be in particular contexts that propitiate it), and even then there's the barrier of credibility: How does a regular person, or even a mildly heroic low-level PC, get any assurances that the information they read on a grimoire written by a guy called Spectaculor the Magnificent is to be trusted? And we're not just speaking of cooking recipe levels of trust here; we're talking of enough credibility as to make someone change his worldview regarding divinity.

The social paradigms within the typical pseudo-Renaissance -in the more sophisticated cases- or borderline Neolithic -in the more primitive ones- D&D realms could hardly be said to place the same level of trust in intellectual authority as our current one. It would be reasonable to expect there would be groups and elites in most D&D worlds were the word of an important Magister in Artribus of a magical university would be considered authoritative enough as to treat as law, but those would remain in the minority. And even in those cases there's still the Athar argument that the gods are not necessarily divine, but instead immensely powerful. Traditional magic would not be sufficient to entirely discard that view.

Considering the above, I cannot agree that a regular person, nor a low-level PC, would have to be delusional to consider an atheistic perspective. There is enough room not just for justifiable doubt in divine-supporting data, but for said data to not even reach the person in the first place.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

These forces are not deities, but they will -- if they are trustworthy, which is magically discernible -- confirm that deities are real deities. They get their power from their worshippers, judge them and look over them in the afterlife (which is trivially provable), and are granted dominion over a domain of reality.

IMNSHO, the above is more a disproof than a proof. Something which gets its power from mortals is ipso facto not a god. It's just another kind of magic user.

A god's power would run in the other direction: predating and superior to/independent of any mortal power. A Darksun Sorcerer King gets his templars' power from the elemental planes, not from his subjects. Zeus and Gaia had power, in Greek mythology, long before they ever created mankind. Coyote in Navajo legend doesn't depend on worshipers for his power. I can't think of ANY religious tradition in which the god's power scales up or down with his number of worshippers. Ergo, anything which behaves that way is disproving its own religious tradition and is not what it claims to be: if humans created Zeus then Greek mythology is proven false.

 

[Dkase]

How does a regular person, or even a mildly heroic low-level PC, get any assurances that the information they read on a grimoire written by a guy called Spectaculor the Magnificent is to be trusted?

That did it, I am now determined to get a PHD and publish a peer reviewed work under the name, "Spectaculor the Magnificent".

 

[mlund]

The degree of exposure this type of information could get to the general public would be minimal (certainly not something most low-level PCs would get, unless they happen to be in particular contexts that propitiate it), and even then there's the barrier of credibility: How does a regular person, or even a mildly heroic low-level PC, get any assurances that the information they read on a grimoire written by a guy called Spectaculor the Magnificent is to be trusted? And we're not just speaking of cooking recipe levels of trust here; we're talking of enough credibility as to make someone change his worldview regarding divinity.

That's backwards. There's a barrier of credibility that skepticism needs to overcome in this case. It is not uncommon knowledge in the base D&D setting that A.) "magic" is real and B.) divine and arcane casters claim their powers are distinct. The clerics of a slew of competing gods assert that their deities are actually gods and provide repeatable supernatural phenomena. Visit any trade city in on Oerth or the Realms and this is painfully obvious. On the other hand, the counter-claim lacks evidence and most attempts to disprove divinity can or have been systematically debunked. One would require a remarkably heavy emotional ax to grind to embrace the denialist position in such a case.

The social paradigms within the typical pseudo-Renaissance -in the more sophisticated cases- or borderline Neolithic -in the more primitive ones- D&D realms could hardly be said to place the same level of trust in intellectual authority as our current one.

It's not "trust in intellectual authority," it's trust in repeatable phenomena - historical evidence. Attempts to undermine the credibility of witnesses is a time-honored tradition, but in such a setting you're basically alleging a truly grand and sweeping conspiracy to falsify evidence that transcends all animosity between cultures, religions, races, governments, and time-periods and has somehow wiped out all evidence of any cynic or skeptic who could employ the same known means to provide contrary evidence or prove a logical contradiction.

Considering the above, I cannot agree that a regular person, nor a low-level PC, would have to be delusional to consider an atheistic perspective.

We can't have it both ways with the ignorance of peasants. If we take the realistic medieval example, the overwhelming population are illiterate peons (not even burghers) and have the same cause to question most physical places and historical figures that were part of their physical reality. They also historically heeded the more learned religious authority of their time and regarded those asserting contrary views as deluded or wicked. But then there's the obvious fantasy element in D&D. Even the lowly villagers and manor serfs, outside of an ultra-low-magic setting, believe in divine and arcane magics. With all evidence in the affirmative and no evidence to the contrary, they have no rational basis for disbelief in what the religious authorities tell them about the existence of gods. The religious authorities can perform actual magic. The only explanation would be charlatanism, and with outside collaboration the only explanation there would be conspiracy or mass delusion on the part of so many others. They are essentially asserting that "everyone else is out to trick me," or "I'm the only sane man," without any basis in evidence. There we've pretty much got paranoid delusion in a nutshell.

If I tell the peasantry, "There are no gods. Pay no attention to the clerics over there casting spells. It's all fakery," without anything to back it up but cynicism then they are, almost uniformly, going to regard me as a lunatic - and rightly so, considering the merit of my argument.

However, if you get to a level far enough removed from peasantry to be worldly (as adventurers almost invariably are/become unless they stay stuck in a "hopeless farmboy" or "ignorant barbarian" trope for the rest of their lives), you could entertain more complicated arguments. The only problem is then you'd also be at a level to be more closely exposed to the means at which such theories can be easily tested and disproven. Heck, by mid-tier adventurers can see for themselves and conduct their own experiments.

Pure disbelief in the disposition of souls and the reality of deities in the Core D&D setting is requires a level of ignorance beneath that of a civilized peasant or some sort of delusion. Setting changes can obviously shift that, but they typically require playing around with what magic can do in the setting with regards to extra-planar travel and communication. Hence my original point: It is far more rational to posit a moral or philosophical stance that the "gods" are real entities that pretend at Divinity - limited / flawed / transient beings that don't deserve the title though they need / crave worship.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's not "trust in intellectual authority," it's trust in repeatable phenomena - historical evidence. Attempts to undermine the credibility of witnesses is a time-honored tradition, but in such a setting you're basically alleging a truly grand and sweeping conspiracy to falsify evidence that transcends all animosity between cultures, religions, races, governments, and time-periods and has somehow wiped out all evidence of any cynic or skeptic who could employ the same known means to provide contrary evidence or prove a logical contradiction.

The existence of wizards tends to undermine this argument. Sure, there's repeatable evidence that this guy can animate zombies. Great. Must be a necromancer. Wait, you say you're not a wizard? And your power comes from Frabjous the Unlimited? So how come Frabjous only does 6 spells worth of miracles per day, until you take a nap, and how come studying wizardry via multiclassing makes him grant more miracles, and gagging you prevents Frabjous from making miracles? You seem EXACTLY like a wizard to me. Oh, you have custom spells? And you don't have to learn spells, you just know them? And you can cast them through Wisdom, not intelligence? Huh. Well, that's weird, but it says nothing about Frabjous. Apparently you're just a different kind of wizard, like a bard is.

 

[Queer Venger]

I'm working on a pantheon for my new campaign and one of my players asked if a deity is mandatory and could he be atheist. He's Christian IRL so it's an interesting response.

Do you think its possible to be an professed atheist in a setting where there are clerics running around? You don't reject the gods and you're not sitting on the fence - you outright don't believe they exist despite hard evidence to the contrary.

If so, what does that mean when you die? Does the carpet get pulled out from under you and you get allocated to a plane anyway? Or do the gods get all petulant and send you to the hells?

Great topic of discussion
IRL Im a proud atheist, yet in my D&D Im very much a deist, (its the mythology aspect).

I run almost exclusively in the Realms. In my current campaign Ive been going for an atheist/agnostic tone. My campaign is set in 1373, about 20 years after the Godswar. People are pretty much disillusioned with the gods/religion; some have seen their churches become corrupt, while others have lost all faith in a god that could be thrown off heaven and made to squable on the material plane. One of my players is playing a Kelemvorite who has lost her faith, and has been cast out of the church. So as a DM I think it makes for great storytelling to deal with this internal/philosophical struggles. In my campaign the gods are real, but many of them are real as* holes. The gods are on a PR campaign because they realized during the Godswar that their power is tied to their worshippers; treat them like sh*t and they'll abandon you. AO, the overgod, probably has a special place for those who have lost their faith, and while the gods may not know what happens to these 'atheists', AO probably does.

 

[Umbran]

As Bacon Bits noted above, you basically have scientific proof available from impartial third-parties via magic-users. I mean, you can disbelieve in the veracity of reports from wizards and extra-planar entities as well as clerics if you want to, but at some point it crosses the line into a delusional psychosis.

Whether one can find this information is setting (perhaps even campaign) dependent, so we cannot generalize.

I mean, who says extra-planar entities are actually answering such questions - typically, when they are summoned, they are here for business, not theological chitchat. And.. truth verifiable? As if your typical extra-planar being has a crappy Will save, so he or she can't overcome a 2nd level Zone of Truth spell?

How many clerics and wizards of high enough level to cast those spells exist in the world? In classic Dragonlance, for example, there were no clerics at all, and only a few wizards - and they were pretty much cloistered away from the world by their respective organizations.

Even in a "typical" D&D game, independent verification is actually not all that common. Wizards who choose to seek out *actually* where souls go, and return to tell the tale? Few and far between. Even the wizards are generally just accepting the word of clerics and those who have gone before them. The bulk of people, even adventurers, don't ever discuss such matters with folks who have been off plane.

And even with all that - in a world where even among humans there are huge disparities of power, why should a mortal consider yet one more very powerful being as a "god" that should be worshipped? As noted before, there's more than one type of atheism - the typical D&D world is probably ripe for apatheism. "Yeah, these things may exist. I fail to see why I care. There would be wars and disease and death with or without them. Pretty darned pointless. Now, excuse me, but I have a cow to milk."

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I've always felt that despite the fantastic elements of a typical D&D world it is quite possible to maintain a form of atheism in the setting. The existence of magic which mortals can cast, the ability of those mortals to gain greater and greater power until they are (in most editions) able to defeat gods, suggest that the bar of entry for a deity is fairly low....much, much lower than omnipotence, which is riddled with paradox anyway. For this reason alone I suspect that a great many wizards and other spell-casters who make it to high level in many D&D worlds would question the validity of the gods.

Of course, D&D is extremely flexible as a system goes so you can have worlds where the gods are clearly inscrutable or their level of power is unattainable. But the core conceits in at least 1st and 3rd edition seemed to suggest you could wack a deity and even replace him.....meaning deity is almost more like a title in some ways than a profound state of being with cosmic purpose.

In the end, an atheist in a D&D setting would probably be someone who refuses to believe that the gods are omnipotent and immortal....rather instead believing they are high level beings of great but still fallible power. This wouldn't be like the atheists of our modern world (of which I am one), who simply abstain from belief in the supernatural due to lack of proof/existence, since a D&D atheist would have lots of evidence that a force called magic does exist....although such a fantasyland atheist might spend a lot of time seeking out the hidden physics behind how magic actually takes effect.