Strong (or "positive") atheism affirms that there is no god, not merely a withholding of belief but the positive claim that deities do not exist. This goes beyond the broader sense of atheism as the simple absence of belief in gods: the strong atheist holds that the balance of reason and evidence warrants the conclusion that no god is real. Arguments advanced for the position include the absence of persuasive evidence for any deity, the problem of suffering and evil, and the success of natural explanation in accounting for the world without appeal to the supernatural.
Philosophically rigorous defences of strong atheism include J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism (1982), which argues systematically against the classical theistic proofs and for the logical force of the problem of evil, and, in more popular form, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), part of the early twenty-first-century New Atheism movement that also included Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, sometimes called the "Four Horsemen" after a filmed 2007 conversation among the four. New Atheist writers argued not merely that god-belief was false but that organised religion was on balance harmful to society, a stronger and more polemical claim than strict philosophical atheism requires, which drew criticism even from some atheist philosophers who considered the movement's rhetoric needlessly combative.