Flat Earth Atheist / Literature

• A good deal of golden-age SF was Doing In the Wizard stories with the science explorer or hard-nosed common-sense guy seeming to be a Flat Earth atheist but turning out to be right. This mostly faded away after the heyday of John W. Campbell era Astounding (when the guy who decides what gets published believes every kind of pseudoscience will definitely be proven true next week, "it's not magic, it's just chi powers" is a lot easier) — still plenty of wizard-abolishing stories, but on the softer side of the spectrum, and rarely led by Flat Earth atheist heroes (unless you count Doctor Who).
• The Arts of Dark and Light: The elves are a somewhat downplayed example. They realize full well something exists that most humans think of as Almighty God, and see that He sometimes causes miracles to happen for His faithful. However, they tend to consider this "God" to be merely some sort of powerful spirit entity, much like the less powerful angels and demons they summon in their own experiments — interesting to study and potentially useful or even dangerous, but not an omnipotent cosmic power or cause for existential crises.
• In Ascendance of a Bookworm, Myne ignores everything people say about magic or all evidence that some plants have magic powers because she simply assumes that magic can't possibly exist. It takes her a long time to realize that not only is magic real, but she has a pretty high ability for it herself.
• The Tolnedrans in The Belgariad worship a god that loves money, which sent them down a road to love money more than Gods, so that they're effectively atheist merchants, and their god couldn't be happier with them. Most Tolnedran characters will cling to their atheism no matter how much the world's supernatural elements prod at them, including a scene where General Varana spends a tactical meeting facing away from the other commanders so that he won't have to see the sorcerers he's working with shapeshifting and casting spells. However, many acknowledge these things do exist, they just "officially" disbelieve them.
  • Further proof of this trope by the Tolnedrans: according to any Tolnedran, and the entire Tolnedran government, there is no such thing as magic, yet there are also specific laws making it illegal to use the very magic the law makers agree does not exist.
  • Inverted by Brador, the chief of the Mallorean Empire's Bureau of Internal Affairs. He is a Melcene, who, like the Tolnedrans, don't believe in anything supernatural. Along comes Book 3 of the Malloreon, at which point demons start butchering whole cities under the command of a Grolim priest. Brador not only doesn't seem to have any trouble believing demons exist, but he begs Belgarath and Belgarion to help him convince his even more skeptical emperor to call off his Roaring Rampage of Revenge so they can go back and deal with the situation.
• Dunk, the hero of the Blood Bowl novel Rumble in the Jungle. In that book, he encounters his long-lost sister who is haunted by the ghost of their late mother. Dunk is unshakably convinced that the ghost isn't a real ghost at all but merely a daemon who (somehow) gained the shape and memories of their mother despite no particular evidence such a thing is possible and his own frequent encounters with more physical undead like vampires.
• Chanters of Tremaris has a non-deity version of this trope in the character of Trout, who refuses to believe in the existence of magic, even after he's seen it used. It later turns out to be a Justified Trope, as the spell in question was a very, very high-pitched spell of illusion, and Trout is deaf to high noises which rendered him immune to its effects. After further exposure to magic that he can see and hear, he gets over it.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: The Wise Men firmly maintain an afterlife, gods, magic, magical creatures and any other worlds are just false superstitions, asserting their scholars had proved these don't exist long ago. While some are left ambiguous, the last three undoubtedly do exist with evidence they could obtain quite easily, but they're clearly dogmatic and uninterested. Some, however, were also members of the Brotherhood, who are well aware that magic exists and secretly practice this. Only after people infected by shadows engulf whole cities and are only defeated with help from the Brotherhood do they tacitly concede this was wrong. Excerpts from an In-Universe history text mention that even later some are still trying to claim this was all mass hysteria.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • In The Last Battle, a group of dwarfs who had turned atheist after being burned by the cult of "Tashlan" manages to trap themselves in an inverted Lotus-Eater Machine effect when they were brought into Heaven during the end of Narnia as we know it.
  • Also, Uncle Andrew, who refused to believe that the animals were talking and trapped himself in a Weirdness Censor.
  • Prince Rabadash is a variation — although he believes in the Calormene Gods, he also believes that the ending of the White Witch's eternal winter has come about through "the alteration of the stars and the operation of natural causes." Despite the fact that the Calormenes have been entertaining fauns, talking animals, they know that Narnia is guarded by "a demon... in the shape of a lion" and that the long winter was caused by a witch.
• Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a good example of the subtrope of the atheist dropped into a supernatural world. It takes him the whole first trilogy to accept that The Land isn't just a figment of his imagination. Even then, he doesn't stop believing the Land is a hallucination. He just concludes that it's an important hallucination.
• In Dangerous Spirits, Meg maintains her position on the reality (or lack thereof) of Sol and Alexei's spiritual encounters, even after witnessing it first-hand.
• Frequently parodied in Discworld, where atheists are often hit with lightning on clear and sunny days.
  • Feet of Clay features Dorfl, a golem who will only believe in gods when they can be proven by rational debate. Offler decides to settle this by hitting him with a lightning bolt but Dorfl simply shrugs this off, saying, "I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument". It seems that Dorfl is the gods' worst nightmare — a ceramic atheist. Fireproof!
  • Small Gods
    • In Small Gods, a bartender in an Ephebian bar for philosophers says: "We get that in here some nights, when someone's had a few. Cosmic speculation about whether gods really exist. Next thing, there's a bolt of lightning through the roof with a note wrapped round it saying 'Yes, we do' and a pair of sandals with smoke coming out. That sort of thing, it takes all the interest out of metaphysical speculation."
    • Sergeant Simony in Small Gods, who tells the manifested god Om, "Don't think you can get round me by existing!" Interestingly, Om doesn't actually mind this and notes that, as the reason gods want worshipers is because Gods Need Prayer Badly, such fervent belief in nonexistence works just as well, so an atheist that enthusiastic is actually worth more to a god than a casual churchgoer. Note that Simony literally means the act of selling church offices for profit, something which a true believer would probably not dare to do. Simony also is a very fervent atheist only to Om — the other gods of the Discworld cosmology he does not gives much mind about at the most.
  • Bizarrely, the Omnians insist the world is round, despite Om telling them no such thing. At least until he manifests to set the record straight. Which is why the Library of Ephebe is roofed in copper.
  • The gods also aren't very fond of being fooled with. A footnote in Hogfather describes one philosopher indulging in the Discworld equivalent of Pascal's Wager^note Roughly, god(s) may or may not exist, but if you pray (sacrifice, act righteously, etc) on the off chance that they do, you're guaranteed a spot in heaven. And if you're wrong, no harm done!... only to wake up in the afterlife surrounded by a lot of deities with pointed sticks saying, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr. Clever Dick in these parts."
  • Played with in the opposite direction with Mightily Oats from Carpe Jugulum, an Omnian reverend who has a crisis of faith throughout the story. Granny Weatherwax helps snap him out of it by telling him that if she saw her god personally save one of his greatest disciples in front of a large crowd, she'd live her life defending her religion to the bitter end.
    • Granny's standard approach to gods is that just because they exist is no reason to go around worshiping them — it only makes them start putting on airs.
      It would be like believing in the mailman.
  • The God of Evolution from The Last Continent, who manages to exist in a world where Gods Need Prayer Badly even though he himself is an atheist.
  • In The Science of Discworld, it's mentioned that the wizards don't believe in the gods- they know the gods exist, they just don't believe in them- because Unseen University has very good anti-lightning spells, and being immune from godly wrath does wonders for free-thinking. The fact that the Archchancellor and the High Priest are very similar brothers might have something to do with it.
  • Susan Sto Helit was raised to believe that supernatural creatures were nice stories but not actually real because her parents thought this would shield her from her grandfather's world. As the Lemony Narrator puts it, this was a bit like not teaching someone self-defence so that nobody would attack them. (In later books she's become a Nay-Theist; she knows the world of her grandfather and the Tooth Fairy and the Soul Cake Tuesday Duck exists, and she wishes it didn't.)
• Downplayed example from The Divine Comedy. The heretic Farinata degli Uberti spends his time in Hell glaring contemptuously at every aspect of the afterlife he denied the existence of. He fails to acknowledge his mistake when Dante talks to him and seems single-mindedly fixated on his family's reputation in the physical world, which he still treats as if it was the only world that exists.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Recurring Character Sanya is a Russian man who was once possessed by a Fallen Angel and offered redemption and a kick-ass magic sword wrought from one of the nails that crucified Jesus, from the hand of the Archangel Michael himself. He describes himself as agnostic. However he makes no effort to deny the existence (and powers) of the Sword, demons, faeries, or wizards. It's mostly played for laughs, but his argument that the existence of the Swords (and even the Angel) doesn't actually prove anything theologically in a world packed with so many magical objects and creatures running around is pretty valid. He suggests the Sword (and Angels) could be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, a dream he's currently having in a coma, or a hallucination of some sort. That said he doesn't think it matters if God is directly involved or even real, as the Sword allows him to do good and help people who need it, and that's all that matters. Or if he's insane he's in no rush to figure it out.
  • In fact Christianity and even faith in God are largely unimportant for being a Knight of the Cross, it seems. Of the three original Knights Michael was Christian, Shiro only converted on accident due to a language misunderstanding (although he did try to be a good Christian after converting) and as mentioned Sanya is an agnostic. Later Knight Waldo Butters was actually Jewish, not Christian, and Uriel specifically notes that it's his faith in good winning over evil that helped him become a Knight.
  • Dresden himself, despite having personally seen all three Swords of Faith in action, and having had open discussions with multiple different Angels, doesn't consider himself a "Believer" either. That said he doesn't deny the existence of God, but simply doesn't associate with the Church and has some differences of opinion about said deity's Modus Operandi. He's still on good terms with the local priest as well as the various Knights of the Cross and is more than happy to have a barrel full of holy water made when he's facing off with Vampires.
• In The Elenium, the Elene people believe in only one God and their religion is almost exactly like the Catholic Church. Their God doesn't respond directly to them and they never see him. However, they do live on a planet with about 1,000 other gods. What is really weird is when the Church Knights (the military arm of the Church) need magic to fight magic, they get four priests from four of the other gods (who, again, the Church says don't exist) to teach them magic. And that magic is praying to the other gods (who according to them don't exist) for spells. Other races of people do find the Elene religion strange that way, especially the ones who actually meet their gods. Amazingly enough, Eddings gets it to work. The Elene god, in fact, is even okay with this. He and the Styric pantheon have a deal worked out.
• In S. M. Stirling's Emberverse, a universe that's kicked off when a bright light rends inoperable all modern technology at once, The Chessmaster Sandra Arminger remains one of the few atheists. She admits that the evidence in favor of religion and magic in her universe makes this an illogical position, and says that she has attempted to pray. Her prayers have been ineffective, however, because in her heart she does not believe.
  Juniper: You believe in nothing, you pray to nothing, and you are answered by — nothing!
  Sandra: (wryly) Is nothing sacred?
• Jalil in the Everworld books is a teen-aged atheist from this world sucked into a world where various mythological deities are real. He's fairly smart about it, but more-or-less claims them to be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and/or that the laws of physics in this world are just different and assumed to be "magic".
  • Interestingly, this series plays with the trope with another character: April, a devout Christian brought to Everworld. While she seems more open to displays of the obviously supernatural, she also claims the various deities aren't "real gods" while at the same time having a small crisis of faith.
  • Jalil's issues are further examined by the other characters' opinions. The acid-tongued, magic-loving Senna in particular has a few interesting things to say about it. "No wonder you don't believe in God or gods: Thou shalt have no other gods before Jalil."
• The Mi-Go, H. P. Lovecraft's Fungi From Yuggoth, live in a world overflowing with monstrous, supernatural beings with horrific powers. Rather than worshiping them as gods like most mortals aware of their existence, they plan to use their science to either control or destroy these entities. In contrast to the hopelessness that surrounds any human confrontation with the Mythos' various horrifying creatures, you get the feeling that the Mi-Go might just have some chance of pulling it off, probably because, unlike humans, their science is not inhibited by old-fashioned limitations like ethics. When you think about it, they may just be the scariest damn things in the entire Mythos.
  • Alternatively, they may just have Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. After all, many if not all of the 'supernatural' entities of Lovecraft's creation are themselves 'only' alien lifeforms that humans — and insane cultists in particular — simply easily mistake for gods or demons.
    • According to The Whisperer in Darkness, where the Mi-Go are introduced, they do seem to worship Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep. It does sound like a pragmatic relationship, though; you really don't want to annoy forces like that, no matter how great your civilization is.
      The Whisper: To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told.
• In the Ghost Roads series, the hitchhiking ghost Rose has met some of the divine creatures that hang out on the ghostroads but refuses to believe just the same. She considers any beings that call themselves gods to be questionably sane and quite full of themselves.
• In Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin, Orrec's mother Melle has a difficult time fitting the magical powers of the domains into her lowlander, anti-magic worldview. The people of Caspromant try not to use their gift of unmaking for her comfort.
• Goblins in the Castle: Karl, who tends to be very skeptical where the existence of magical beings is concerned, though he comes around eventually — he originally claims in Goblins in the Castle that Granny Pinchbottom is just a fictional character (which turns out to not be true, as William meets her after leaving the castle). He does it again in Goblins on the Prowl, when Igor proposes going to visit his giant friend Bonecracker John, and Karl responds by sighing and saying that giants only exist in stories. While Bwoonhiwda is offended by this, Igor just shrugs it off as Karl being "smart, just not as smart as he thinks he is".
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The God in the Bowl", Dionus is a materialist in a world with plentiful magic.
• C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce takes this a step further; there are atheists who persist in their unbelief despite being in the afterlife.
• In Christopher Stasheff's Her Majesty's Wizard, an agnostic from Earth is transported to another world where he discovers not only his magical powers but the unequivocal Judeo-Christian deity (God) and opponent (Satan) who directly and consistently interfere in human affairs. Priestly blessings have direct and easily detectable effects, the hero interacts directly with his personal devil who tries to drag him into hell, he runs into at least one saint who tells him what to do after transporting him from a wrecked church into a fully restored one and back again, the act of being knighted by a king (who rules by divine right, and who happens to be mostly dead at the time) actually confers martial abilities, and at the end after the chief bad guy is defeated we see hordes of devils stream out of the sky and compete for his soul, only being banished by the intervention of priests. He converts to the local version of Catholicism by the end of the first book. Stasheff pointed out in the afterword that medieval people saw God and the Devil everywhere in their daily lives, and this book is an attempt to show that where most fiction of this type completely ignores this aspect of their lives.
• Allan Carpentier, the hero of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) believes that the world he finds himself in is just a copy of Dante's Inferno built by sadistic Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. By the end of the first book he has become convinced otherwise but has yet to decide whether or not God Is Evil.
• In Caitlin R. Kernan's novels, the characters spend a suspicious amount of time fervently denying anything supernatural is happening... including when they're blasting ghouls into chunky salsa with shotguns. Former psychic detective Deacon Silvey is a repeat offender.
• In the Kitty Norville series, the masquerade was broken in the first book of the series. Kitty's House of Horrors is the seventh book, set about four years after the start of the series, and is probably the first time the reader meets a person who doubts the existence of the supernatural. Author Conrad Garrett argues that people who claim to have supernatural powers are frauds or crazy, that video footage of a werewolf shapeshifting is CGI, and that CDC reports on were-people and vampires are the result of collusion with drug companies who want to make money off the conditions. He only changes his mind when he sees Kitty shapeshift.
• The characters in the Knight and Rogue Series are fully aware that there are two gods out there who somewhat violently protect plants and animals, but as no greater being guards humans there's no serious religious practices.
• Bob Howard of The Laundry Files describes himself as an atheist because he doesn't believe in God. He then turns the trope inside-out by saying that he definitely does believe in non-Euclidean monsters from outside our universe that think human souls are crunchy and good with ketchup.
• The Left Behind series. After a wide variety of miracles, divine intervention, etc. it began to strain disbelief that so few people would convert.
• Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: Samirah refuses to believe that the Norse gods are divine, as she's a devout Muslim for whom there is only one God. Magnus, on the other hand, is an atheist. Samirah says that it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: "An atheist and a Muslim walk into a pagan afterlife..."
  • Magnus has even more reason to not see any of the Gods in the Riordanverse as capital G beings: his cousin is Annabeth Chase, Daughter of Athena. Bit hard for there to be a Great Plan when there are two wisdom gods (that he knows about) running around, and two gods of thunder, and two gods of the sea. Of course the fact that the various Gods have struggled against other threats in the past DOES mean they're not all powerful, so at a certain point comes down to what exactly makes something a god or not.
• In the setting of Philip K. Dick's A Maze of Death God is openly real, and prayers are a commonly accepted way of solving problems, though they usually have to be carefully composed and transmitted by radio into outer space in order to work. Dr. Babble, however, is an atheist who believes that the "God" in question is just a Sufficiently Advanced Alien.
• Lampshaded in some of Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson novels. Werewolves have recently gone public; the fae have been officially out for a decade or so, and demons are also real, but the protagonist meets quite a few people who don't believe in vampires or ghosts, and her friend Adam, a werewolf, doesn't believe in God (although she does herself).
• In the novella The Mist, the main character refers to a group of "rationalists" who refuse to accept that something very strange and dangerous is happening out in the eponymous mist as "The Flat Earth Society." The Flat Earth Society is a Real Life group of modern-day people who believe that the Earth is in fact flat.
• Mau, the hero of Terry Pratchett's Nation, refuses to believe that the gods are anything more than superstition and lazy thinking — despite being periodically shouted at by the spirits of his ancestors, and courted by Locaha, the god of death. As the old priest points out, though, this may be more anger that the gods have so thoroughly let him down than genuine atheism — after all, being the sole survivor of a tsunami has left him pretty goddamn traumatized. As the priest says to Mau, "You want the Gods to exist just enough that you can be angry at them for not existing."
  • The gods themselves seem more like ineffectual echoes than genuine powers of the universe, so disbelieving them can be seen more as disbelief in their hype of themselves, rather than in their subjective existence (all observations of gods in the book are subjective — no omnipotent narrator's solution is presented).
  • "Why do they want gods? We need people. That is what I believe. Without other people, we are nothing."
• The Pilgrim's Progress: Unsurprisingly, the character of Atheist gets depicted this way, since in the story Heaven is a place that you can actually see and walk up to, yet he claims not to have found it after twenty years in searching. Hopeful says he is "blinded by the god of this World" (i.e. Satan).
• In John Ringo's 'Queen of Wands', all of the deities and devils in all religions exist and interact with human beings, with "The White God" (the Judeo-Christian Trinity, directly from the Christian Bible, Old Testament in this case) being the most powerful but still only one of the gods. The main driver of one of the stories in that book is that an "Old One" is summoned, and is well on its way to destroying the USA. During a conference call with government officials who are deciding how to deal with the Old One, the White God personally speaks through his representative, the main character, and lays down the law. And even then, multiple people in the government still don't believe in deities, and/or refuse to accept their divinity, and refuse to support any actions which might violate the principle of separation of church and state, such as having the President go on television to pray for deliverance from the Old One (who at this point has been shown to be immune to nuclear weapons). Their insistence on not believing, in the face of unequivocal evidence to the contrary, is this trope.^note The reader might quickly note that said government officials are very poor charicatures of real Democratic politicians John Ringo obviously doesn't like.
• In Saturn's Children, all the characters are robots (though that word is considered obscene). Most of them, based on design schematics and such, believe that they were created by human beings. A few, however, believe in the holy doctrine of Evolution, and its prophets Darwin, Dawkins, and Gould.
• The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School are set in an Extranormal Institute whose students include psychics, shapechangers, werewolves, and fish-people, in a setting where there are publicly active superheroes like the Aviatrix, who flies with wings that appear and disappear as needed. Charlotte Knowles' father writes detective novels about impossible crimes that always turn out to have non-supernatural explanations, even though he lives in a world where "the murderer used telekinesis to kill the victim from outside the locked room" is entirely possible and much more straightforward than the kind of solution his novels usually have, and refuses to believe that his wife's and daughter's psychic abilities are not some kind of trick that he can't figure out and that they won't admit to. Charlotte says at one point that she suspects on some level he's aggrieved that they both got abilities that let them absorb vast amounts of information instantaneously while he has to do research the difficult and time-consuming way.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, the character Stannis Baratheon expresses atheist sentiments while using the magic of a particular religion to accomplish his own ends. He's portrayed very differently in the TV adaptation. It's somewhat justified as magic in general is proven to exist and there are magic users who belong to other religions or who are not religious. The fact that Red Priests are able to use magic and produce what appear to be miracles isn't necessarily proof that their god is real.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • The Yuuzhan Vong follow a Religion of Evil and truly believe the gods that they worship exist. They think the Force isn't real and that the Jedi and Sith are just charlatans. Their unbelief in the Force is helped by the fact that the Yuuzhan Vong are immune to most Force abilities. Later, after seeing some Jedi's extraordinary powers, some Yuuzhan Vong come to see the Jedi as the avatars of their gods.
  • In the Clone Wars novel Med Star I: Battle Surgeons, arrogant mercenary Phow Ji refuses to believe in the Force, even when it's demonstrated in front of his eyes. This appears to stem largely from his insufferable arrogance — he beat a Jedi in unarmed combat (because the Jedi didn't use the Force, to be fair) and is therefore convinced their powers are simply tricks. Notably it's heavily implied that the reason he launches a suicide attack at the end is that he has been forced to accept that the Force is real and that therefore he wasn't the best.
  • Star Wars: Lost Stars is a downplayed example. Thane works for the Rebellion with Luke Skywalker living just down the hall but continues to believe the Force is ridiculous nonsense. Doubly so with so many people in living memory who knew the Jedi. Also, despite the staggering amount of really weird happenstances that have kept bringing him and Ciena back together. However, he's never shown as seeing any hard evidence (Luke doesn't appear on page in the book nor apparently use his powers where Thane can see, and witnesses don't interact with him), thus his view seems more reasonable at first since he just hears people state their belief in the Force. In the end, he comes around to believing it's real from the aforementioned happenstances just becoming too much for explaining as being coincidences.
• In The Stormlight Archive, written by the same author as Warbreaker, Jasnah, and later her uncle Dalinar, are branded as heretics for denying the existence of the Almighty. Dalinar received what amounts to a psychic recorded message from the Almighty, part of which states that he is dead. He doesn't deny the Almighty existed is not sure exactly where he lands on if there is or is not a true God, but if the Almighty was killed he was never truely God in the first place. This also plays in Jasnahs argument, once the basically undenabile existance of the Almighty and Odium is presented to her, she makes no attempts to deny their existance, but challenges the fact that simply being vast, powerful beings does not make them gods.
• Richard from The Sword of Truth series denounces the concept of an afterlife where people are rewarded or punished for their actions, because "nobody has ever come back from the grave to describe conditions in the next life." This despite having personally conversed with the spirits of the dead at least three times, and having gone to the underworld and come back.
• Defied by Richie Ginelli in Thinner. After Billy's disastrous first encounter with the Gypsies, Richie surveys his emaciated friend and immediately concludes that he's been cursed. The mobster says that while he may be an atheist, he's also willing to face facts:
  Ginelli: Some guys don't believe what they're seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat, drink, and believe. [...] The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: In "Nothing Up Her Sleeve" Gillian insists flying carpets are impossible even when Magdelene's touches down right in front of her on one. Magdelene is perplexed hearing this.
• In Towing Jehovah by James Morrow, God Is Dead and his two-mile corpse is floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The Vatican hires a disgraced oil tanker captain to tow God's body to the Arctic where it can be kept on ice before it rots away or is devoured by sharks. One of their primary antagonists is the Central Park West Enlightenment League, who upon hearing the news, try to destroy the corpse with bombs to remove concrete evidence of a deity. One of their members does remark that if they were truly committed to scientific reasoning they should try to study the corpse and accept the possibility they'd been wrong all along, but the majority reject her.
• Harry Turtledove's Videssos Cycle has Marcus Aemilius Scaurus who doesn't believe in the opposing Scotos and Phos, despite all evidence, until one of them practically bites him on the ankle.
• In Warbreaker, Lightsong is a god who doesn't believe in his own religion. He has an epiphany towards the end, not that he is necessarily a god, but that he at least had a divine purpose. Another character, Siri, is married to the God King but doesn't believe in his divinity. In both cases, though, they believe in the potential existence of deities, Lightsong simply doesn't believe that he is one, while Siri was raised in a different religion and does believe in a god but does not believe her Husband is one. That said, even the people who do worship the Returned as gods also believe in the Iridescent Tones, a sort of guiding force behind the actions of the gods, which is actually fairly close to the truth. The Returned are created by a Shard, which is one of 16 (give or take) gods in the setting, but wouldn't accurately be described as divinities in their own right.
• In the Warrior Cats series, there are two. Cloudtail refuses to believe that StarClan exists, despite seeing his leader come back to life after being killed and the fatal wounds healing themselves. But even more notable is Mothwing, a medicine cat. She had a prophetic dream herself right after being apprenticed, and everything that Leafpool has told her, which she couldn't possibly have known on her own, happens to be true. She has also seen her own leader lose lives and come back to life. As part of a medicine cat's job is to be the spiritual leader of the Clan, this makes her the equivalent of an atheist priest.
  • She later starts training a religious apprentice, Willowshine, who knows that Mothwing's an atheist and interprets mystical dreams and omens for her. Mothwing did originally believe in StarClan and see them, but her brother (an evil, manipulative bastard) convinced her that they weren't, and after he dies, she can't quite bring herself to trust in them again. Essentially, she wants to believe in StarClan, but she can't risk getting her hopes dashed again.
  • And in the fourth series, Mothwing's disbelief is finally broken, (according to the author) when the feline equivalent of Heaven and Hell take physical forms on Earth to battle against each other. That's what it took.
  • And earlier in said fourth series, after seeing something that was clearly an omen by cat standards (a burning reed that wasn't extinguished, even by constant rainfall over it) she brought another medicine cat over to see it, saying that she didn't believe it was a sign, but she knew that he would and that it might be important. One imagines that she was just in denial to begin with.
• Wraith Knight: In Wraith Lord, Ketra Whitetremor is Regina's cousin and loud in her belief that the deities of the World Between are social constructs designed to oppress the masses. She notably does this to Jacob Riverson, who is, in fact a Physical God and recently made her cousin into the Goddess of Starlight.
• In You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) Travis Habsworth of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany very specifically disbelieves in a huge number of things that most people would agree are real, including but not limited to: money, bus drivers, skepticism, and Australia.

---