Basic Trope: In a world where it is proven on many levels that fantastical elements exist, a couple people will flat-out disbelieve these facts.
- Straight: Bob does not believe in God, even though God has been proven to exist and has caused several strange events to occur.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob does not believe in God, even though God has routinely saved Bob from near-death situations.
- Bob goes bowling with God every Friday while angels fly about, mages operate the bowling alley, and God performs physics-defying bowling feats. Bob insists he's a simply a talented stage magician.
- Bob is half-divine, yet he still doesn't believe in God.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is a Nay-Theist who doesn't understand why people worship a being just because it's supernatural and powerful.
- While Bob has seen Physical Gods and believes in them, he insists there is are scientific explanations for their power.
- Bob acknowledges the gods but theorizes that they are vastly exaggerating their abilities and role in the creation given incongruities of their 'designs' making the old stories they testify to not quite add up.
- Justified:
- Bob is incapable of recognizing a divine presence.
- Bob's seen beings with enough power to qualify for divine status who did not claim to be anything special. He decided that the distinction between divine and non-divine is meaningless.
- Bob's belief system allows for the possibility of phenomena which current scientific research cannot yet explain — however, he believes that a sufficient amount of scientific research will eventually uncover the solution, and is unwilling to accept an 'unsatisfactory' answer like the character with power being a god.
- Bob thinks this so-called God is just another regular person.
- Magical powers are normal to the point where Bob didn't know there was a god.
- Bob is a Hollywood Atheist activist/philosopher/author/professor/political leader, or any other job where he might lose respect with his colleagues or be fired if he admits a belief in this specific god.
- Bob thinks God is just a Sufficiently Advanced Alien with technology that only appears to be godlike.
- Inverted:
- God doesn't believe in Bob, even though Bob has been proven to exist.
- Bob believes in God even when it's been logically proven God can't exist.
- Bob is a big skeptic for many other things (especially because of seeing how far people can go for the sake of scare tactics) but he nevertheless is very religious on the off chance that deities are real and he doesn't wants to end in Hell (Pascal's Wager
). - Bob is a ludicrously vapid conspiracy theorist in a world where people don't know much (or have even heard of) the things he says.
- Subverted:
- Bob's atheism begins to weaken after several incidences of direct divine intervention.
- Bob is right to be skeptical. The "gods" are just a Higher-Tech Species. Not even Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, they use advanced but comprehensible technology and a lot of smoke and mirrors to seem bigger than they are.
- Double Subverted:
- However, Bob is still a pretty stubborn guy and refuses to give in.
- A particular god or set of gods proves to be smoke and mirrors, but when Bob makes the same guess about another, he's demonstrably wrong.
- Parodied:
- Bob just so happens to be Pals with Jesus, going out to the movies and playing mini-golf with Him, and yet still does not believe in Him as a divine power.
- Bob meets God and explains to Him that He doesn't exist. God agrees.
- God doesn't believe in Himself.
- Bob's disbelief is so powerful that it creates an Anti-Magic field, which obviously loops into making his disbelief even stronger.
- Bob's disbelief in God is so strong that, in a situation where God needs someone to believe in Him, He still gathers power from it. It's probably best not to try to understand how that works.
- Zig Zagged:
- Bob's faith in God changes wildly depending on the situations he's in.
- Bob doesn't believe in God, but believes in other gods (like the ones in Classical Mythology) or even the devil.
- Bob believes that the gods are merely sufficiently powerful beings and believes it is possible to ascend to be one eventually. He does eventually gain enough power to do so - and with his newfound omniscience comes to realize that the gods did indeed exist from the beginning of the universe. He sees them as distinct and having some special significance. Until he meddles with time travel enough to retroactively add himself to the beginning of existence.
- Averted:
- Bob is an active praying member of the community, conversing with God on a regular basis.
- Or he's an atheist or agnostic, but there's no In-Universe evidence of God's existence, leaving his choice the rational one.
- Enforced: "This Hollywood Atheist is so dull. Let's make him funnier!"
- Lampshaded:Bob: "Thanks for the help, God, but I still don't believe in you."
God: "It's alright, Bob. I don't believe in you either." - Invoked: Bob is friends with a guy who is secretly Satan and who encourages him to disbelieve in God.
- Exploited: There are gods clearly in the universe but the Big Bad is using some sort of device to make Bob and all the others refuse to believe in them. Y'see, in this universe God Needs Prayers Badly and if no one believes in them, they will die.
- Defied:
- Bob is smart enough to recognize the existence of a higher power when the evidence is overwhelming, even if it's begrudgingly so.
- Bob decides to apply Pascal's Wager - if he cannot find empirical evidence of the existence of capital-G God that's a bummer, but on the off chance that He and everything associated with Him (especially Heaven and Hell) exist, Bob is not going to walk around looking like a sacrilegious jerk.
- Discussed:
- "What, does the whole pantheon need to send him fruit baskets first?"
- "He wouldn't believe in God even if he appeared at his door dancing a tango!"
- Conversed: "The Earth is flat. What more proof does this guy need?"
- Implied:Alice: I can't believe we just met an angel.
Bob: Well, we've also met vampires and aliens, some of which claimed to be gods. I have to wonder if everything that angel said was true. - Played For Laughs:
- Bob refuses to believe in God,... despite God being his next door neighbor... and the coach for the local little league baseball team... which Bob's son plays for. The rest of the neighborhood think Bob is a little weird, needless to say.
- Bob uses the exact same tactics religious organizations perform to try to spread his message of atheism, such as going door to door handing out pamphlets and swarming people with lectures on how the local faith-fueled phenomena is Psychic Powers and collective delusion. He is absolutely lacking in differences with the people he claims to hate, and is equally annoying to the common man.
- Played For Drama:
- God clearly exists in this universe and, while most people believe in him, Bob doesn't due to an Abusive Parent who acted as The Fundamentalist, making Bob resentful of the very idea of a deity. God desperately tries to reveal himself to Bob who stubbornly refuses to believe.
- Bob's staunch refusal to recognize God angers Him, causing God to rain down misfortune and torment on Bob who withstands it all with Heroic Spirit. When Bob is broke, homeless and stricken with boils he asks "Are you done yet?"
- Played For Horror:
- Bob is so staunch to refuse to believe that he develops a murderous Berserk Button for people who try to convince him otherwise. And not even deities are safe.
- Bob is so staunch to refuse to believe that his natural reaction to anything that would make him believe is to undergo Sanity Slippage as his mind Logic Bombs itself into oblivion.
- Bob is so staunch to refuse to believe that he is directly responsible for the local demonic invasion - if you need to Clap Your Hands If You Believe to prevent it from happening, guess what happens when someone doesn't does either?
- Deconstructed: Bob's fierce disbelief in the supernatural gets shattered when he realizes that he's had a direct, verifiable encounter with the divine. He struggles to reconcile this irrefutable fact with his worldview.
- Reconstructed: Bob encounters the divine in an undeniable fashion and still refuses to believe they are divine, but rather just sufficiently advanced aliens or something. Instead of denying that they exist, he dedicates his life to studying these beings so he can prove it.
"There's a page called "Flat-Earth Atheist"? What a bunch of crap!"
