THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF NONBELIEF

A recent Scientific American article points out that the number of Americans who state that they are “not religious at all,” has continued to rise.  In the most recent Harris poll, conducted in 2013, that percentage had risen to 23%, up from 16% in 2007.

But it isn’t entirely clear what exactly this statistic means.  It almost certainly does not mean that 23% of Americans are atheists—yet.  In fact, in the 2013 poll, when asked if they believed in God, 12% of the respondents overall answered no, 14% answered that they were not sure, while the remaining 74% answered yes.  Clearly, an individual could consider himself as not religious and yet believe in God, while another individual could believe that God does not exist and yet consider herself affiliated with a religion on a social or cultural basis.

It is evident that there’s some uncertainty here.  Part of that relates to what questions are being asked and how the respondents interpret them.  When an individual is asked if she believes that God exists, is she thinking of a theistic god who takes an active interest in and intervenes in human affairs or is she thinking of a deistic god who may have created the world but who no longer interacts with it?  Or is she thinking of something even more abstract, such as pantheism, where God and the universe are considered one and the same.

Recently a friend asked me if I would label myself an “atheist” or as “not religious.”  We agreed that for some persons of faith the term “atheist” can carry a connotation of militance, an in-your-face anti-religious attitude.  My friend preferred to describe himself as “not religious.”  I told him that I usually described myself as a skeptic.  I added that one reason I am sometimes reluctant to label myself an atheist is that I occasionally vacillate between atheism and a “soft” deism.

Some prefer the term “agnostic” as being less strident.  But the terms atheism and agnosticism actually address two separate questions.  Agnosticism refers to the question of what one can know and states that one cannot, as an epistemological matter, know whether God exists.  Atheism, on the other hand, refers to the question of what one believes and simply describes a belief that God does not exist.  One can be both an agnostic and an atheist.

It is clear that the number of nonreligious individuals in America, whether atheist, agnostic, or just not religious, is steadily rising, with nearly a quarter of the population labeling themselves as “not religious at all,” or as “nones.”  Personally, I find it encouraging that the percentage of nones is even higher in the younger generations.  In a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, over one-third of millennials identified as nones.  Increasingly, religion is becoming an activity of the elderly.

Having said that, in my view progress toward nonbelief in the U.S. is going to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  It’s going to take a while.  It’s not as though millions of people are suddenly going to think seriously about their religious beliefs, experience secular epiphanies, and declare that they no longer believe in God.  Rather, religious belief is simply going to become less and less relevant to the lives of more and more in succeeding generations.

Years ago I asked a friend whether he believed in God.  The friend, who had a Jewish background, said that if he had to bet a nickel, he would bet against there being a God.  What he was saying was that God’s existence simply wasn’t important to him.  He was focused on his family and career and the challenges and travails of this life.  God just wasn’t relevant.

© 2018 John M. Phillips