We’re a long way from the day when the United States could reasonably be described as a non-religious nation. But we’re getting there. It’s sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees, but the longer-term trends are pretty unambiguous. (Which is not to say it’s impossible they will someday reverse course.) I suspect that, hand-wringing about arrogance and “fundamentalist atheists” notwithstanding, the exhortations of Richard Dawkins and his ilk have had something to do with it. If nothing else, they provide clear examples of people who think it’s perfectly okay to not believe in God, and be proud of it. That’s not an insignificant factor. It’s most likely a small perturbation on top of more significant long-term cultural trends, but it’s there.
Newsweek reports the facts: the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen by 10 points over the last twenty years, from 86 to 76 percent. The number of people who are unaffiliated with any religion has jumped forward, from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent today. And the number who are willing to label themselves “atheists” has, it’s reasonable to say, skyrocketed — from 1 million in 1990 to 3.6 million today. That’s still less than two percent of the population, so let’s not get carried away. But it’s double the number of Episcopalians! (I was raised as an Episcopalian. Always been a shameless front-runner.)
Here’s how Jon Meacham sums it up in Newsweek:
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
I’ve said it before, but it’s time for us atheists to diversify our portfolio, as far as popular culture is concerned — skepticism and mocking of creationists are all well and good, but we need to put forward a positive agenda for living our lives without the comforting untruths handed down by religion. I’m doing my part by joining the Epicurus fan page on Facebook.
OK… now I’m convinced. ree-ree is totally yanking our chain.
mk:
I saw the video. Nice song. However, there IS empirical evidence supporting the existence of a higher power: the universe and the fact that it has a beginning in time. We know it has a beginning through cosmological observations. Thus, the universe was created by a higher power, or was generated from another universe. Since there is no evidence for a multiverse, or for two branes colliding, or for string theory itself, the idea that the universe was created by a higher power is at least as believable as string theory’s explanation.
Also, that guy who prayed the rosary using beads which were blessed by John Paul II was instantly cured! In that case, the Catholic Church has taught that a case for sainthood must demonstrate that a miracle occur after praying for the subject’s intercession. In this case, the subject was John Paul II. Guy prayed…guy got cured. There you go. People always knew John Paul II was a saint, and they now have their proof.
What more do you want yo?
Peace.
I’m not yanking your chain. I do believe in God and in miracles, you know. Just like how many string theorists believe the theory HAS to be true. Yet atheists don’t chastise string theorists, so why should they chastise religious people?
ree ree: Yes, you have an explanation, but you can’t prove it. As far as string theory goes, to quote one of my professors, “it’s not even wrong.” There are so many possible solutions to the equations that it could mean anything, and there’s virtually no evidence to support any version of it. I’m as skeptical of strings as I am of God, but there’s a major difference between them: the concept of God has a lot more influence over society, culture, and policy than the concept of strings.
Ryan: for me, being an atheist does mean that I don’t believe in God. If empirical evidence was found demonstrating God’s existence, I would accept that proof. However, I still would not “believe” in God as religious people do, i.e. having faith despite a lack of or contradictory evidence. I understand that there exists the possibility of God’s existence, but I don’t actively believe it to be true, and this is the same for unicorns, etc.
ree ree’s reasonable statement:
“…we cannot know the mind of God…”
ree ree:
“And when medicine cannot explain it, it’s because God did it. ”
“…miracles were done so that people will believe.”
“…you cannot just go through the motions, my dear friends, and expect God to submit himself to experimentation.”
“God will heal whom he chooses, when he chooses, according to his plan.”
@ree-ree…
Totally good stuff man! You had most of us going for bit there. You’re like Stephen Colbert of the science/atheist blogs! I bow to your cleverness. Kudos!
Hello, before offering an opinion may I ask if there’s been something wrong with posting here (on this thread at least) for the last several hours? Right now, in a library, and would be a shame if patrons couldn’t put up their opinions. Briefly though, forget the stale arguments and read Paul Davies and the like – or better yet, try “going inside.” Neither conventional religion or atheism is satisfactory IMHO.
Well, apparently not. Let my try to enlarge a bit. Yes, one should try to make a case for X if one believes that X exists (not that “exists” is a clear concept, see what modal realists have said.) But thinking it’s all about “evidence” is a radical empiricist posture. There is also “argument” and interpretation from what we already know, if we can’t get “evidence.” An example would be saying (and ironically, including atheists like Victor Stenger, Max Tegmark) that all possible worlds should exist (for same argument I use below re numbers.) Multi-worlds in QM is a similar, less radical ides. Or maybe that time travel should be impossible because it would cause troubles, or those who say “time doesn’t really exist” because flowing time is weird or whatever. Then there’s claims like, if space had D large dimensions instead of three, things would be such and such a way, and so on.
The case for a first cause/supreme being is based on argument from what we already know, as you would be taught in any good philosophy class. Second, the case does not depend on any silly oversight like thinking “everything needs a cause” which leads to a regress – yes, they knew that in the Middle Ages. “If you say that God needs no cause, or is its own cause, you might as well ascribe that same property to the universe and avoid the whole thing.” – Kevin. Well, saying “you might as well” doesn’t make it equally viable. That’s what the whole argument turns around: Whether this universe is the right logical sort of thing to be self-sufficient. As I have said here and there, it is too “particular” of a set of affairs to make sense as fundamental, as opposed to some ground of being like a Platonic mind having “all” within it etc. This universe being “it” is like 42 being the “it” number that needs no explanation of why it can be made a real thing and not just an abstraction.
But in any case, I hope everyone here believes in freedom of belief and especially freedom of expresion. What we do is more important than these abstractions. I once had a sort of “message” from God, but you don’t have to believe that “God exists” to appreciate it in practice. The message was:
I am your eyes and ears,
you are my hands and feet.
I was amazed to find that some great mystics like Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross had “heard” similar messages. So IMHO, our insight comes “of God” or is Godly (the best there is, whether “a being” is there to embody it.) But God cannot do things, we must be the doers of God’s will. And God’s will is the Good, the best we can do. You don’t have to worry about whether God exists or not to be Godly. The World certainly needs plenty of helping hands and feet, more than debaters now!
“Totally good stuff man! You had most of us going for bit there. You’re like Stephen Colbert of the science/atheist blogs! I bow to your cleverness. Kudos!”
Although I love Colbert, I’m actually being 95% serious.
Seriously! Well done! Never breaks character!
Absolutely brilliant.
anonymous one: The idea you’ve presented that the universe is too “particular” to be a self-sufficient, i.e. causeless, entity seems related to the anthropic principle. We can certainly imagine a universe with different properties where life (as we know it) couldn’t exist. However, without knowing how the universe came to have the properties it does have, we can’t say that these different properties are a real possibility, rather than just a fantasy. Also, our logic is based on causality and allows us to postulate the existence of causeless entities, but we don’t know that the former principle can be extended to the universe itself and “beyond” (as I said before), and we don’t know that the latter postulation has any physical relevance or meaning.
God’s existence can be phrased in terms of evidence or argument, I agree. However, if there is no evidence for God’s existence, than God might as well not exist, because evidence is any effect God has on the universe. It’s true that creating the universe is an effect, if it can be proven, but there’s still no logical step to take from that information that gets to any existing form of religion or spiritual belief (again, besides deism).
I don’t deny that you and other people have had religious experiences that are very similar in content and feeling; there’s clear evidence for it. However, I do deny the assumption that the cause of those experiences must be God. It’s much simpler to ascribe these experiences to similar conditions within the experiencers’ brains, all things considered, which is a perfect example of Occam’s razor. In fact, research into what exactly happens to the brain during a “religious experience” is being conducted right now. Even if an outside cause rather than an internal one ends up being a better fit for the information once more is known, demonstrating that that cause _must_ be God is quite a heavy burden of proof.
It sounds to me like an atheist would have little uncertainty about his disbelief in god/s.
Well, sure. Probably you are the same. Ask yourself this question.
How uncertain are you that Zeus doesn’t really exist?
Sure, perhaps he does really exist but…I doubt you’re going to honestly lose any sleep over it.
They always strike me as less of an argument and more a way of making fun of god…
No. It’s not about making fun of a god. It’s that there’s no evidence that the god exists in the first place.
It’s about illustrating how empty is the claim that there is a god/gods.
For example, my NW camping experience could be considered evidence against a bigfoot (sans bigfoot siting).
Nope. You were clearly not in the right place in the right time. The Bigfoot was there. You just chose not to see it. Or perhaps you farted or something and you drove it away just as it was about to say “Hi”.
(nudge, nudge, wink, wink)
“Evidence against…”
If somebody wants to claim that Bigfoot exists then you don’t have to provide any “evidence against” Bigfoot. That’s not your job. That’s not your responsibility.
They claim that there’s Bigfoot? Then THEY get to provide evidence FOR Bigfoot. You don’t have to do anything except check out their evidence.
If you find their evidence compelling then there’s no problem with signing up to the Bigfoot Appreciation Society.
Same goes for unicorns, Zeus, pixies, Ra, ghosts, Sky Woman, Wotan, bunyips, Krishna, etc.
No exceptions allowed. No special pleading. No Get Out of Jail Free card.
I’m convinced that this terminology ends up being largely a function of culture.
Excellent point. So, with that point in mind, I would respectfully suggest that you don’t restrict yourself to the definitions provided by one solitary dictionary. There’s a big chance that those defintions were written by non-atheists.
If we’re talking about culture then please check out how atheists define themselves, not how religious people with vested interests define them.
Please have a look at the link I provided. There’s lots of intellectual discussions on atheism that might give you a better understanding on what atheists think about things. I personally found it to be very useful.
Take Dawkins, for example. How does he sum it up?
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.
Some of us just go one god further.
Professor Richard Dawkins
If you can get behind that then…I’d call you an atheist.
🙂
And Dawkins is paraphrasing the historian Stephen Henry Roberts, who said:
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
Tacticus says:
“Religious indoctrination is a vital part of the suicide bomber’s preparation.
And also note that without that indoctrination, there are no suicide bombers.”
This hypothesis suggests that secular resistance groups such as the LTTE would make little or no use of suicide bombers. How do the data fit this prediction?
This discussion about God and atheism has two aspects: the political and the philosophical. The political aspect is related to the question is religion usefull or harmfull for a society and what should be a role of religion in a society. These questions do not have a simple answer. As far as the philosophical aspect is concerned, I tried to argue that essentially there are only two posibilities: materialism or idealism. The problem with materialism is that you can not have natural laws, because a natural law by definition is not a part of spacetime nor of matter (it is a mathematical structure). Then what would be perceived as a law of motion would be simply a random regularity in the motion of matter. Then the problem for a materialistic philosophy is to explain why regularity in Nature is so widespread and persistent in time (“The unreasonable effectivnes of mathematics” – Weyl). The only explanation is that all regularity in Nature is a giant fluctuation, which is ridiculous. On the other hand, the idealism, or more precisely the platonism, can accomodate the natural laws, mathematics, as well as the idea of God.
This discussion about God and atheism has two aspects….
Hang on!
You said something about an “atheist worldview” before.
What happened?
That silly and meaningless phrase now missing from your latest post.
Is it because you now understand that…it’s silly and meaningless?
I find very little “post-Christian” about America. There are still more Christians than non-Christians or agnostics or atheists and to say that “woo-hoo, they’re declining” allows for decline in the activism that is definitely needed to keep them out of our lives.
I suspect that this decline is mostly those Christians who have decided that every other form of Christianity is “wrong” except theirs and that they have tried to abandon the term because they don’t want the baggage that comes with it. How many of us see the usual claims of “a relationship, not a religion” or some such way to disassociate themselves from the horrors that their God evidently advocates? Instead of one massive religion, we now have millions of sects that all think that they have the only grasp of the “truth”. IMO, this makes them more dangerous than ever.
So lets see, we have two data points. Lets draw a straight line connecting them. Ah-Ha!! That gives us a definite trend to Post-Christian America!!
Is this the sort of thing that scientists do?
“Betting against American religion has always proved to be a fool’s game. In 1880, Robert Ingersoll, the leading atheist of his day, claimed that “the churches are dying out all over the land.” In its Easter issue in 1966, Time asked “Is God Dead?” on its cover. East Coast intellectuals have repeatedly assumed that the European model of progress, where modernity equals secularization, would come to the U.S. They have always been wrong.”
“Looked at from a celestial perspective, the American model of religion, far from retreating, is going global. Pastorpreneurs are taking their message around the world. In Latin America, Pentecostalism has disrupted the Catholic Church’s monopoly. Already five of the world’s 10 biggest churches are in South Korea: Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has 800,000 members, is a rival in terms of organization for anything Messrs. Warren and Hybels can offer. China is the latest great convert. There are probably close to 100 million Christians in China, most of them following a very individualistic American-style faith. Already more people attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party. China will soon be the world’s biggest Christian country and also possibly its biggest Muslim one.”
That quoteed above is from the editors of the Economist in their Wall Street Journal article that cam be read at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906081768295037.html
Sean, and most of this blog’s commenters, are far removed from reality.
“Ryan Says:
April 5th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
That is great if it is becoming increasingly clear (read: Newsweek survey). I came to the same conclusions quite a while ago. What do you propose to do about it? Talk about your atheism until all the Christians are super mad and everybody else who stopped listening a while ago continues to not care? In the US the conflict between the secular and religious is largely a cultural one, where evidence has very little effect.”
Yeah… your right (in my mind). It’s just that this doesn’t need to be about convincing the religious about the failings of faith. I think “Post-Christian America” would be the complete and strict separation of state and religion, not some attack on religion. If that was done, such an achievement would change the world.
“ree ree Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I’m not yanking your chain. I do believe in God and in miracles, you know. Just like how many string theorists believe the theory HAS to be true. Yet atheists don’t chastise string theorists, so why should they chastise religious people?”
I am constantly amazed at how much a bunch of readers who don’t pay any subscription feel that they are entitled to. The comment by John Doe above is a classic example – this dude would rather have Sean stop writing about non-science, instead of bothering to simply NOT READ the post. How charitable of him to allow Sean another non-science blog for his thoughts on matters beyond science. And how cruel of Sean to not ‘clearly distinguish from physics discussions’ a post that is called ‘Post-Christian America’ and tagged as religion. It must be hard to separate physics from non-physics when you don’t care to read a word.
Sean (who maybe actually remembers me from conferences 10 years or so ago) says:
“I suppose I am a Bright, by the stated definition (naturalistic worldview, etc.). But I’m not sure what the benefit of joining groups like this might be, and I’m very sure that attaching the label “Brights” to people with naturalistic worldviews was one of the worst PR moves of all time.”
I couldn’t agree more. A PR disaster of very high magnitude. The only book I’ve read by
Dawkins is “The God Delusion”, which I enjoyed, though of course in my case it was
preaching to the choir. (I admit that I am hesitant about reading his books on evolution
since I am strongly influenced by Stephen Jay Gould, who claims that Dawkins
over-emphasises certain things, to put it mildly. Of course, Gould ties in to the post
on randomness and the link to Peter Coles’s blog.)
There is the analogy with “gay” (take a positive word and attach it to something you think
is positive but most people don’t), but the difference is that most people don’t mind if they
are deemed to be not gay (in the traditional sense), whereas most would probably take
offense at being deemed not bright (or being deemed dim).
Somewhere on the web, I ran across the term “secular pagan”. That says it all. It is SO
much better than “bright”. Getting back to cosmology, all the world (especially people
who write about cosmology, whether or not they are cosmologists) should realise how
much better Sean’s coinage “smooth tension” is than the now ubiquitous “dark energy”.
Dear blogger,
I was referring to “atheistic worldview” as the materialistic philosophy where everything that exists can be explained as a pattern of motion of elementary constituents of matter.
I was referring to “atheistic worldview” as the materialistic philosophy…
(sigh)
Ahah, now I understand your confusion!
Atheism is NOT materialism.
Talking about materialism is not the same as talking about atheism.
Talking about atheism is not the same as talking about materialism.
Don’t conflate the two.
There is no “worldview” of atheism.
“Atheist worldview” is meaningless gobbledy-gook.
“A-pinkunicorninism worldview” is meaningless gobbledy-gook.
“A-fairiesinmygardenism worldview” is meaningless gobbledy-gook.
No set of rules. No handbook with easy-to-read instructions.
No creed to recite before bedtime. No single ideology or set of behaviours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=803X0iiiX0c&feature=related