Untheism is not Atheism

      A very rapidly growing number of people in the world don’t believe in supernatural beings or realms. In other words, they don’t believe in gods or demons, heavens or hells, the unseen and unsensed, the actuality of what is only imagined.

     But they are not necessarily atheists, a word that implies, often unfairly, active antagonism. Untheists are simply unbelievers, people who, lacking material evidence in support of a hypothesis, simply can’t accept its reality in existence. But they are not universally hostile to faith or to those who have it. In fact, they are often acutely aware of the transcendent good religion can bestow. They just can’t subscribe to any faith doctrines themselves on principle—the principle that reality always requires substantiality to verify.

     In terms of expanding numbers, this skeptical group has been sharply ascendant in the industrialized West for decades, with more-devout Americans lagging somewhat behind. But uber-Christian Yankee piety clearly appears to be ebbing. In the parlance of religious demographics, the doubters are known as “nones,” comprising atheists, agnostics and people with no religious affiliation whatsoever. All the rest are true believers of one kind or another. According to influential Pew Research Center’s 2017 report “The Changing Global Religious Landscape,” the number of formerly religious adherents in the world who switched to “nones” leaped by 26 percent between 2010 and 2015, compared to Christians (sharply down 7 percent) and Muslims (up a paltry 0.3 percent). The vast majority of “nones” (78 percent) say they were raised with a particular religious identity but shed it in adulthood. Forty-nine percent of “nones” say they discarded religion due to lack of belief in supernatural ideas; they cite “science” and “lack of evidence” among key reasons for their changed attitudes regarding religion.

     Barna Group, a researcher of spiritual issues, wrote in its “State of Atheism in America” in 2015, that “nones,” which it terms “skeptics,” were getting younger at the time. Barna reported that the number of skeptics under 30 years old had nearly doubled—from 18 percent to 34 percent—over several decades, and that their proportion of the overall population rose from 17 percent in 1991 to 23 percent in 2015. In the meantime, the number of skeptics 65 and older comprise only 7 percent of the population, halved from several decades ago. “Nones” and skeptics are also becoming better educated, with the number who are college graduates growing from a third to half over the same period, Barna reports. Women make up the largest group transitioning into the ranks of unaffiliated; in 1993 only 16 percent of atheists and agnostics were women, but that figure tripled to 43 percent by 2013. There is also likely a significant, possibly very significant, population of hidden nonbelievers. The American Atheists organization noted recently that whereas 5 percent of Americans specifically self-identify themselves as “atheists,” 11 percent self-report that they don’t believe in gods.

     General interest in unbelief is broad and growing in the West. For example, Amazon.com lists 2,456 titles on atheistic topics, 471 related to agnosticism. This recurring column will focus on how religious skepticism is not just a modern phenomenon. It has been coursing continuously like a river—often blood red from combat—for thousands of years. I will try to show how genetics, natural human behavior, the coercion of church-state power and the politics of self-interest collaborated to embed religion—which effectively means Christianity in the West—deeply into the Western mind. Understanding how intractable belief relentlessly evolved over history might present new, possibly more practical ways to define mankind’s heretofore compulsively imaginative reality, as science already does in the strictly material world.