Atheism

Atheism settles a single point: whether any god exists. It answers no, or it answers that the case has not been made. Nothing else follows from that answer. What an atheist thinks about the good life, the state, death, art, or what the universe is made of is left entirely open, and two atheists may share nothing at all beyond the one negation. Historically they often have not.

The standard distinction is between the weak or negative form, which is simply the absence of belief in gods, and the strong or positive form, which asserts that no gods exist. The difference matters because the two carry different burdens. Someone who merely lacks belief has made no claim and owes no defence of one. Someone who asserts that no gods exist has made a claim and can be asked to support it. A great deal of argument between atheists and their critics turns on which is meant, and much of it is conducted at cross purposes.

Two things atheism is not. It is not antitheism, the further judgement that religion is harmful and should be opposed; the two travel together often enough to be confused, but they are separable, and plenty of atheists hold the first without the second. And it is not a religion, though the charge is made regularly. There is no atheist scripture, rite, clergy or obligation, and nothing an atheist can be excommunicated from. The stronger version of the charge is narrower and harder to wave away: that particular organised atheist movements have behaved socially like religions, with canonical texts, recognised authorities and internal heresies. That is a claim about movements, and there is evidence for it, but it is not a claim about the position.

Nor does atheism supply a moral code. Atheists have been utilitarians, Kantians, Marxists, libertarians and nihilists. Where morality comes from if not from a god is a real question, and secular philosophy has several competing answers to it; atheism as such offers none of them.

New Atheism names a particular moment rather than the position as a whole, and reading it as the definition of atheism is a mistake. Between 2004 and 2007 four books (Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great), sold in numbers no work of unbelief had reached before, and their authors were widely called the four horsemen. The setting was the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and the case being pressed was not only that religion is false but that the deference customarily shown to it is dangerous and should stop.

What was new was reach and tone rather than argument. Most of the philosophical content had been available since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the novelty was a mass paperback audience and a deliberate refusal to be polite.

The reaction from other atheists is usually left out of the story and is the more interesting half of it. The sociologist Stephen LeDrew argued in The Evolution of Atheism (2015) that the movement was itself an ideology, scientistic in its assumptions and incurious about what religion actually does for the people who hold it. Others objected that its treatment of Islam slid from criticism of doctrine into hostility toward Muslims, a charge pressed hardest against Harris and against Hitchens, who also supported the invasion of Iraq. Historians of science disputed its background assumption of a permanent war between science and religion, which specialists had largely abandoned.

The movement then fractured in the 2010s over questions that had nothing to do with God: disputes about sexism at conferences from 2011 onward, and the short-lived Atheism Plus project, which tried to bind atheism to a set of progressive commitments and was rejected by many atheists on the ground that atheism entails no commitments whatever. That argument is the clearest demonstration of the point made in the first article. By the late 2010s few people were claiming the label.

The number of atheists in the world is not known within any narrow margin, and the reasons are worth setting out, because confident figures circulate freely in both directions.

Most of the large numbers quoted are not atheist numbers. Pew Research Center put the religiously unaffiliated at roughly 1.9 billion in 2020, about a quarter of humanity and the third largest category after Christians and Muslims. But unaffiliated is an answer about membership, not about belief. Pew's own later work on the same population found that large shares of people who report no religion nevertheless report belief in God or a higher power, in spirits, in fate or in an afterlife. Treating that figure as a count of atheists overstates it by a wide multiple.

The United States shows the gap plainly. About 28 per cent of American adults told Pew in 2023 that they had no religion, but only around 17 per cent of that group described themselves as atheists, which puts atheists near 5 per cent of all adults.

The larger difficulty is China, which supplies the majority of the world's unaffiliated in every dataset and therefore drives the global total. Chinese respondents commonly report no religious affiliation while making offerings to ancestors, visiting temples and holding beliefs a Western questionnaire would score as religious, because the Chinese term rendered as religion carries a sense of formal institutional membership that the practices do not involve. Pew publishes a separate methodological report on the problem. Where and how the surveys are conducted adds further uncertainty.

Then there is stigma, which cuts both ways. In states where unbelief is criminal or socially ruinous it is not declared to strangers with clipboards. In others the word atheist carries a combativeness that people who simply do not believe prefer to avoid, and they answer agnostic or nothing in particular instead. Any global figure should be read as a floor.