Agnosticism

While U.S. currency says “In God We Trust,” only half of U.S. adults have certainty about God’s existence.

When asked about their confidence in God’s existence, 50% say they know God exists and have no doubts, according to the latest General Social Survey (GSS). In 1993, 65% of Americans said they were certain God existed, and the percentage has been sliding down ever since.

Belief in God has particularly fallen among young adults. In 1993, 63% of 18- to 34-year-olds knew God existed with no doubts. Today, just 36% have the same confidence. Other age demographics have fallen, but not to the same extent. Belief in the divine among 35- to 49-year-olds is down to 49%. While the percentage of those 50 and older who have complete confidence in God’s existence remains higher than other age groups, it has dropped to 58%.

Belief in God among upper-class Americans has actually increased over the past two decades, from 49% to 53%. But it has declined in every other class designation. Middle-class belief is down from 62% in 1993 to 44%. Working-class belief has declined from 67% to 54%. And lower class belief has dropped from 75% to 57%.

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check “none.” A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They're more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%). Researchers refer to this group as the "Nones."

Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew's new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically. Pew asked respondents what they believe. The research organization found that most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.

They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.

Pew also asked respondents what they believe. While many people of faith say they rely on scripture, tradition, and the guidance of religious leaders to make moral decisions, Pew found that Nones say they're guided by logic or reason when making moral decisions. And huge numbers say the desire to avoid hurting other people factors prominently in how they think about right and wrong.

Demographically, Nones also stand out from the religiously affiliated:

• Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty.

• They're also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white.

• The Nones are comprised of three distinct groups – atheists, agnostics, and those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular.”

Democritus suggested that all matter in the universe was made up of tiny, indivisible, solid objects. He called these particles "atomos” which is Greek for “uncuttable” or “indivisible.” Later scientists discovered that these atoms could be divided into smaller particles known as the electron, proton, and neutron. Now, more than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand it.

High school physics teachers describe protons as featureless balls each with one unit of positive electric charge. College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks. But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images. Most recently, a monumental analysis found that the proton contains traces of particles called charm quarks that are heavier than the proton itself.

Mike Williams, a physicist at MIT, said, “This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine. In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is. (The proton) has been humbling to humans. Every time you think you kind of have a handle on it, it throws you some curveballs.”

Our understanding of the atom has come a long way. While it has taken several thousand years, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of all matter has advanced considerably. And yet, there remain many mysteries that are yet to be resolved. With time and continued efforts, we may finally unlock the last remaining secrets of the atom. Then again, it could very well be that any new discoveries we make will only give rise to more questions and they could be even more confounding than the ones that came before!

Possible Preaching Angle:

Scientists continue to expand our knowledge of the universe and how it operates. Just as the universe is massively complex with uncounted galaxies, so the subatomic world is massively complex. Together they are silent witnesses of the mind of our omniscient and omnipotent Creator who designed it and “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists according to the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC, the research arm of the University of Chicago. Religious scholars consider NORC the gold standard of surveys on faith.

According to this 2022 survey, 50% of Americans say they’re unsure God is real; just under 50% say they’re positive God exists; and 34% say they never go to church—the highest level in 50 years. It’s still about a fifty-fifty world out there; but it’s tipping toward uncertainty.

If you look at years past, in comparison with years present, it seems America is hurtling toward secularism. In 2008, for example, 60% of those responding to this General Social Survey expressed certainty in the existence of God. At that rate—of 10% drops in belief in God every 15 years—all of America will be non-believing by the dawn of the next century.

Ryan Burge, is a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies faith. He wrote that mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is “collapsing.” Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.

Christianity could become a minority religion in the U.S. by 2070 if Americans continue to leave the faith at the current rate, according to new projections by the Pew Research Center.

The projections used surveys and other data to figure out what religion in America would look like in the next 50 years. Pew estimates that nearly a third of people raised in the Christian faith currently leave the religion before turning 30 years old, and another seven percent do so after that age. If those rates continue, the group projects that 46% of Americans would identify as Christian by 2070 and those with no religious affiliation would stand at about 41%. That would mean Christianity would no longer be the majority religion in the U.S., according to Pew.

In the early 1990s, about 90% of Americans identified as Christians. By 2020, Pew estimated that about 64% of Americans were Christian; 30% had no religious affiliation (“nones”); and 6% were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or part of another religion. If the latest projections become reality, the U.S. would fall more in line with other Western European countries, where Christianity has already lost its majority.

According to a 2021 study many young people consider themselves spiritual but don’t identify with an organized religion. The survey found that half of young people ages 13 to 25 don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter to them. Those include issues related to racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality, and gun control.

For decades, we’ve thought of women as more religious than men. Survey results, conventional wisdom, and anecdotal glimpses across our own congregations have shown us how women care more about their faith, though researchers haven’t been able to fully untangle the underlying causes for the gender gap across religious traditions and across the globe.

Now, data shows the long-held trend may finally be flipping: In the United States, young women are less likely to identify with religion than young men. The findings could have a profound impact on the future of the American church.

Percentage who identified as nones in 2021:

18 to 25-year-old men – 46%

18 to 25-year-old women – 49%

40-year-old men – 45%

40-year-old women – 44%

60-year-old men – 32%

60-year-old women – 36%

65-year-old men – 25%

65-year-old women – 20%

There’s also a gender gap in church attendance. This pattern has been so stark that Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Christian women around the world are on average seven percentage points more likely than men to attend services; there are no countries where men are significantly more likely to be religiously affiliated than women.

Tara Edelschick was raised in a home that was loving, loud, and fun, but an undercurrent of anxiety coursed through it all. The world was seen as a scary place. Tara said, “The message of my childhood was clear and insistent: Work, play, and love hard. Stay in control at all times, because something scary is waiting to take you down. I heeded that message into adulthood.”

She went to a great college, found the perfect job, and chose a wonderful husband. She thought to herself, “Weaker souls might need a god, but I needed no such crutch. I can orchestrate the perfect life. But that belief was obliterated when my husband, Scott, died from complications during a routine surgery. Ten days later, I delivered our first child, Sarah, stillborn.”

During the next year, she began a search for God. She visited psychics, read New Age thinkers, and attended meditation classes. Her forays into faith were attempts to make sense of what had happened to her and to control a world in which she had far less control than she thought she had.

Then she started reading the Book of John with a friend. Tony was the only Christian she knew who didn’t try to explain away the loss of her husband and baby. He said that if she would just read the Bible, God would do the convincing. So, they read the Bible together over the phone on Saturday mornings.

Tara writes,

I especially loved the story of (Jesus and) Lazarus. Unlike the Eastern philosophies that maintain that suffering is the result of our attachments, this story was about a man who was unashamedly attached. A man who behaved as though death was not natural. As though everything was broken, and that the sane response was to snort and weep. I loved that man.

After months of reading the Bible, Tara had to admit what she had fought so long to resist: She was hungry for Jesus. For the Jesus who hung out with whores, who wept when his friend died, and who claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. She said, “All of my searching for something in which to place my faith … led me to God who offered me himself in the form of Jesus. I didn’t have to find him or explain him; I just had to say yes.”

After that, Tara returned to school to study childhood bereavement. She married a wonderful man, and they had two beautiful sons. After getting married, she facilitated a support group for surviving parents whose spouse had died, and taught a class at Harvard on bereavement. She often found herself the repository for stories of loss, told in lowered voices at parties and grocery stores.

She says,

I try to listen deeply as people share those stories, nodding in agreement with how awful it is. I bear their story and, in so doing, remind them that they are not alone. These days when I sit with the broken and mourning, I pray for God’s love to do what I cannot: to bind up the wounded places, leaving their scars to bear witness of the power of both loss and love.

Jewish novelist Andrew Klavan shares his testimony of coming to faith in Christ:

When he was 13-years-old Andrew Klavan received thousands of dollars in gifts at his bar mitzvah. But over time his pleasure in his riches soured and died and he realized the truth—he hated all that they stood for. He writes:

The majesty and profundity of the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony … and of Judaism itself—were lost on me. For the simple reason that my parents did not believe in God. ... Despite our dutiful celebration of Jewish holidays, God had no living presence in our family. We did not say grace before meals or prayers before bedtime. We did not read the Bible at home.

Andrew could not overcome the feeling that in undergoing bar mitzvah he was not being true to himself. So, one winter’s night he took all of his riches and threw them in the trash. With that gesture he hoped to leave Judaism far behind him. For the next 35 years he was a practical atheist.

Yet, as Andrew looked back over his life, he could see that Christ had beckoned to him in many circumstances. The kindness of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired him to keep going when he contemplated suicide. And especially in his marriage that taught him the reality of love and led him to contemplate the greater love that was its source. He writes:

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. I was in my 40s, lying in bed with a novel. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, “Well, if he can pray, so can I.” I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I’d found, “Thank you, God.” God’s response was an act of extravagant grace.

I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects. I called this experience “the joy of my joy.” I realized that prayer—that God—had transformed my life utterly, giving me a depth and pleasure of experience, I had never known. I asked God, “How can I thank you for what you’ve done for me? What could I possibly offer you in return?” And as clearly as if he had spoken aloud, God answered, “Now, you should be baptized.”

I was stunned. Nothing could have been further from my mind. I was a realist who believed in science and reason; a worldling who loved sex, politics, and a good single malt scotch. I feared that becoming a Christian would estrange me from my past, my parents, my culture, and from reality itself.

My bar mitzvah had been an empty ritual, devoid of God. But my baptism was the outward expression of an authentic inner conviction. The moment I rose from my knees by the baptismal font, I knew I had stepped through some invisible barrier between myself and a remarkable new journey. Within a week or so, my wife noticed it too: a new joy and easiness. My soul had found its northern star. And that star still leads me on.

The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81% who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup's trend. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. Gallup's May 2022 Values and Beliefs poll finds 17% of Americans saying they do not believe in God.

Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year's drop to 81%.

The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62%), young adults (68%), and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the US.

The bottom line is that fewer Americans today, than five years ago, believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership, and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

The opening lines of a recent article in INews reads: “Those of us without traditional religion are left to make our peace with uncertainty. ... There’s nothing comforting about being agnostic.” In the article, Eleanor Margolis laments her agnosticism and muses about the benefits of faith.

It was in February, and while Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, that I started to wonder if it was time to find God. Definite God, that is. Not the half-hearted agnostic one built on a Jenga tower of uncertainty. The addition of a heightened nuclear threat from Putin made me desperate for a vengeful Old Testament God. Someone (to) smite the warmongers and oligarchs, the evil ones “know not what they do.” When nothing is left of civilization but the cockroaches.

The last time I felt so envious of religious people was when my mum was dying of cancer. Certainty about an afterlife sure would’ve come in handy then. And prayer might have created the illusion that I had some power over the situation. Instead, I was treated to the spiritual equivalent of the shrug emoji. I became a devout follower of one true religion of the 21st century: uncertainty. Those of us without traditional religion are left to make our peace with uncertainty.

Brett McCracken writes in his book, The Wisdom Pyramid:

I live in Southern California, where climate-controlled houses and air-conditioned cars give us a measure of mastery over summer's triple-digit temperatures or winter's atmospheric river storms. But we can't escape nature completely. A mudslide washes away parts of Highway 1, making it impassable. The Santa Ana winds will blow, causing us to cough on the air that "tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette" as the poet Dana Gioia (aptly) says. Months of no rain crisp the Sonoran landscape, making it ripe for autumn wildfires. The weather doesn't ask for our opinion. Nature reminds us there is a world bigger than the one we've made.

A headline in the Los Angeles Times that sums it up well: "We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not." Perhaps that's one of the reasons I've always loved nature—God's beautiful and terrifying creation. In a world where man thinks he is the measure of all things, nature begs to differ. There is a givenness to nature that is sanity in an insane world. It is there to sustain our lives, to be enjoyed, but also to challenge us, to put us in our place, and to impart to us wisdom—if we are willing to listen.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Scripture is our supreme and only infallible source of knowledge of God. But Scripture itself tells us that wisdom can be found in God's creation (Psa. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:19-20). Nature’s glory is not an end unto itself. It’s not a god to worship. It’s a prism and amplifier of God’s glory. It’s a theater, a canvas, a cathedral, but God is always at center stage.

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn, explores meaning, morality, and faith. She recalls the role of thinking and reason during her days at Bible College:

When I was a Christian, I had a naive, unquestioning faith in the faculty of higher thought, in my ability to comprehend objective truths about the world. ... People often decry the thoughtlessness of religion, but when I think back on my time in Bible school, it occurs to me that there exist few communities where thought is taken so seriously. We spent hours arguing with each other—in the dining hall, in the campus plaza—over the finer points of predestination or the legitimacy of covenant theology.

Beliefs were real things that had life-or-death consequences. A person’s eternal fate depended on a willingness to accept or reject the truth—and we believed implicitly that logic was the means of determining those truths. Even when I began to harbor doubts…. I maintained an essential trust in the notion that reason would reveal to me the truth.

Today, no longer a believer, she has her doubts:

I no longer believe in God. I have not for some time. I now live with the rest of modernity in a world that is “disenchanted.” ... I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind.” Yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions by elusive forces: some combination of hormones, evolutionary biases, and unconscious needs. Twice a week I attend a yoga class where I am instructed to “let go of the thinking mind.”

Researchers calculate that about 530,000 fewer public school students are learning about intelligent design in 9th or 10th grade biology classes today, compared to 2007. The amount of class time science teachers spend on human evolution has also doubled in those 12 years, according to scholars at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education. The changes come from a new generation of teachers, new textbooks, and updated education standards.

Science teachers who teach intelligent design is a valid alternative:

2007 – 8%

2019 – 5%

Science teachers who discuss intelligent design:

2007 – 23%

2019 – 14%

Science teachers who teach evolution is established science:

2007 – 51%

2019 – 67%

The latest survey (2021) from Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center found that belief in God has declined between generations:

• 83% of those in the Silent Generation (born 1927-1945) profess belief in God
• 79% of baby boomers (born 1946-1964) believe in God
• 70% of Generation Xers (born 1965-1983) identified as Christian.
• 43% of millennials (born between 1984 and 2002) said they “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.” Only 57 percent said they were Christian.

The report underscores the declining importance of religious faith in American life, as highlighted in pandemic reopenings when politicians prioritized restaurants and tattoo parlors over houses of worship.

When Rebecca Pippert was an agnostic, she had one question she continually wrestled with: How can finite limited human beings ever claim to know God? How do they know they are not being deceived?

Pippert writes:

One sunny day I was stretched out on the lawn … when I noticed that some ants were busy building a mound. I began to redirect their steps with twigs and leaves. But they simply bounced off and started a new ant mound. I thought, This is like being God! I am redirecting their steps, and they don’t even realize it!

At one point, two ants crawled onto my hands and I thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if one ant turned to the others and said, “Do you believe in Becky? Do you believe Becky really exists?” I imagine the other ant answering, “Don’t be ridiculous! Becky is a myth, a fairy tale!” How comical, I thought--the hubris of that ant declaring that I don’t exist, when I could easily blow it off my hand. But what if the other ant said, “Oh, I believe that Becky exists!” How would they resolve it? How could they know that I am real? I thought. What would I have to do to reveal to them who I am?

Suddenly I realized: the only way to reveal who I am, in a way that they could understand, would be to become an ant myself. I would have to identify totally with their sphere of reality. I sat upright, and I remember thinking, What and amazing thought! The scaling-down of the size of me to perfectly represent who I am in the form of an ant! I know; I would have to do tricks! Things that no other ant could do!

Then it hit me: I had just solved my problem of how finite creatures could ever discover God. God would have to come from the outside and reveal who he is.

On the final episode of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Dolly offered various responses to the question: “What is the theology of Dolly Parton?”

After stating that she was “spiritual not religious,” Parton said, “The Bible says let every man seek out his own salvation, and that means to save himself. Whatever it takes to save you, and if you can get to that place and find your own peace then you can do good for other people if you are at peace with yourself.”

When asked about the afterlife, Parton responded, “You don’t really know, you just hope, and you have faith. That’s what faith is. I think it’s not the end of me. I don’t think it’s the end of any of us. I think we’re recycled and if nothing else we just go back into that great flow of divine energy and hopefully we spread ourselves around in other wonderful ways.”

An article in The Atlantic states that as a medical student Dr. Francis Collins found himself moving from agnostic to atheist. Collins said, “I would have challenged anybody who wanted to have some discussion about God. I would have asserted they were basically stuck in some past era of supernaturalism that is no longer necessary because science has eliminated the need for it.” But the time came as a third-year medical student when he found himself sitting at the bedside of people who had terrible illnesses that physicians were unable to help.

Dr. Collins went on to say:

Watching those individuals … at the end of their lives, I was trying to imagine what I would do in that circumstance. Many of these people were deeply committed to faith. I was unsettled to see how they approached the end of life. This was something that I personally was pretty terrified about. They had peace, and even a sort of sense of joyfulness that there was something beyond. It made me realize that I had never really gone beyond the most superficial consideration of whether God exists, or a serious consideration about what happens after you die.

Collins described one patient he had gotten pretty attached to:

She suffered from advanced cardiac disease, which included episodes of daily crushing chest pain. And yet she came through this all with remarkable peace and was very comfortable sharing the reason for that with me, namely her faith in Jesus. She looked at me in a quizzical way and said, “You know, doctor … You have listened to me talk about my faith, but you never say anything. What do you believe?” Just a very direct, very simple question, and it was like a thunderclap. That was the most important question I've ever been asked.

Collins later met a Methodist pastor, who “willingly tolerated my blasphemous questions and assured me that if God was real there would be answers.” It was this pastor who introduced Collins to the work of C.S. Lewis, starting with Mere Christianity.

“I realized … that most of my objections against faith were utterly simplistic. Here was an Oxford intellectual giant who had traveled the same path from atheism to faith, and had a way of describing why that made sense that was utterly disarming. It was also very upsetting. It was not the answer I was looking for.” And at age 27, Dr. Collins became a Christian.

Harvard professor James Wood, in a New Yorker article "Is That All There Is?" tells of a friend, a philosopher and a convinced atheist, who sometimes wakes in the middle of the night haunted by the following angst: "How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband's, my child's, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?"

Wood, who is a secular man himself, admits that "as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one's own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night."

What is this "incomprehension" that can suddenly grip even secular persons? Wood's friend's questions reveal more an intuition than a line of reasoning. It is the sense that we are more and life is more than what we can see in the material world.

Steve Jobs, when contemplating his own death, confessed that he felt that "it's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience ... and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures." It seemed to Jobs untrue to reality that, for something as significant as the human self, death would be just an "off switch," so it is merely "Click! And you're gone."

In an interview, actor Jim Carey was asked about his views of Jesus. Carey struggles with believing in the deity of Jesus but he still can't stop thinking about Jesus.

He's constantly coming up in my head. I definitely remember the first time he came up in my work: It was in art class, grade three or four, and because I was in Catholic school, I decided to draw a really beautiful picture of him. I was so proud of it, and I couldn't wait to bring it home and show my parents, because I'd show them all my art and they'd flip out and throw me the metaphorical dog bone and tell me how special I was.

But on the way out of the school yard, some bully got in front of me, and this gang started picking on me for it, saying, "You drew a picture of the lord." A fight started, and I just remember seeing the picture float through the air between bodies and a mud puddle, because it had been raining, face down. And then I became like a whirling dervish and just started punching faces, any face that I could find. I lost my mind. It was like somebody killed my baby. I don't remember what happened exactly—all I know is I punched a lot of people that day. [Laughs.] Maybe not the reaction you want, and not the reaction Jesus would have wanted, but it just took over. There was love in that picture…