Unbelief

A writer admits that secularism still hasn’t found an alternative to belief in God. Lauren Jackson writes, “I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure. I had that, and I left it all.

I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like [the religion of my childhood].

Jackson concludes:

But I don’t feel I can go back… I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the uncritical belief I once felt… [But] my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god… I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

In a remarkable 1988 article, the British atheist philosopher A. J. Ayer, architect of a philosophy known as logical positivism, recounted his own near-death experience (NDE)., Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon, causing his heart to stop beating for four minutes. But Ayer astonished his medical team by recovering and then telling them about an extraordinary experience. “I was confronted,” he recalled, “by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.”

One might expect that such an experience would prompt an atheist to reconsider views on God’s existence. But not Ayer—at least not publicly. “My recent experiences,” he wrote, “have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.” He was ready, in other words, to admit the universe might be more complex than he originally thought, but not to the point of questioning its supposed godlessness.

Yet in a curious twist, another account suggests that Ayer did reconsider the question of God’s reality. Jeremy George, the attending physician, later reported that Ayer had told him privately, “I saw a divine being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”

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%.

When Galileo introduced the telescope as a tool to peer into the galaxies, his contemporaries did not believe him. Scoffing, they refused to even look through the device. Galileo sat alone with his telescope. He was the sole observer of the vastness of the cosmos. A single witness of galaxies beyond anything anyone had seen or imagined. Galileo had the stars to himself.

Undermining Aristotle’s previous explanations of the universe, Galileo published his own findings based on what he’d seen through the telescope. He painted a picture for the entire world through words, a display of the heavens scratched across bound pages. He wrote about mountains and craters on the moon, spots upon the sun, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and multitudes of stars never known to exist.

These were monumental discoveries that would shape future space explorations, but they fell on ears refusing to hear and eyes refusing to see. Galileo’s peers mocked him and his toy. Strictly adhering to Aristotle’s descriptions of the universe, they refused to believe anything contrary to what they had held to for so long.

Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth, they rate a perfect 10 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. But on other carbon-rich planets, the jury is still out. That’s because for some 40 years, scientists have theorized that diamond can squeeze into an even harder mineral known as an eight-atom body-centered cubic, or BC8. If true, this ultra-dense form of carbon would likely be found on carbon-rich exoplanets and would have both a higher compressive strength and thermal conductivity than diamond.

As a result of their exceptional toughness and resistance to wear, diamonds have found a wide range of services in various fields and daily life. Saw blades and drill bits with diamond tips may easily slice through stone, concrete, and metal. Diamonds are also essential in the electrical industry because of their resilience and resistance to heat and chemicals. Another use for diamonds is their high electrical insulation which makes it a promising material for improving the reliability of semiconductors. And let’s not forget the romantic side of diamonds. Because of their extreme hardness and brilliance diamonds are prized as jewelry which can last forever.

Simply put, the discovery of a way to make this “super-hard diamond” could be a game changer for a variety of industries. And scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of South Florida using the Frontier supercomputer are researching just such a possible pathway toward creating BC8.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While a diamond is remarkable for its incredible hardness, there is something on earth that is even harder – the human heart. The Bible warns that a hardened heart is a serious spiritual condition that can develop through unrepentant sin, pride, ingratitude, or disappointment. Only God can truly soften a hardened heart, which requires recognizing the problem, repenting of sin, and submitting to God's work in one's life.

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.”

Sharing a Christian worldview with others can often create tense situations. Especially when we are talking with friends and family who do not share our views.

A "Profile" article in The New Yorker spotlighted Ross Douthat, a popular Times columnist. The title of the article is noteworthy: "The Believer: Ross Douthat's Theories of Persuasion." Douthat is a conservative leaning Catholic who is a pro-lifer and an advocate for traditional marriage.

How does he negotiate working with colleagues whose views are radically different from his own? The article offers one example that might be instructive.

In 2015, Douthat wrote a piece critical of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage, expressing concern that it reflected a "more relaxed view of marriage's importance." Before releasing it, he thought of Michael Barbaro. Barbaro has been a close friend of Douthat's since childhood. He refers to himself as Douthat's "sidekick." And Barbaro was married to a man. Barbaro recalls:

We hadn't been in touch that much, but Ross reached out to me to say, “I'm about to publish a column in which I come out against same-sex marriage. I want you to know that it didn't come to me easily. It's something I know may be sensitive to you. And, as somebody I care about, I want you to understand it. I don't want you to read about it in my column without us talking about it.”

When Barbaro shared how much he appreciated the note, Chotiner, the New Yorker reporter conducting the interview, was surprised, Barbaro should have been furious! Why wasn't he? Barbaro explained:

I was wounded by the position he took on a personal level. How could I not be? But it was meaningfully tempered by the reality that I knew where he was coming from, and that he had gone to the trouble to reach out to me.

Barbaro and his husband later divorced. When Chotiner interviewed him, Ross was on vacation with his wife and two children. He shared, "I've been on a long journey that I know Ross generally approves of. But, although I didn't do it for him, it's very funny, as I have had children, I can just sense his glee. It's no secret that he wants people to have children and to enter into monogamous heterosexual relationships." Barbaro let out a laugh. "And that wasn't my plan, but I have sensed his joy at that outcome."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the pressure of sharing our Christian worldview comes from our mistaken belief that we must convince others of our views. But our job is much simpler than all that. We are called only to speak the truth in love. And you'd be surprised at how persuasive that simple act can be.

Every person starts as one fertilized egg, which by adulthood has turned into roughly 37 trillion cells. But those cells have a formidable challenge. These cells must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA perfectly, about once every 24 hours. To speed up the process, cells start replication in multiple spots with people having tens of thousands of them throughout their genomes.

However, this poses its own challenge: How to know where to start and how to time everything. Without precision control, some DNA might get copied twice, causing cellular pandemonium. Bad things can happen if replication doesn’t start correctly. For DNA to be copied, the DNA double helix must open up, and the resulting single strands are vulnerable to breakage or the process can get stuck.

It takes a tightly coordinated dance involving dozens of proteins for the DNA-copying machinery to start replication at the right point in the cell’s life cycle. Keeping tight reins on the kickoff of DNA replication is particularly important to avoid that pandemonium.

Today, researchers are making steps toward a full understanding of the molecular checks and balances that have evolved in order to ensure that each origin initiates DNA copying once and only once, to produce precisely one complete new genome.

Possible Preaching Angle:

3,000 years ago, King David exclaimed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Ps. 139:14). Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially since that time and we should be even more in awe of God’s creative genius on display.

Saving faith is not mere knowledge of Scripture or of Christ. Treating it like that is like treating a prescription as a medicine, or a signpost as a destination. It fails to see the difference between two types of knowledge: A detached “outward” knowledge and a personally involved “inward” knowledge.

C.S. Lewis found this distinction indispensable and illustrated it in his essay titled “Meditation in a Toolshed.” In this excerpt he wrote:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What we see depends upon where we are standing. Any person can learn something about Christianity from the outside, e.g., by reading the Bible, studying what Christians believe, and examining the life of Christ. These are good things. It is important to remember, however, that a Christian is someone who has been born again, and knows God personally as Savior and Lord “from the inside.”

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.

Researchers reported recently that it is striking that water is the “least understood material on Earth.” In an article, researchers ask, “What could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s clear. It comes from rain. It boils. It makes snow and it makes ice! Does our government actually spend taxpayer money to study water? Yes, water is common—in fact, it is the third most common molecule in the universe. But it is also deceptively complex.” From steam to ice, water continues to mystify. Here are several of the weird facts about water:

Why Does Ice Float?

Researchers tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (This) explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are denser than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. But when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than … liquid water, which is why water props ice up.

Why Can Insects Walk On It?

Water has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life according to the researchers.

How Does Water Evaporate?

The rate of evaporation of liquid water is one of the principal uncertainties in modern climate modeling. ... The addition of salts to water raises the surface tension … and so should reduce the evaporation rate. But experimental studies show little or no effect when salts are added. The exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood.

Possible Preaching Angle:

These researchers point out some of the weird anomalies of water, which covers 71% of the surface of our world. Although they do not acknowledge God in their research, they do admit that “water can appear to be ‘fine-tuned’ for life.” Christians would respond that without its God-given properties, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing all fish in them. And, although the salt in oceans should inhibit evaporation, the water in the oceans evaporates, producing rain over the land. These are some examples of “Intelligent Design” in which our wise creator fine-tuned the earth to sustain life and provide for our needs and enjoyment of life.

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.

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 Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.

Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein. Epstein, author of the book Good Without God, is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. Yet many Harvard students—some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities—attest to the influence that Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.

Epstein said, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.” He has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.

This reflects a broader trend of young people across the United States who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated. That trend might be especially salient at Harvard; a Harvard Crimson survey of the class of 2019 found that those students were two times more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic than 18-year-olds in the general population.

Epstein said, “We don’t look to a god for answers. We are each other’s answers.” Epstein’s community has tapped into the growing desire for meaning without faith in God. A.J. Kumar, president of a Harvard humanist graduate student group, said, “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic, that’s a powerful thing.”

Joy Davidman was a Jewish American atheist poet who as a young woman became a communist to satisfy her thirst for justice. She married a fellow writer, Bill. (After Bill’s death she married C.S. Lewis.)

At one point she said, “Of course, I thought, atheism was true, but I hadn't given quite enough attention to developing the proof of it. Someday, when the children grow older, I'd work it out.” But between marrying Bill and meeting C.S. Lewis, Joy met Jesus.

Bill was a workaholic, an alcoholic, and unfaithful. One day he called Joy from his New York office and told her he was having a nervous breakdown. Then he hung up. There followed a day of frantic telephoning. By nightfall Joy recalls, there was nothing to do but wait and see if he turned up, alive or dead. She put her children to sleep and waited. And in that silence, something happened:

For the first time in my life, I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not calm after all, the master of my fate and the captain of my soul. All my defenses … all the walls of arrogance and cockiness and self-love behind which I'd hid from God … went down momentarily, and God came in … There was a person with me in that room, directly present to my consciousness—a person so real that all my previous life was by comparison, a mere shadow play, and I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep.

Many contemporary atheists give the impression that faith and science are completely incompatible. For instance, atheist Steven Pinker says, “The findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions and cultures … are factually mistaken.” In his book, The Atheist Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg writes, “Atheism is a demanding, rigorous, breathtaking grip on reality, one that has been vindicated beyond reasonable doubt. It’s called Science.”

But there are many other voices that would disagree with this view. For instance:

MIT professor Jing Kong, who grew up in China and became a Christian, says, "My research is only a platform for me to do God's work. His creation, the way he made this world, is very interesting. It’s amazing, really.”

Andrew Goslar, Oxford professor of applied ethnobiology, claims, “My coming to faith in Christ did not rest on one single issue … It was holistic a redefining of perspectives that came together through every aspect of my life.”

Cambridge professor of experimental physics, Russell Cowburn, expresses what dozens of leading scientists agree with, “Understanding more of science didn't make God’s role smaller. It allows us to see his creative activity in more detail.”

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.”

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.