Understanding Unbelief: Key Findings

Understanding Unbelief responded to a need to understand atheism and other forms of religious ‘unbelief’ much more widely, deeply and scientifically. Atheism, agnosticism and other forms of so-called ‘non-believing’ have been growing in many parts of the world. Yet, at the beginning of this project significant and fundamental questions remained about how to understand unbelief, and researchers relied on categories developed by social actors, not social scientists, to think about it.

At the outset, researchers did not know how best to characterize the various forms of unbelief as psychological and sociological phenomena, the extent to which other beliefs — about religion, or the existential — underpinned these forms, how diverse they were, and how they varied across demographic groups and cultures. At the same time, we recognised that understanding the nature and variety of unbelief was necessary if we were to answer big questions about the causes of ‘unbelief’ and its effects on such outcomes as personal wellbeing and social cohesion.

UU aimed to provide a scientifically robust understanding which would account for the diverse psychological and social phenomena and processes subsumed under these terms, and systematise our understanding of how these relate to one another.

The programme provided the first scientifically coherent account of ‘unbelief’ and what it means to be an ‘unbeliever’. It established the need to examine beliefs and non-beliefs in isolation and, at the same time, as part of wider worldviews and existential cultures.

• The process of ‘mapping’ unbelief as a complex and global set of phenomena established the need to disentangle several phenomena that are often amalgamated into ideas about ‘religious unbelief’ and ‘atheism’, such as beliefs about God, beliefs in supernatural phenomenon attitudes toward religion, moral systems, and existential beliefs and culture. This work showed how the idea of ‘fractionation’ developed in cognitive science (e.g. Pascal Boyer’s The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion, 2010 ; Whitehouse & Lanman 2014, Lanman 2016) could be used in cross-disciplinary research.

• Sociological work showed how fractionated elements are assembled into cultural packages and identities that guide individual lives, which in turn help us understand those individual beliefs and attitudes more deeply. Our work highlighted the value of examining beliefs and non-beliefs in isolation and, at the same time, as part of wider worldviews and existential cultures.

Major project findings include:

• Systems of meaning associated with atheism are complex and do not necessarily conform to stereotypes of being scientistic, rationalist, purposeless or amoral. Atheist attitudes towards science take far more diverse forms than those associated with the high profile ‘new atheism’ of writers like Richard Dawkins.

• Around the world, the majority of ‘unbelievers’ believe in an ultimate meaning to the universe, the objective reality of human rights, and the natural world holding ‘deep’ value. They are not typically moral relativists. Their values are not substantially different from, or diametrically opposed to, those held by many religious believers, suggesting that simple binary distinctions between believer and unbeliever or between religious and nonreligious values are unhelpful.

• Systems of meaning associated with atheism are not simply structured around propositional nonreligious beliefs, but can also involve emotional and embodied dispositions in which ritual and acts analogous to ‘worship’ play a significant part. These complex forms are better understood through concepts such as ‘worldview’ (Taves 2016; 2019) or ‘existentiality’ (Lee 2016; 2019), which emphasise how ‘unbelieving’ can constitute a fuller sense of self and the world rather than simply being structured around propositional beliefs about the non-existence of God.

The programme also offered a number of new typologies for understanding different forms of ‘unbelief’, uncovered profiles of the many worldviews found to be proximal to unbelief, and mapped cultural variation in the beliefs and outlooks associated with religious unbelief — moving us decisively beyond the idea that ‘unbelief’ — and atheism and agnosticism — is most meaningfully understood by what it is not.

New and Forthcoming publications

Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America
Stephen Bullivant (2022) Oxford University Press.