I RECENTLY discovered that I am a member of a downtrodden minority, one of the most mistrusted and discriminated-against in the world. As a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gender male, this is not something I’m used to. But my minority status is undeniable. I am an atheist.
I’m not complaining. I live in one of the world’s most secular countries and work for a science magazine, so it hasn’t got in the way. But for atheists living in societies with a strong religious tradition, discrimination is a real problem. In the US, atheists have one of the lowest approval ratings of any social group. Non-believers are the only significant minority considered unelectable as president – and “unelectable” turns out to be a pretty low bar.
Even when atheists don’t face open hostility or discrimination, we often have to endure put-downs about the sincerity of our (lack of) beliefs. One of the most common is that “atheism is just another religion anyway”. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of god, the argument goes, so to deny it is a leap of faith. Ergo, atheism is just like a religion.
“This idea turns up all the time, and it is very loaded,” says Lois Lee, who directs the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. “When people say ‘atheism is just another religion’, they normally mean it in a pejorative way.” The subtext is clear: atheists are hypocrites.
But this is more than a personal slight. If atheism really is just another religion, its claim to be a superior way to run the world is fatally weakened. All the criticisms it flings at religion – of being irrational, dogmatic and intolerant – come flying back with interest, and progress towards a more rational and secular society is undermined. So is it true? Is atheism just another religion?
Atheists have been treated with suspicion for centuries. In 1689, philosopher John Locke warned that they are “not at all to be tolerated”. The “just another religion” claim seems to have arisen around a decade ago in response to the rise of New Atheism, a scientifically motivated critique of religion led by Richard Dawkins and underpinned by his 2006 book The God Delusion. Journalists writing about the movement took to using religious metaphors, calling it “the church of the non-believers” and a “crusade against god”. Religious scholars joined the fray to defend their beliefs. Even some scientists took up the cause. In 2007, evolutionary biologist (and atheist) David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York controversially described the new atheism as a “stealth religion”. His point was that, like many religions, it portrayed itself as the only source of truth and righteousness and its enemies as “bad, bad, bad”.
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The human mind is primed to believe in god, so why are so many people abandoning religion – and should we be worried about living in an atheist world?
To atheists, such accusations might seem easily refuted. The defining feature of religion is belief in god(s). Atheism defines itself as the absence of belief in god. How can it be a religion? That is like saying that “off” is a TV channel, or not-playing-tennis is a sport.
But atheists arguably have not taken the charge seriously enough. “They’d say, the word just means ‘without god’. That is all. We can go home now,” says Jon Lanman who works on the scientific study of religion at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Perhaps because of this rather aloof response, atheists have failed to dispel the sense that the critics were on to something.
The truth is that atheism is not simply an absence of belief in god, but also a set of alternative beliefs about the origin and nature of reality. Even though these belief systems diverge in their content and level of fact from religious beliefs, perhaps they originate from the same underlying psychological processes, and fulfil similar psychological needs. Religious ideas, for example, provide stability and reassurance in the face of uncertainty. They help to explain events and provide a moral framework. For these reasons, and others, they are intuitively appealing to human brains. Maybe brains that reject supernatural ideas simply soak up naturalistic ones to take their place. “They may work as replacement beliefs, helping alleviate stress and anxiety as religion does,” says Miguel Farias, leader of the brain, belief and behaviour group at Coventry University, UK.
One candidate for a replacement belief that atheists and others might hold is “progress”. A few years ago, psychologists in the Netherlands tested this idea. It is well known that religious people often turn to their beliefs to deal with emotional distress. Faced with reminders of mortality, for example, they vigorously reaffirm their faith. This may be why churches are full of death imagery – it is good for business. Does the idea of progress work the same magic for atheists?
To find out, the team got volunteers with a secular world view to either write about their own deaths or about dental pain. Then participants read an essay arguing that progress was an illusion. Those who had been prompted to think about death disagreed more strongly with the essay. The anti-progress essay also made volunteers more aware of their own death, as if it were pulling their comfort blanket out from under their feet. A different essay arguing that progress had been substantial did the opposite.
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That’s not all. Another primer known to strengthen religious belief is lack of control over external events. Clinging on to god can help people regain at least a subjective sense of control and predictability. And, yes, atheists do it too. Doing the “progress” experiment with people on board an aeroplane, for example, makes them espouse a stronger belief in progress.
For many atheists, scientific ideas have a similar soothing effect. Stressful situations tend to strengthen their belief in science, especially in theories that emphasise orderliness and predictability over randomness and unpredictability. All of which suggests that religious believers and atheists are more psychologically similar than either would like to think.
That could even extend to supernatural thinking. Proponents of the “psychological impossibility of atheism” argue that supernatural beliefs are so hard-wired into our brains that discarding them altogether is not an option. Evolution, they point out, has endowed us with a suite of cognitive tendencies that make belief in non-material beings come easily. As highly social and tribal animals, for example, we need to keep track of the thoughts and intentions of other people, even when they are not physically present. From there, it is a short step to conceiving of non-physical entities such as spirits, gods and dead ancestors who have minds and intentions of their own, know what we are thinking and have some influence over our lives. And, sure enough, there is evidence that even hardcore atheists tend to entertain quasi-religious or spiritual ideas such as there being a higher power or that everything happens for a purpose.
“It’s like saying that ‘off’ is a TV channel, or not-playing-tennis is a sport”
However, even if letting go completely isn’t an option, that doesn’t mean that atheists are actually religious. “Intuitions about dualism, teleology, and magic are common among non-believers,” says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “But the case is much weaker for belief in God or gods, where cultural learning is much more powerful.” And experiments show that people can override their tendencies. “There is no evidence for the argument that all people have an implicit belief in the supernatural,” says psychologist Marjaana Lindeman at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
David Levene / eye vine
So, despite some similarity between religious and non-religious beliefs systems, they are not equivalent. Surely that buries the claim that atheism is just another religion?
Maybe not. There is another way in which atheist beliefs make them religion-like, according to Sloan Wilson. It is the way they play fast-and-loose with scientific facts. “Atheists will say that religion is bad for humanity, that it’s not an evolutionary adaptation – which happens not to be true,” he says. “That is how atheism becomes an ideology. It is organised to motivate behaviour. If it uses counterfactual beliefs in order to do it then there’s really very little difference between atheism and a religion.”
But if using non-factual beliefs to motivate behaviour is enough to make something a religion, then atheism isn’t the only offender. Political campaigns are a religion; Father Christmas is a religion; self-help books are a religion. That would seem to lead to such a broad definition of religion that it is almost useless – and certainly doesn’t make the accusation against atheism especially damning.
Besides, religion is not just about belief. There are many ways in which atheism is not like a religion, according to Dan Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. When somebody puts it to me that atheism is just another religion, he says: “I ask ‘in what way?’ They usually counter with demonstrably false parallels. We have no rituals, no membership rules, no sacred texts and the small percentage of atheists who belong to specifically atheist organisations are more like people who belong to interest groups like scuba divers or guitar aficionados. And most atheists don’t feel the need to proselytise.”
What’s it all about?
Atheism lacks other features of religion too. “Can atheism provide a strong sense of meaning and purpose?” asks Sloan Wilson. “Can it motivate people to prosocial action, can it get you out of bed in the morning with enthusiasm to do things? I think the answer is theoretically yes… but only for a few individuals.”
So there we have it. Atheism is both like a religion and not like one, depending on which aspects you consider. And therein lies the real problem, and the reason why the question of whether or not atheism is just another religion goes around and around in circles. Atheism is not one thing. Nor is religion. “Asking ‘is atheism a religion?’ is a terrible question,” says Lanman. “You can’t answer it because both are social constructs.” In other words, they are categories that we impose on the world rather than things that exist independently in it.
In that respect they are similar to the category “weeds”. Everybody knows what a weed is, but try to produce scientific criteria to distinguish weeds from non-weeds and you will fail. It is impossible, for example, to develop a weedkiller that kills only weeds. “In the scientific ontology that has been built up through biology and botany, there’s no place for a category ‘weed’,” says Lanman. “The things we label weeds have nothing causally to do with one another.”
Without a causal connection, you can’t do science. You cannot produce a description of a social construct that distinguishes it from other things. You can’t discover what causes it, and you can’t make predictions about it. You certainly cannot answer the question “is social construct A just another instance of social construct B”. You might as well ask “are bushes just another sort of weed?”. Er, sometimes. It depends.
And so it is with atheism and religion. “We’ve been using inadequate concepts,” says Lee. “To answer the question, you’ve got to have a coherent idea of what “religion” is, as well as what “atheism” is.” And that’s not possible. You can identify beliefs and behaviours that are often part of the social construct we call religion and you can do the same for the social construct we call atheism (see “Elements of atheism“). But you can’t really compare the two, says Lanman. Neither really exists.
That, of course, won’t win me an argument in a pub or across the dinner table. But according to Lee, the argument is still worth having. “It may be a daft question, but it gets at a bigger debate about what it means to be religious and what it means to be non-religious. About 50 per cent of Britons are unbelievers of some description, and we really don’t know what we mean by that.” Amen.
Elements of atheism
Religion is not one thing but many. To understand it, you need to break it up into smaller pieces. For example, it often – but not always – features a belief in supernatural agents. And it often – but not always – features a social identity as a member of a group. These are clearly not the same thing, and can be studied in isolation from one another. What are beliefs and where do they come from? What are social identities and how do they form?
By breaking apart religion in this way, scientists find at least five other phenomena. These are: creation beliefs; afterlife beliefs; magical causation beliefs; rituals; and sacred or non-negotiable values. It is tempting to think of these as the “ingredients” of religion, but that is a mistake, says Jon Lanman at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. In fact, religion does not really exist. It is a social construct, the name we give to collections of these beliefs and behaviours (see main feature). The more there are, the more likely we are to call it a religion. But none is essential, and one can be enough.
Lanman has applied the same process to the social construct we call atheism. It breaks down into five elements: moral opposition to religion; absence of belief in nonphysical agents; an atheist social identity; rituals; and sacred values. Again, this is not an ingredient list, but captures the various beliefs and behaviours that we typically call “atheism”.
One conclusion is that religion and atheism do have things in common, sometimes. Both feature sacred values, which are beliefs that people would not trade for material goods. Both have rituals – although atheist ones are rare – and distinct social identities. But the content of these features are very different. An atheist’s sacred value might be that religion should have no place in government, whereas a Muslim’s might be the exact opposite.
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