Based at Kent University, this research survey across six national settings, Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, UK and the USA, started in 2017 and officially ends this year. It is funded with 3 million dollars from the Templeton Foundation. They recently presented their newly published initial report at a Vatican sponsored conference at Rome’s Gregorian University.
The Templeton Foundation and Vatican are active advocates for belief. It is reasonable to assume that at least one of their interests in funding and endorsing research of unbelief is to try to learn how they can more effectively counter unbelief. The term unbelief itself hints at the notion that it is the contrary, rather than merely the negation, of belief as in unbend, undo, unfold, etc. It is for this reason that people who start with belief as the normative position prefer the word unbelief over non-belief. So there are a number of reasons to be suspicious that there is an underlying agenda at work that is biased against the perspectives that they are studying.
With those caveats, the initial 24 page report titled Atheists and agnostics around the world: Interim findings from 2019 research in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States is groundbreaking and you may find it interesting. Their eight “key findings” are described on page 3. These survey results can be useful for dispelling common negative stereotyping. In the U.S., a substantial minority of agnostics and atheists preferred to label themselves as such, non-religious was the favorite alternative, few choose Humanist as their preferred label (this was a choose one among many vote which is too restrictive, allowing participants to vote for all self-labeling that they approve would have been better), 35% of atheists and 10% of agnostics also qualified as philosophical naturalists. I tend to associate atheism with philosophical naturalism, but my view is atypical. 70% of agnostics/atheists versus 33% of people overall recognize that the scientific method is the only reliable method to knowledge. There were a few substantial differences between people from different countries. Many Chinese who qualified as agnostics nevertheless labeled themselves atheists and philosophical naturalism was rare (<10%) among Chinese atheists. This may partially reflect the influence of supernatural religious beliefs without powerful deities. The survey tried to account for this by defining god as “Buddha, Allah, God, or Spiritual phenomena.”
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