The Canon · No. 125
Atheism, Agnosticism & the Unaffiliated
The Nones; irreligion; New Atheism
Antiquity; organised from the 19th century · Non-Theistic / Philosophical · Living · China, Europe, North America, Japan, Australia
VIII. POSTWAR & CONTEMPORARY — 1945 – PRESENT
How many
About 1.9 billion religiously unaffiliated (Pew, 2020) — 24.2% of humanity, the second-largest category in the world after Christianity. Roughly two-thirds live in East Asia, with China alone accounting for around half.
Who began it
No founder. Explicit disbelief is ancient — the Charvaka school in India (entry 023), Diagoras of Melos, Lucretius. Organised irreligion dates from the nineteenth century with Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersoll and the freethought movement.
What it is for
Not a purpose in the religious sense. The category covers positions rather than programmes.
What it worships
None.
What it holds
The label conceals enormous variation and this is the most important fact about it. Atheism is the absence of belief in gods. Agnosticism is a claim about knowability, not belief, and the two are not alternatives — a person can be an agnostic atheist. Antitheism is the further position that religion is harmful. And the largest group by far, the unaffiliated or nones, are mostly none of these: Pew's work consistently finds that a majority of the unaffiliated in the US believe in God or a universal spirit, and that most Chinese unaffiliated participate in ancestor rites and folk practice. Unaffiliated is a statement about institutions, not about metaphysics.
What it does
For most, none. Organised forms overlap with Secular Humanism (entry 124). In China, the unaffiliated majority nonetheless observes Qingming, burns incense at temples and consults fortune tellers, which is why the Pew category is so misleading if read as atheism.
After death
For the explicitly atheist, annihilation — the person ends. Epicurus' argument is still the standard consolation: death is nothing to us, since where death is we are not, and where we are death is not. Among the broader unaffiliated, belief in some form of afterlife remains surprisingly common; survey work regularly finds a substantial minority of self-described non-religious people who accept survival of some kind, and a smaller number who accept reincarnation.
Its texts
No canon. Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Feuerbach; Nietzsche; Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927); and the New Atheist quartet — Harris' The End of Faith (2004), Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006), Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006), Hitchens' God Is Not Great (2007).
Its branches
Not branches: overlapping positions. Atheism, agnosticism, antitheism, secular humanism, apatheism (indifference), and the very large unaffiliated-but-believing population that dominates the statistics.
Of note
This entry is in the dossier because you cannot compare religions without accounting for the people who have none — and because the headline figure of 1.9 billion is routinely misreported as 1.9 billion atheists, which it is emphatically not.
Its timeline
- c.6th c. BCE Charvaka in India; Ajita Kesakambali.
- c.99–55 BCE Lucretius' De Rerum Natura argues that fear of the gods and of death is the source of human misery.
- 1770 CE d'Holbach's The System of Nature, the first unambiguously atheist book published in Europe.
- 1880–1886 CE Charles Bradlaugh, elected to Parliament, is repeatedly refused his seat for declining to swear a religious oath; the affirmation he wins is now available to everyone.
- 1917–1991 CE State atheism in the USSR, and later in China, Albania and elsewhere. Churches, mosques, monasteries and temples destroyed; clergy imprisoned and killed on a very large scale. This is the part of irreligion's history that the movement's advocates most often omit and that belongs in any honest account.
- 1966 CE Time asks on its cover whether God is dead.
- <strong>2004–2007 CE</strong> New Atheism — a publishing and public-argument phenomenon following the September 11 attacks, unusually confrontational and unusually commercially successful.
- 2007–2015 CE The movement fragments over sexism, harassment and its stance toward Islam and Muslims; Elevatorgate in 2011 is the usual marker.
- <strong>2012–present</strong> The rise of the nones. The religiously unaffiliated become the largest single group in several Western countries. In the 2021 England and Wales census, for the first time, fewer than half the population identified as Christian.
- 2020s CE Pew projects the unaffiliated share of the global population to fall over the coming decades, because the unaffiliated are concentrated in low-fertility countries and religious populations are growing faster. Secularisation is advancing in the West and losing globally at the same time.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.