Hi, I'm Lois Lee and I'm a Research Fellow here at the University of Kent and I also direct the Understanding Unbelief programme and I'm going to talk today about unbelief. 

So, over the past 10 years there's been growing interest in atheism and other forms of religious unbelief and that's reflected in our academic research. So the Understanding Unbelief is just one example of that interest and that activity and to some extent is a culmination or a next step in that work and what it's doing is bringing together researchers from across the human sciences and who are working in different parts of the world and looking at different parts of the world. The question I'm going to address today is, does religious unbelief exist? Why are all these researchers converging on this topic? Isn't religious unbelief just the absence of religious belief, what might we have to say about that. 

So, many think that religious unbelief is just the absence of belief, in fact unbelief as it's defined by a colleague of mine on the Understanding Unbelief programme, Stephen Bullivant, he defines unbelief as 'the state of lacking (especially religious) faith or belief. ...unbelief is often used in a wide sense to imply a generalised lack of belief in a God or gods' and 'it can be used specifically to imply lack of a particular belief in a theological claim', but whether it's generalised or specific, the crucial point here is we're talking about the lack of something, the absence of a belief, and in fact many unbelievers themselves like the term for that reason, it sort of describes just the absence of a kind of way of believing, thinking about the world, and so on, that they feel doesn't make much sense to them in their lives. So does religious unbelief exist? It's not looking good, the concept is defined by absence, and in fact there's no tradition of human science research on the topic for a similar reason, so historically scholars have taken the view that unbelief doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of existing in the minds, cultures and societies of and human beings. This means that the contemporary interest in unbelief represents quite a significant and ongoing shift in thinking about unbelief and it's a move towards thinking about unbelief in similar terms, atheism and secularism, as marking out something about the about human life that does exist that human scientists might be interested in. The question then is, what is this something. 

So, there are in fact probably more than one something's at hand, we're talking about a range of phenomena and in the first instance we do really need to think about unbelief as the absence of belief. The thing is that this absence looks a bit more complicated and interesting than might first appear to be the case. And this is largely because religious beliefs are themselves plural, so we're not just talking about theism we're not just talking about beliefs and relationships with God, we're talking about commitments and beliefs and commitments around the afterlife, around human agency, and so on, and so on, and so forth. So, if religious beliefs are plural therefore religious unbeliefs are plural and we can think about different kinds of unbeliefs, either in isolation from one another, we might think about, we might compare them to one another, so in context of religious decline we might be interested to know why some beliefs are declining more quickly than others, why others appear to have a more enduring appeal. We can also think about the configuration of unbeliefs, so it's common, for example, to find that people who don't believe in God do have a belief in the afterlife, that's a common example and so we can look at those kind of configurations in individuals and start to draw profiles of unbelievers in these more complex terms and then look at where these different configurations of beliefs are occurring. Are there different profiles in different countries, for example. So, even if we're just talking about the absence of unbelief, we can do we can talk in much more nuanced terms about what's going on. 

So that's unbelief one, the first form we might want to think about and it's unbelief as absence, but it's in the plural and there's some more interesting things going on there. A second form of unbelief has to do with the presence of the beliefs and commitments that undergird those kinds of unbeliefs. So, for example, lots of people who don't have a belief or any other kind of relationship with God or gods might have different reasons for that and those reasons can be quite different. So the most well-known, most conventional way of talking about those distinctions is by making a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Atheism or positive atheism or non-theism entails the belief that there's no such thing as God or gods and that's opposed to a negative form of atheism that's just about the absence of those beliefs. An agnosticism which involves the belief that nothing can be known or is known about immaterial things including the existence and nature of gods. So those are two quite different positions we sometimes group them together and when we talk about unbelievers but actually there are very different things going on there and sociologically there's reason to distinguish them. Here in the UK, for example, agnostics of the single largest religious belief group, so to speak, in the UK and that's closely followed by the positive atheists that's 18 and 17 percent respectively, so they're large numbers and they have these distinct demographic profiles. So to take one example here: agnostics are more likely to be female than male while positive atheists are more likely to be male than female and that kind of finding complicates previous research which just talks in more general terms and points out that unbelievers in general are more likely to be male than female, so once we break down that profile into different groups the picture starts to look somewhat different. And these are culturally contingent profiles, so the kinds of demographic correlations I'm talking about don't vary across from country to country so we know that to some extent they're culturally contingent. So those some things that are interesting for sociologists and others who are interested to understand unbelief in society but if we think beyond atheism and agnosticism we might be able to say something more detailed about underlying beliefs and cultures. 

So many people, human scientists included, have just stopped with atheism and agnosticism but we have cultural evidence, philosophical evidence, that there that we could give a much more fine grained account and so instead of just thinking about those two survey categories I've talked about which maybe point to Atheist materialism and agnostic post-modernism, we could break them down even further. So, we could talk more specifically, for example, about rationalist humanism. In the West rationalist humanism is maybe one of the more familiar forms of unbelief, though we don't always use that term to talk about it, because it's a general orientation of prominent figures such as Richard Dawkins and others associated with the new atheism and it's also the orientation that's been associated by critical secularist scholars with a European narrative about what it means to be modern. So, social scientists and others have paid rational humanism some attention but what about non-rationalist humanisms which prioritise humanity in certain ways but are less convinced than the rationalist perhaps that our rational capacities exist at all perhaps or are a source of salvation or any kind of meaning. Then both of those humanisms contrast again with non-human centered forms of materialism, so those that are associated, for example, with deep ecology which is a movement that finds the idea of human centrality often ethically and existentially troubling. And, of course, if we think in those terms there are many philosophies of life, global philosophies that we might want to consider. To take some examples, transhumanism, nihilism and so on and so forth. So that's the second form of unbelief, the second way of thinking about unbeliever populations and that's to do with the presence of a diverse set of beliefs, especially concerning the nature of life and reality, so what we might think about as the beliefs beyond unbelief and which aren't all only matters of belief but also of culture and practice. 

And then thirdly, and finally, another important form of unbelief to consider is unbelief as the irrelevance of religious belief. So, this is about the significance of religious beliefs, or rather their lack of significance, and this way of thinking arises or is closely connected to secularisation theory. So, human scientists have for a long time worked with or within this secularisation paradigm and that focused on the declining power and authority of religious beliefs over individuals and societies as well. It was more focused on that decline than the kind of changing beliefs around religion or changing beliefs around the existential too. The other side of this coin was that this scholarship was sometimes interested in the secular, meaning the state of being immersed in secular time, focused on this worldly life, not reflecting on existence just living it in a much more sort of hand-to-mouth way and I think this is expressed very well in a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that the geographer Claire Dwyer has used in a recent chapter on the secular city and in Emerson's lament to such a city he talks about the population is godless, materialised, they have no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm, these are not men but hungers, thirsts, fevers and appetites, walking. So the unbeliever here is sort of zombie-like, hollowed out, not only of the capacity for religious meaning-making but of any meaning-making at all and that meaning-making capacity has been replaced with base hungers and appetites. So, this is the third way of thinking about unbelief, it's also talked about as indifference to religion and as growing interest and around the topic described in that way, and it's actually the form of unbelief that religions have often feared the most. 

So, here we go, the three forms of unbelief, I think there are at least these three forms of unbelief to consider, and they can be tangled up in interesting ways, perhaps the materialist outlook might encourage us to not only be less interested in religion but also in any kind of existential beliefs since the focus is on just this one life that we have. I'm not sure that's always the case, in fact I would think there's reason to think that it isn't always the case, but it's a plausible hypothesis to draw and we can start to look at those relationships if we're clear about these different forms of unbelief. We can think about all of these especially unbelief as presence of something that's bound up with wider cultures, so it's not just a matter of propositional belief and meaning systems but is manifest in practices, symbolic forms and perhaps shapes our relationships with others. Unbelief in all of these senses exists on a large scale, so we've already seen agnostics are the largest group in the UK, closely followed by the positive atheists and we see similarly large numbers in other parts of the world too. To give another indication we know that very large numbers of people identify as non-religious or don't affiliate with a religion, that's not the same as being an unbeliever but the population of people who don't believe, who don't have religious beliefs and who don't identify with a religion overlap to a significant degree so it can take those numbers as indicative. The Pew Research Centre has recently shown that the unaffiliated can be counted now as the world's third-largest faith group, so we're talking about very large numbers of people and unbelief in some sense exists. It's not totally clear in what sense it exists, since unbelief and similar terms atheism, secularism and so on, they're narrow, they are popular categories rather than scientific ones but what they do do is help us mark out a number of phenomena, beliefs and identities and cultures that do exist and which are significant not just here in the UK but around the world and which often play a major role on that global stage and therefore warrant our attention. 

Thank you very much.