Core Research

The core research of the Explaining Atheism programme will test promising and popular theories of the causes of atheism and other forms of non-belief across diverse cultural contexts. Through our unique approach, we aim to do so in a way that does not conflate different meanings of ‘atheism’, that utilises the perspectives and methodologies of multiple disciplines, and that recognises the complexities of testing any causal claim.

Our core research has 3 related work packages. The first is a new series of survey studies in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the UK, and the US. Utilising the model successfully employed by Aiyana Willard and colleagues (2017) to examine belief and non-belief in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, as well as the detailed descriptive understanding our team developed in our six countries as part of the Understanding Unbelief programme, we aim to determine the most powerful causal factors for individuals being non-theists.

The second work package consists of qualitative text analysis of hundreds of interviews with non-theists from 7 countries discussing both the nature of their beliefs and non-beliefs as well as accounts of how they arrived at them. This analysis will allow us to examine how supposed causal factors may be playing out in individual case studies as well as offer up new potential general causal factors.

The third work package will apply emerging methods in data science and machine learning to the ‘digital archaeology of religion’, using the vast repositories of archived data from the early internet to examine a number of hypotheses on the causes of atheism, including that the use of the internet itself is an important causal factor in explaining atheism.