CADRE Comments

In a previous post , I noted the stability of atheist belief in the United States despite the many predictions about the end of religion. The number of atheists in the U.S. today is the same today as it was in 1944: 4%. In other words, "[t]he number of atheists in the United States appears to be unchanged for at least 63 years." Just as the rise of atheism had been predicted for so long, the demise of church attendance and Christian faith has been anticipated by many. Studies show, however, that reported church attendance has been remarkably stable. Church attendance today is he same as it was in 1973: 36%. There was a drop off before then. From 1954 through 1964, church attendance was stable at 44%. The drop off occurred between 1964 and 1973. But why did it drop off about 8 points during that time? Stark attributes the decline in the late 60s and early 70s to Vatican II. His theory is that Vatican II lead to a decline in Catholic attendance, while Protestant ra...

In his What Americans Really Believe , Rodney Stark has a chapter entitled The Godless Revolution That Never Happened . He notes several earlier predictions of the demise of religion and rise of atheism. Thomas Woolston, 1670-1731, thought religion would disappear by 1900. Voltaire, 1694-178, gave religion another fifty years. Though religion endured, the expectation of its imminent demise persisted. Other influential thinkers including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, all shared a similar view of declining religious belief. In the 1960s, Anthony F.C. Wallace stated in a leading undergraduate anthropology textbook, "The evolutionary future of religion and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature's laws will erode and become only an interesting memory . . . belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of he increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge . . . the process in in...

Speaking of the New Atheism movement... My friend David Marshall, former missionary to Southeast Asia, now an increasingly prolific author of popular-level Christian apologetics, just alerted me that stock has arrived for his new book The Truth Behind the New Atheism: Responding to the Emerging Challenges to God and Christianity. I expect this is an expanded version of an article he was going to write for _First Things_ last year, on Dennett's (then-)new book about the (merely) evolutionary source of religion--when he heard Dawkins was going to release _The God Delusion_, he decided to just wait and do a full book addressing both authors as his primary topical focus. (That's an educated guess on my part; hopefully I'll be able to find a way to do an interview for the site.) He has managed to snag a couple of good pre-press reviews, too, from people like Paul Griffiths, Warren Chair of Catholic Thought at Duke Divinity School; and Rodney Stark, sociologist and historian, re-...