Last week, I came across this video on the YouTube, in which a popular atheist science advocate has a go at a popular atheist historian and counterapologist. I’m not interested in debating all the merits of the video here (it has a comments section of its own) but I would like to discuss just one argument that was brought up around 16:00 minutes or so, an argument rooted in religious demography. I ran a quick sanity check on the graph itself by creating a histogram from this dataset, which unfortunately does not break out atheists/agnostics as a separate category but does have a bin for the religiously unaffiliated, of which atheists and agnostics comprise about 25%. As it turns out, the Pew data on the importance of religion to respondent’s lives are more or less amenable to the model presented in the video (religiously unaffiliated are shown in green, everyone else in red):
As to the substance of the argument itself, once stripped of a certain amount of unhelpful and unnecessarily insulting invective, the claim being made was that the atheist community can grow faster by reaching outward to persuade theists to give up theism than by reaching inward to better accommodate existing atheists who are not comfortable participating in the community as it exists today. That might well be true, but it’s certainly not anything like a dead lock. The fact is that only a small fraction of those who reject belief in any and all gods are at all active in the community right now, and we could easily grow tenfold without running out of preexisting atheists to recruit to the cause. If you don’t believe me, just look at the membership numbers for atheist groups at any level (local, state, national) and compare those numbers to those indicated by the survey data: roughly 6% secular unaffiliated and another 4% atheist/agnostic nationwide. That’s a vast and mostly untapped mission field, and you don’t have to persuade them to change their entire worldview, only their view on the value of joining the community of freethought.
Of course, this all assumes that we’re faced with a geniune dilemma in the first place. I see no reason why we cannot reach out to atheists of all sorts while at the same time continuing to take the argument to theism.
