Mike Shermer

The problem with the word atheism is that it has become very pejorative. In America, you may as well call yourself a child molester or a rapist or something, a communist.

Inga Clendinnen

I'm just a common or garden variety of atheist. A person who has found no reason to believe there is any supernatural force existing outside this world and directing it.

John Gray

I belong to no religion and I have no religious beliefs. I would define myself as a skeptic.

Phillip Adams

Atheism is nothing but everything. Atheism is now the fastest-growing faith - or faithlessness it's growing even faster than Islam in the United States.

Narration

Whether they're called godless Communists, sceptics, secularists or humanists, atheists are raising their voices - especially in the west. So who are they and what do atheists believe?

Who are the atheists?

Phillip Adams

I've been an atheist for 65 years and I didn't even know the word for the first ten, I didn't know there was such a thing as atheists.

Narration

Broadcaster and writer Phillip Adams is arguably Australia's best known atheist. Over the years he's discussed religion with believers and non-believers of many kinds; on and off air. But he himself dismissed the Almighty at an early age.

Phillip Adams

When I was five I found I couldn't believe in god. Not that I wouldn't but I couldn't. I tried very hard to believe in him because everyone around me believed in him. It was after all the family business of my father a Christian minister. But I found I just couldn't find any sensible, rational reason or even irrational reason for believing in him. And it came, I have to tell you it was a great shock.

Phillip Adams

I asked one simple question. If everything had to have a beginning there had to be a creation, and if god was the beginning, who begun god? Now I asked that at four. When I passed this thought on to my grandmother she boxed my ears which made the question seem incredibly significant.

Inga Clendinnen

I'm not in a condition of doubt about this. I might have been in some doubt between the ages of perhaps 7 and 10, but after that I've had no doubts at all.

Narration

Inga Clendinnen is a celebrated historian and writer whose interest in other peoples and times began early.

As a child her curiosity about other cultures led her to wonder about - and to doubt - the existence of God.

Inga Clendinnen

I early discovered that other people in other places had extraordinary ideas about religion.

As soon as you know that there are a variety of gods. That means that god becomes a problematical entity

When you consider the great range of different characters that gods are attributed. When you think of how the Aztecs defined their god. When you think that Aborigines didn't define a god at all and that the dreaming creatures were pretty much like humans in their fallibilities and their courage and their lusts and their wants. As soon as you become aware of that, why you should project some old patriarchal figure with very strong views about women's modesty and call it god, I don't know, and I think that's the question.

Mike Shermer

Well I was a born again Christian for a while and then I became something of a born again atheist. You know, going around knocking on those doors and telling people not to believe. And it sort of reminds me of that joke about what do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with an atheist: Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all.

Narration

Michael Shermer is an American science writer and the editor of Skeptic magazine. He founded the Skeptics Society in the United States, a group dedicated to exposing and debunking pseudo-science.

Mike Shermer

In my case it was a change of milieu, different friends, a set of arguments, exposure to science and evolutionary theory, exposure to anthropology, to comparative world religions. You know you sort of put all that together.

I just remember one day taking out my little ichthus - I had this little fish with the Greek symbols that stand for 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.' I remember my girlfriend had given this to me and I just felt hypocritical wearing it, so I took it off and I guess that's it, I guess I'm not a Christian any more.

As I got older I mellowed out more, and I decided at first that rationally agnostic is actually the right term.

When T H Huxley coined the term in 1869 he meant it to be, it's not knowable.

Not, "I'm not sure, could go this way, could go that way. I'm waiting for just a little more evidence you know." That's not what agnosticism is.

Agnosticism says it isn't possible to know. So therefore no belief in god, because it isn't possible to know. That's agnosticism. I guess that's probably what I am.

John Gray

I belong to no religion and I have no religious beliefs. I would define myself as a sceptic. I prefer not to think, to describe myself as an atheist or an agnostic because that is too restrictive a set of categories.

Narration

John Gray is one of the world's most eminent and provocative political philosophers. Until recently he was Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

John Gray

Well sceptic isn't one who has no beliefs. A sceptic is one who keeps belief to a minimum, and also doesn't always insist on making a definite decision about which beliefs one has.

Narration

Gray's philosophical framework is rigorous and uncompromising.

John Gray

I have no reason to think that human life goes beyond bodily death for example, so I take that as a basic assumption. I don't believe that humans are especially privileged creatures in the universe in the way that theists think they are; that they have souls which other animals don't have; that they have a kind of free will that other animals don't have. So I do have a variety of beliefs about humans and their situation in the world, but I try to work with as few as I can get by with.

Why does atheism matter?

Narration

For more than a century atheists assumed that with the advance of science religions would die out ... but they've refused to go quietly. Indeed they've turned up the volume, to the alarm of the atheists.

Phillip Adams

We sit in a world now which is on the edge of total disaster because of raging crusades between Christian and Muslims. The hatreds between the major religions and within them have never been more intense.

Inga Clendinnen

Now there is clearly more aggression on the part of fundamentalist sects as we'd call them, whether they're Christian or Islamic or whatever. But I think there's also a notable increase in aggression on the part of the great organised religions; a new readiness to intervene politically.

Narration

The turning point came at the start of the new millennium with an event that shook the world.

Mike Shermer

Since 9/11 the game has changed. It's become clear that religions in the modern world can still be very dangerous. And it's not that only religious people become fanatics. There are Marxist ideologists that become fanatics for example, but that isn't who is doing that now. At the moment it's extreme religionists that are causing the problem.

John Gray

Secularisation was expected to be, believed to be up until quite recently, up until maybe the last 10 or 20 years an almost inexorable almost unstoppable process all over the world.

Now it's true that some countries have become somewhat more secular, for example. Ireland, is a lot more secular than it was 20 years ago. In Britain most people have long since ceased to be practising Christians.

But on the other hand the great secular parties, the mass movements and the great secular ideologies that existed like Marxism have really crumbled away and the vitality, the energy in the world, and also to some extent the violence in the world, is coming from religions. So we're really living it seems to me in a post secular period. And in a post secular period when religion has vitality you'd expect what in fact you find, which is a revival of atheism.

Narration

The revival is marked by a torrent of words. In books and the media atheists are taking on religion. Their best-known proponents are Richard Dawkins & Christopher Hitchens - leaders of the New Atheists.

Richard Dawkins - Root Of All Evil Part 1

The time has come for people of Reason to say enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.

Christopher Hitchens - Foreign Correspondent 7 November 2001

Civilisation consists of the leaving behind of the religious mentality - of the mentality of faith, of the mentality of fanaticism, of the mentality of certainty, of the mentality of Holy Books and the Word of God - civilisation begins where that stops, in all societies.

Phillip Adams

I don't disagree with Dawkins arguments. I don't disagree with Hitchins arguments. I disagree with the atmosphere of their arguments. I disagree with adding, with fanning the flames of bigotry on this planet by taking positions which are that strong.

John Gray

All these new atheists want to convert the world from belief to unbelief. And like Christian missionaries like Christian evangelists they believe that if they can alter human beliefs on a large scale then the world will be better.

In fact we have plenty of historical evidence from the Soviet Union and elsewhere that when attempts are made to eradicate religion, to eliminate religion from human life, to de-convert people from religious belief to some other type of belief or unbelief, the results are generally pretty disastrous.

Mike Shermer

The evangelical kind of atheism is not my thing because I'm not a strong atheist. I just don't believe. I don't think we can prove there is no god. I just don't think it is necessary to do that.

Look if you encounter somebody whose deepest most cherished belief is god and you say, "It's all bullshit man, why do you believe this crap for?" That's the end of the conversation. It's over. You've lost them. You have no hope of converting them.

Inga Clendinnen

On the whole atheists seem to me peaceable beings because they have no vision that they have some understanding of what is truth, which they have a moral duty to impose on others.

Mike Shermer

The problem with the word atheism is that it's become very pejorative. In America, you may as well call yourself a child molester or a rapist or something, a communist. That's how atheists are treated. Which is why the New Atheist Movement is something of a political social movement, because it is our way of saying, "Hey look, we're not going to put up with that any more. You can't say things like atheists are not moral. That's wrong. You might as well say blacks are not moral, that women are not as smart - that kind of thing. Well you can't say those other things any more, and you can't say that about atheists anymore."

What do atheists believe?

Narration

But what do the non-believers agree on? Their views are diverse and they don't all answer to the name atheist, yet most do share a respect for science.

Mike Shermer

These are part of our science education program. We are pro-science, we're not an anti-religious group. Religion comes up a lot. That's simply because it has been such a hot button issue in the last 10 years in America.

Narration

Shermer's latest book defends Darwin's theory of evolution by arguing the case against Intelligent Design.

Mike Shermer

But in the long run we want to be in favour of something, not just against. We're not just against Big Foot, UFOs, psychic power. We address those things. What are we for? We're for critical thinking, rationality, reason, science.

Mark Simkin

Forget what you were taught in school. According to this museum, the Earth is just 6,000 years old; there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark.

Ken Ham

We believe that Christians, those that believe in the Bible, are going to be more equipped to be able to defend their faith and uphold the authority of God's word

Inga Clendinnen

When I think of the rise of the Intelligent Design people, the new Creationists, I am truly appalled because Charles Darwin is to me one of my great heroes. Here is a quiet reclusive country gentleman with a giant network of fellow amateur naturalists who had such respect for facts and for care in thinking that he could come up with a theory which shook the world. And which rendered intelligible to us this whole experienced world around us in a new and absolutely thrilling way.

Now I don't want to see him not taught in the schools because of some dimwit who wants to go on believing in a six day creation and one day off routine. There is something to my mind obscene about that denial of human reason and its glory.

Phillip Adams

I thought of a new term about six months ago and I'm rather proud of it. Faitheist. And I think in some ways I'm a faitheist because I have faith in science. The same way as my religious friends have faith in god, I have faith in Einstein. I have faith in the great brains that have been trying to push back the darkness through rational thought.

Where do atheists find meaning?

Narration

But is faith in science and rationality enough? Do atheists have a sense of wonder? And, where do they find meaning?

Mike Shermer

People who don't believe in god are no less spiritual than those who do. I don't think religion has a monopoly on spirituality.

For me my spirituality comes from an awareness of something grander than me, than you than us, something beyond the material world; whatever you want to call that, the beauty of nature.

For me just like looking at a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of galaxies expanding you know that triggers that feeling of transcendence, like there is something so much grander than me. I am so unimportant you know. And that's what religious people describe.

Inga Clendinnen

I find deep gratification in trying to understand the cultural world of people different from myself. And that keeps me very happy and it gives me a sense of discovery, and even occasional bliss.

So I suspect I have some of the pleasures of religion from my secular base. Some of the pleasures typically associated with religion.

Phillip Adams

I'd borrow the word numinous from the vocabulary of the religious because I think it's a great word. The sense of the numinous is when you stand outside at night at the farm and you look up at a clear sky unpolluted by the metropolis, and you're looking at billions and billions and billions of stars. More suns out there than there are grains of sand in the Sahara.

And if you're not overcome by a sense of the numinous - which is a mixture of awe and wonderment and dread - there's something wrong with you. It's a great emotion. It's the emotion I think that drives religion and philosophy and science.

Narration

Does nature or even science hold all the answers? Can a greater understanding of our universe guarantee human progress?

John Gray

Science cannot save humanity. Science is itself a human construction, a human achievement. It's embodied in growing knowledge which gives humans greater power to do what they want to do, but science does not make humans wiser or more reasonable. It leaves them as much ruled by folly as they ever were.

However, science is indispensable. Science is the only way in which we can accommodate ourselves I think to climate change for example.

Why do we need science?

Narration

It's climate change that is bringing atheists and some believers closer, as Christian ideas about life on earth are changing.

Phillip Adams

The Bible got us off to a bad start with a line of argument that said, it's all here for you to use folks, enjoy. Very kind of god. And until very recently that was pretty much the hard line of the hard religious right.

Mike Shermer

There is a small branch of Christians, sort of Millenarians and apocalyptic-oriented, who say, "It doesn't really matter what we do with the earth; it's all coming, like next Saturday Jesus is coming, look busy!"

Phillip Adams

For a long time the Bible bashers, the hard right, religious right, took that view and therefore climate change was a great big left wing conspiracy.

Suddenly that has changed and it's changed emphatically. And although there's not much of a hint in the good book that we have environmental responsibilities, people are finding it. And many of the most ardent campaigners now to do something about climate change come from religious organisations.

Mike Shermer

I think it's more important that I understand and embrace religion because we need to work together to solve say the global warming problem, rather than my first trying to convert them all into secularism and then we'll solve the global warming problem. That isn't going to happen. Before global warming has its problems, OK, we need to address the problem now.

Does religion have a future?

Narration

So rather than confronting believers, many atheists are now accepting the human need for religion.

Phillip Adams

I think basically it may be a virus. I've always hoped that the CSIRO would find a virus so people could be cured of religion. But short of that, it's a fact of life and I think we've all got to try and get on a bit better with each other - atheists with God-botherers, God-botherers with us.

John Gray

It seems almost self-evident to me on the basis of anthropology, literature, observation, that the human animal comes into the world with a variety of needs to which religions answer.

John Gray

That being the case one would then think that if one doesn't believe in any supernatural creator one should accept religion is part of human beings, part of human life. It's like it's an impulse like or like the sexual need. Repressing it or attempting to eradicate it, trying to think of a world in which there is no religion would then seem to me like thinking of a world in which there is no sex.

Phillip Adams

The great problem in discovering that you don't believe in god is you feel an intense, an all-pervasive sense of loneliness.

And when I found that I didn't need to believe in him, I still felt a great sense of desolation and a high degree of fear.

I've always understood the religious impulse, the great overwhelming fear of death, of annihilation which is a part of most of it, and a desperate need to find a meaning in a universe which really doesn't have one.

If you want to know what happens after, think about what happened before; infinite, infinite nothingness. We've all been dead. We live briefly, we go back to the same state. Why can't people see it's as simple as that?

Inga Clendinnen

I don't think we can underestimate the need for explanations among humans. And some humans will have a greater desire for their daily lives to be made intelligible than others. Their search for meaning, to coin a phrase, is going to be more intense. I suspect this has got something to do with individual psychologies and individual childhoods.

Mike Shermer

I think it is probably safe to say religion will not fall into disuse any time soon, so the John Lennonesque, Imagine no religion, I think is probably not realistic in terms of our social needs.

We may even have something in our brains that hardwires us to believe in supernatural entities, whether it is animistic spirits, ghosts, demons, multiple gods, single gods the monotheistic - whatever it is I think we our brains lead us to interpret certain events in the world to be caused by hidden spirits of some kind.

John Gray

The question is, can the point of living as a human being be simply to see. That's to say to look at the world to see it as it is or as close as we can get to seeing it as it is, the finding in it perhaps what is of beauty in it. Can humans adopt seeing as the meaning of their lives?

Phillip Adams

I still think we're at the end of the religious era. It may be, what we see now is the great storms before the lull.

I think in a hundred years almost all of the religious animosities we're experiencing now will be ancient history. I think they will ebb away from exhaustion.

And I still believe that as science advances, god recedes; I still believe that little by little the world is becoming excited by a new form of the numinous as they realise that we are learning more and more and more and more than the people who wrote the Bible and other good books could possibly have imagined.