A recent Gallup poll finds that belief in God is at a historic low in the U.S. Although believers still constitute a majority (81%) that figure is down six percentage points since 2017.
Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. In the 1950s and 1960s those claiming to believe in God were consistently at 98%. By 2011, 92% of Americans still said they believed in God.
Actually, the 81% who claim to believe is misleading since it appears to conflate theists, who believe that God is a personal being who can and does intervene in history, and deists who believe that God is impersonal and/or unable or unwilling to intervene in the world.
In fact, according to the poll only 42% of all Americans would qualify as theists. Of the remainder of those polled who said that they believed in God 28% of them hold that God hears prayers but cannot intervene, while 11% think God does neither (17% of respondents say they do not believe in God and would be considered atheists).
In other words, 39% of Americans believe in the existence of a deity which is largely irrelevant to their lives other than, perhaps, to hold people accountable for their mode of life after their death and/or to serve as some sort of guarantor of eternal life.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, belief in God has fallen the most among young adults and people on the left of the political spectrum (liberals and Democrats). These groups show drops of 10 or more percentage points from the average of the 2013-2017 polls.
Most other key subgroups have experienced at least a modest decline, but it's perhaps noteworthy that conservatives and married adults have had essentially no change.
The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%).
Slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans are theists, but only 25% of liberals, 32% of Democrats and 30% of young adults are (Check out the charts which display this data at the link).
There's a real irony in all of this, in my opinion. Belief in a personal God seems to be waning at a time when the case for the existence of a personal God has never been stronger. Almost every new discovery in cosmology and biology either supports, or at least doesn't conflict with, the belief that an intelligent, purposeful agent is behind the creation and architecture of the cosmos and of life.
The ubiquity of talk of human rights, justice and moral duties in our contemporary culture necessarily assumes some transcendent ground for these. Apart from any such foundation this talk is sheer emotivism.
The existential yearning for meaning and the desire to live beyond physical death, all impress upon us the conclusion that either these things have no real satisfaction, in which case life truly is a Shakespearian tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, or they do have an ultimate satisfaction, in which case there is very probably a personal God.
The phenomenon of human consciousness, which seems inexplicable on any naturalistic, materialistic hypothesis, is a flashing neon sign telling us that we're not just material beings.
There are additional reasons to think that theism is true and that it's a much more powerful explanation of what we experience in and of the world than is naturalism. I explored some of those reasons in a series of five posts in November of 2020. The first is here and the rest appear on subsequent days.
I also explained why I believe Christian theism in particular is reasonable in a pair of posts from last January. You can read Part I here and Part II here.
So, if I'm right about this why is theistic belief trending downward? Surely there are numerous reasons, most of which have nothing at all to do with the plausibility or rationality of theistic belief. I'll consider some of what I think to be the chief reasons tomorrow.
