Dr Lois Lee, Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Understanding Unbelief research programme, has given an online lecture entitled ‘Does Religious Unbelief Exist?’ for the University of Kent’s Think Kent series, which is now available on YouTube.
The past 10 years have witnessed rapidly growing interest in atheism and other forms of religious ‘unbelief’ – be it in the record-breaking numbers of unbelievers like the perfect 100% of young Icelanders who now say they do not believe in a creator God, or debates around how unbelievers are protected in law or provided for in public services, or the sometimes controversial antitheistic perspectives of Richard Dawkins and his fellow ‘new atheists’.
But underlying these phenomena and our interest in them is a paradox. As the column inches and academic interest continues to grow, the question arises: what is it exactly that we are interested in? After all, aren’t atheism and unbelief not phenomena in themselves, so much as they are ways of describing the absence of other phenomena – belief in God, or other religious beliefs? And if unbelief does not exist in any meaningful way, why do we have so much to say about it?
In her talk, Lois shows why there might be more to unbelief than meets the eye.
The talk may be viewed below or on YouTube via the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-UnDWmpyAs
You can more about the Understanding Unbelief programme at www.understanding-unbelief.net or follow the programme on Twitter @U_Unbelief and Lois’s work at @loielee.