There are more American Atheists than we thought

[Aroura]

The authors of the study, published earlier this year, adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity. Instead of asking about belief in God directly, they provided a list of seemingly innocuous statements and then asked: “How many of these statements are true of you?” Respondents in a control group were given a list of nine statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian.” The test group received all the same statements plus one that read, “I do not believe in God.” The totals from the test group were then compared to those from the control group, allowing researchers to estimate the number of people who identify as atheists without requiring any of the respondents to directly state that they don’t believe in God.1 The study concludes that roughly one-quarter (26 percent) of Americans likely do not believe in God.

538 article

I think this article makes a lot of great points.  

First, the way we poll about religion tends to be very binary.  Do you believe in God or not?  A lot of people may believe in spiritual energy, or an utterly impersonal god, and they will answer yes.  

Second, atheists are still very marginalized, and many are still closeted.  So if people hide their atheism from close family and friends, how likely are they to admit it to a stranger?  I know a number of people who say things like "I don't believe in god, but I'm not an atheist". 

So it is difficult to accurately measure the number of people who believe in a personal creator God, some variant in the middle that is NOT a personal creator God, and those who are full materialists.  Clearly atheist can be spiritual.  

I've also often seen religious folks quote the big number, like "well 89% of American believe in God!", but this is in fact false, because they mean a creator god when they quote that number, but quite a large chunk of the people who answered yes don't mean a creator god.

Anyway, I just found the study interesting and wanted to share.