UC Santa Barbara

This essay argues that “atheist” and “agnostic” are not merely negative labels that indicate a person lacks belief in God or is not religious. Relying on a new survey of very secular Americans and the General Social Survey, we demonstrate a statistically significant and substantively meaningful relationship, in both predictive directions, between identifying as atheist or agnostic and holding certain beliefs about how best to know the world and what happens when we die. We can reliably predict that most people in the U.S. who trust science, reason, and evidence and do not trust religious sources will identify as atheist or agnostic—and vice-versa. We find the same bi-directional relationship with belief in mortal finitude, i.e., that death is the final end. Our findings suggest that exclusive empiricism and mortal finitude are positive tenets of belief systems that those who identify as atheist or agnostic are likely to hold.