Odds are, few Free Inquiry readers check their watches and think, "Hmm, it's after five in Amherst, New York-I wonder what Tom Flynn's doing?" Still, for the last couple of years, there's been a reliable answer to that question. I've been spending most of my after-work and weekend hours editing a thumping-big reference book. The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, soon to be published by Prometheus Books, is designed as the successor to Gordon Stein's groundbreaking 1985 The Encyclopedia of Unbelief. It's a comprehensive reference work covering the full spectrum of unbelief, of which secular humanism is a part.

Unbelief is a deliberately generic term, intended to rise above those endless arguments over labels that atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and secular humanists have among themselves. Of course, Free Inquiry focuses on secular humanism, which we might describe in shorthand as that subset of religious unbelief endowed with the most fully developed cosmic and ethical outlook. Though secular humanists are unbelievers by definition, not all unbelievers are secular humanists. Think of Stalin, or of people you know who espouse the sort of moral nihilism depicted in Woody Allen's films, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. Editing FI while editing The New Encyclopedia meant straddling that gap: working as a secular humanist by day, a generic atheist by night. And it prompted the question of whether-or why-unbelief matters as a necessary (though admittedly insufficient) component of our secular humanist eupraxsophy.

Does unbelief matter? In my opinion, it matters very much. Americans, religious and otherwise, might disagree, noting that religiosity seems so pervasive and is rapidly expanding in public life. Some Europeans might disagree also, noting that religiosity has shriveled and now seems socially irrelevant outside of Muslim immigrant communities. The very fact that unbelief seems unimportant for opposing reasons-and that merely within the confines of Western culture-should give us pause before we consign unbelief to history's bulging dustbin. True, many of unbelief's most prestigious recent advocates-twentieth-century labor reformers, political revolutionaries, and academic Marxists-have largely melted away. Atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and old-line freethinkers and anticlericals stand increasingly alone on the barricades of radical reform. Despite these historical developments, the fundamental stance that all unbelievers share-the conviction that the everyday world of matter, energy, and their interactions is either all that exists or all that matters-is inescapably significant.

Consider how important it would be if unbelievers' naturalistic worldview were definitely proven wrong. Imagine for the sake of argument that the core contentions of Christian monotheism were somehow demonstrated to be correct beyond any possibility of question. If the universe really is intentionally designed and the designer knows and cares for each of us-if we truly host immortal souls that will know eternities of ecstasy or pain determined by our behavior during eyeblink sojourns on earth-if this is true, then the knowledge that this is true would be the most important item of knowledge any human being could possess. No scientific discovery, no mathematical theorem, no artistic expression, no secret to success, no avowal of love could ever be as significant as the knowledge that accurately gave us the key to eternity.

But now imagine (as unbelievers hold to be the case) that no conventional theistic worldview is true-but that millions of people still order their lives, allocate their resources, and make decisions as though some form of theism were true. Knowing this is terribly important, too, if for a different reason. To believing critics, I propose a thought experiment. Suppose for a moment that we unbelievers are correct. Suppose that each human being is nothing more than an accidental and temporary convergence of pattern . . . that nothing is eternal . . . that the only values we can hold authentically are the ones we create and embrace for ourselves. Suppose most of all that this life is the only one that any of us will ever have. If these things are true, then the most important item of knowledge any religious believer could ever possess would be the knowledge that his or her faith is groundless.

Denied that knowledge, ardent believers-perhaps we should think of them as misbelievers-will go on squandering the precious hours of their only lives pursuing otherworldly rewards that will never-can never-be theirs. In addition to making empty investments in ineffectual prayer and ritual, misbelievers may forsake harmless pleasures (think Mormons and coffee), disdain beneficial practices (think Christian Scientists and medical care or Muslims and commercial credit), or embrace positively harmful courses of action (think witch-hunting and female genital mutilation, merely the first examples that come to mind).

Decades ago, religious liberalism held out the promise that it might domesticate sacerdotal conviction, making of faith something less at odds with naturalism. Sadly, religious liberalism no longer commands such momentum. In recent years, the fastest-growing pieties have tended to be literalistic and retrograde, and to grow at the expense of liberal strands within their particular faith communities. The odds are greater today than at any time in nearly a century that a randomly chosen religious believer will be a literalist, if not an outright fundamentalist, within whatever tradition he or she inhabits. If false beliefs are so likely to be taken so seriously by so many, then we cannot avoid this harrowing conclusion: if unbelief is true, countless misbelievers are stunting their only lives in tragic and eventually irremediable ways. That is one reason why unbelief matters very much.

Or consider this. Across our world, billions embrace one religion or another. Tens of billions of person-hours, hundreds of billions of dollars, are devoted each year to affairs of faith. How much might the human prospect have been improved had this energy and these resources been even partially redirected toward improving the human prospect in this world? What technological innovations do we live without today, what medical breakthroughs remain undiscovered, what dazzling philosophical and artistic ideas remain unconceived? (Keep in mind that I'm not even talking about the way some faiths engender hostility toward scientific discovery or the social application of its products-for now, I'm focused solely on the diversion of resources.) If unbelievers are right and no religion is true, why wait another moment before striving to deflect so much human passion and wealth into channels at whose end some real benefit can result?

Believers may find these suggestions shocking-which merely underscores the significance of the gulf between the way believers and unbelievers look at the world. Most (though not all) believers see human nature as a duality of body and spirit; they see their brains not as what they are but as things they have. They see the universe as planned and purposive, as something understood in its totality by a force that is essentially benign. Many see morality as definite, inflexible, and ordained. Most view reality as eternal and attach primary significance to the countless eons that they expect will follow this life.

While unbelievers are far from homogeneous, most would disagree with this cluster of views. Most unbelievers see human nature as monistic; consciousness is simply what goes on in our brains as viewed from the inside, which is to say that we are our brains. Many reject any idea of "spirit" or immaterial causation; with due allowance for hierarchies of emergent properties, at base, everything is physics. Most unbelievers see the universe as unplanned, as purposeless, as something that has never been understood in toto and probably never will be, unless one day human beings (or other intelligences of equally natural origin) rise to that challenge. Far from benign, unbelievers see the universe as coldly neutral-or they may discern, as Bertrand Russell did, a mute hostility in the relentless, uncaring order of the cosmos. On morality, opinion is diverse. Some unbelievers feel that morality must be utterly flexible and relative. Some argue that, without God, all things are possible, so we should launch ourselves headlong into every possible alternative, run every experiment, test every option, break every barrier, upturn every custom. Others conclude that we can discern the outlines of an objective moral code that best serves the welfare of human communities, because it is best fitted to the way humans think and interact. What almost all unbelievers agree on is that no part of morality has been ordained, there being no entity in a position to do the ordaining. As for cosmology, science says our universe had a distinct beginning and predicts it will one day end; eternity, it would seem, is not in the cards.

This brings us to what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between believers and unbelievers: whereas most traditional religious believers claim to attach primary importance to eternity, unbelievers necessarily attach primary-indeed, sole-importance to this life. Hence the sick anguish many of us feel as we watch our believing fellow citizens throw away vast chunks of their only lives-lives whose precious, solitary finitude their faiths render them powerless to grasp. Unbelief, I conclude, matters very much. Its contentions, implications, and history merit study. Its place among the foundation stones of our secular humanist eupraxsophy is unquestionable, even as we recognize that a fully realized secular humanism encompasses more than unbelief alone. As for The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, if I have succeeded as its editor, I hope that it will do some small justice to the importance of its subject. Perhaps it will be a portal through which at least some believers can better come to understand how unbelievers see the universe. And perhaps it will aid in liberating a few more human beings from the seductions of misbelief.

Tom Flynn is the editor of Free Inquiry. This essay is adapted from his Editor's Introduction to The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief.

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