Secularism
A Religion Profile from International Students, Inc.
Secularism: An Overview
Number of Adherents
Demographer Davit Barrett estimates that there are 150 million atheists and 768 million nonreligious people in the world. The combined total comes to more than 918 million people (Barrett). Toward the end of the Renaissance, the modern method of empirical science began to develop. The key players were Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Johannes Kepler (15711630), and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Although it may seem ironic now, each of these men believed in the Christian God. They viewed science as studying the handiwork of an almighty Creator and discerning His natural laws. Galileo considered God to have written two “books”: the Bible and nature (Hummel, p. 106). Contrary to popular belief, the cause for the diversion between Christianity and science originated not with the Church but with the university professors who were threatened by Galileo’s revolutionary ideas. These professors were steeped in the Greek scientific method, which included observation to a small extent, but mostly explained the workings of nature through rational deduction from first principles, or assumptions, an entire view of the universe had been built up. Consequently, the professors embraced such misconceptions as the sun having no imperfections, the moon being a perfectly smooth sphere that shone with its own light, and the earth alone having a moon since the earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo’s recently invented telescope quickly demonstrated the incorrectness of such assumptions (Hummel, pp. 91-94). Not willing to be thwarted by Galileo, the professors decided to make the controversy religious rather than academic (Hummel, p. 92). They argued that the heliocentric (sun-centered) view contradicted scripture (e.g., Psalm 104:22 says, “The sun rises.” Therefore, the