According to a Pew Research Center Survey, the number of American atheists has roughly doubled in the period from 2007 to 2014. Impacting this demographic change has been the influence of naturalistic explanations that explain the world without reference to any transcendent deities or supernatural powers. Such changes were abetted by the progressive secularization of American culture and education following the 1962 Supreme Court decision that removed prayer from the public schools.

While atheistic materialism found its philosophical roots in the positivism of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, today that it nearly dominates the public arena in the form of leading scientists who proclaim that natural science can offer all the rational explanations of the universe, including its very existence. The so-called “new atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, have done much to blunt religion’s traditional social influence by attacking it as superstitious irrationalism. Whatever cannot be empirically verified, such as God, free will, or the human spiritual soul, is rejected by atheists as unscientific nonsense.