As the number of nonreligious individuals has been increasing around the world, the team explored what exactly nonreligious beliefs and worldviews entail. Rather than assuming an absence of belief or imposing a predetermined set of beliefs, the research team used an open-ended approach to investigate which secular beliefs and worldviews nonreligious nontheistic individuals in ten countries around the world might endorse. In the study, approximately one thousand answers were analyzed (100 participants per country).
To analyze the answers, the team created a data-driven coding scheme, showing that the ten most frequently mentioned categories were science, humanism, critical skepticism, natural laws, equality, kindness and caring, care for the earth, left-wing political causes, atheism, and individualism and freedom. The research demonstrates that there is a range of secular beliefs, clustering together in scientific worldviews, humanist worldviews, and caring nature-focused worldviews, which provide answers the big questions about life.
You can find the paper here:
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
