For many years the Pew Research Institute has been exploring what it calls the “landscape” of religiosity in the United States. It regularly distributes questionnaires that probe every aspect of Americans’ religious beliefs and practices. One of the standard questions on those questionnaires concerns religious affiliation. Possible responses include the major religions, and the word “none.”

Though America is, by European standards, an exceptionally religious country, the percentage of Americans that respond to the religious affiliation question with “none’ has increased significantly over past decades. In 2007, 16 percent gave this response; in 2014, 23 percent did so. Surveys in the 1970s and 1980s recorded 10 percent or less “none” respondents.

Of course, the “nones” are not a homogeneous group, nor have they ever been. Those individuals who do not regard themselves as affiliated with a religious institution have a variety of reasons for that view.

The Pew Institute recently ask the 78 percent of “nones” who indicated that they were raised within a religion why they shed their religious identities. The question was not in the form of a multiple-choice questionnaire, but a request for an actual written explanation.

The responses, as categorized and summarized by the institute, are as follows: 49 percent of the respondents cite a lack of belief as a reason for their “noneness.” Within that group, more than three quarters label themselves as atheists or agnostics, the rest as “nothing in particular.”

Pew reports that many in the group: “mention ‘science’ as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said ‘I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.’ Others reference ‘common sense,’ ‘logic,’ or a ‘lack of evidence’ — or simply say that they do not believe in God.”

Twenty percent of the “nones” say that they are unaffiliated because they dislike organized religion. This opposition, for some, has to do with the hierarchical nature of religious sects; for others, religious groups are too much like businesses; still others cite clergy sexual abuse scandals as a reason.

A similar proportion (18 percent), report that they are “religiously unsure.” Some in that group: “say they are religious in some way despite being unaffiliated…others …describe themselves as ‘seeking enlightenment’ or ‘open-minded,’ and several say they are ‘spiritual’ if not religious.”

Ten percent of the “nones” describe themselves as religiously “inactive.” For some, that means that they have some religious beliefs, but no inclination to participate in public religious observances; others say they’re just too busy to do so.

Another dimension of religiosity investigated by Pew has to do with the level of people’s religious commitment, as measured by four factors: the self-assessed importance of religion in their lives; attendance at religious services; frequency of prayer; and belief in God.

There are three levels: low, medium and high. From 2007 to 2014, the share of the U.S. population that has a low level of religiosity grew from 14 percent to 19 percent. Not too surprisingly, people with a low level of religious commitment are increasingly among the “nones.” While 63 percent of those in the low-level category were “nones” in 2007; 72 percent were in 2014.

Interestingly, there is a striking generational element in this 9 percent increase. In 2014, 79 percent of low-level individuals born after 1980 were “nones,” compared to only 54 percent of those born before 1946. So, the overall increase in “nones,” while it includes people of all ages who have ceased to identify with any religion, is heavily driven by the youngest generation, the millennials.

The Pew Institute doesn’t attempt to explain why religious belief is waning in this country. But the quoted remarks of the “nones’ regarding their reasons for ceasing to believe, are worth reviewing.

Many cite science, and science is, indeed, often characterized as an enemy of religious belief. But science doesn’t actually attack religion; it ignores it. Science has provided us with highly satisfactory and trustworthy accounts of the world, none of which have included God as an explanatory factor. Certainly there are still many puzzling questions in science, but, if we take seriously the last three hundred years of scientific discovery, the word “God” will not appear in the answers to any of them.

Science may show us a world full of marvelous and extraordinary things, but it’s not a world like that portrayed by the fiction genre known as “magical realism.” In that genre, perfectly ordinary people do perfectly ordinary things in a recognizable landscape, yet occasionally unpredictable and inexplicable events occur. For the scientifically-minded, “magical realism” is an oxymoron.

Common sense is mentioned as a reason for disbelief. Common sense is what guides us through life by helping us distinguish between the plausible and the implausible. But today’s common sense is not what it once was.

There was a time when it was commonsensical to believe that the sun moves across the sky. It was once plausible that my crop’s failure was due to a curse put upon it by the local witch. Now, common sense is shaped by science, and for an increasing number of people common sense, like science, no longer has the word “God” in its vocabulary.

Similarly with regard to “evidence,” or the lack thereof. Thunderstorms were once taken as evidence of God’s presence. Science, in giving us a successful model of evidence-based reasoning, has made it almost impossible to regard any real-world event as one that would count as evidence of the supernatural. We may still talk about a “miraculous” recovery from an illness, but for how many of us is that really evidence of divine intervention?

“Logic,” is also mentioned by respondents, which probably refers in an informal way to any process whereby trustworthy conclusions are reached. Here again, science has heavily influenced our ordinary view of what counts as a piece of logical reasoning. For many of us, if an argument concludes with “Therefore: there is a god,” either one of the premises is untrue, or the inference violates the rules of logic.

Then there are “nones” who have fallen away from the faith because they dislike religious organizations, which do tend, in varying degrees, to be hierarchical and authoritarian, and not infrequently corrupt. Others are not sufficiently convinced of any religious doctrines to find established sects attractive, or are simply not motivated enough to become engaged with them.

I suspect that an underlying attitude for a great many “nones” is that religion really doesn’t matter that much anymore. This, I think, is the wave of the future. Ranting atheists like me are not going to bury religion. Instead, growing indifference and neglect will cause religion to devolve into something like the human appendix — still there, but useless, and noteworthy only when it causes trouble.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.