I happened to be speaking before a group of rather militant atheists on the day that the Pew Forum announced these bizarre findings. One conspiracy theorist suggested the the Pew pollsters might have rigged the results so as to prove that there really aren't very many true atheists. Somehow, I doubt this. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is staffed by people who are honorable to a fault, and their polls are the best source about American religious attitudes that have ever been available to the public. No, if the Pew poll found that 21 percent of self-identified atheists also say that they believe in God, I believe that is what these putative atheists told the pollsters.

I think that the explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings lies in a phenomenon I discuss at length in my recent book, The Age of American Unreason . Americans as a people have become supremely ignorant about and indifferent to the specific meanings of words, and they are equally confused about important historical distinctions.This is a serious cultural disease throughout our nation. A majority of Americans, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible. Why shouldn't some American atheists be as ignorant about the meaning of atheism as many religious Americans are about religion?

In my book, I mention one of the sentences most commonly abused by television commentators--the old expression, "I couldn't care less." This sentence is repeatedly transformed, by people who are paid millions of dollars for reading the news on TV, into, "I could care less." When I pointed out to a class of magazine writing students that "I could care less" means the precise opposite of "I couldn't care less," one student replied, "What does it matter as long as everyone knows what you mean?" Of course it matters. There's a wonderful passage in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--a dialogue among Alice, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter. "You should say what you mean," the March Hare tells Alice. Alice replies, "I do. At least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." The Hatter chimes in, "Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might as well say that, `I see what I eat,' is the same thing as `I eat what I see.'"

I suppose it's possible that some of the atheists who said they believed in God were operating under the misapprehension that atheism means something like deism--belief not in a personal God but in an overarching providence, or spirit, that gave rise to the universe but plays no direct role in the affairs of humans. I suppose it is also possible that some of those polled, aware that atheism is greatly stigmatized in American culture, wanted to make nice by saying that they did believe in God in the same spirit that some women say, "I am a feminist but...." The "but" is always followed by some silly, ingratiating statement like, "I don't want to burn my bra" or "I like men."

But atheism is not a flexible word. That is, in fact, the reason why so many nonbelievers prefer to call themselves agnostics. Indeed, the word "agnostic" was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, the great popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution, as an alternative to the much older, harsher-sounding word "atheist." Atheists are people who don't believe in God. They do not claim (as some believers mistakenly think) to "know" that there is no God. What an honest atheist says is, "Given all the available evidence, I don't believe in a divine creator." An atheist can no more prove that there is no God than a believer can prove that there is one--but only believers claim to "know" that their religious convictions are true.

But too many Americans are convinced, and have been convinced by the sloppy speech around them, that words mean anything you want them to mean. They really do believe that "I see what I eat" means the same thing as "I eat what I see." And that mistaken idea probably lies at the heart of what I will call the Pew Paradox.