I just came across some excellent information. Later this year, Cambridge University Press is going to publish the Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College has put his chapter on the web here. Zuckerman offers a compilation, review and analysis of recent studies about the distribution of atheism globally. Here are some highlights…
The top three atheist nations by percentage of population are, in descending order, Sweden, Vietnam and Denmark. The high estimate for Sweden is 85%!
The United States is #44 (3-9%).
The Jewish state of Israel is 15-37% atheist.
“From the top 50 countries, along with those additionally mentioned above countries, the grand total worldwide number of atheists, agnostics, and non-believers in God is somewhere between 504,962,830 and 749,247,571. These minimum/maximum numbers are conservative estimates; had I factored in a mere .25% of such highly populated countries as Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Burma, Tanzania, and Iran, as non-believers in God, estimates would be significantly larger. Also, these numbers are only for non-believers of God, specifically. Had I included all “non-religious” people in general, the numbers would nearly double.[…] Such figures render any suggestion that theism is innate or neurologically based untenable.”
“Given the above estimates, we can deduce that there are approximately 58 times as many atheists as there are Mormons, 41 times as many atheists as there are Jews, 35 times as many atheists as there are Sikhs, and twice as many atheists as there are Buddhists. Finally, nonbelievers in God as a group come in fourth place after Christianity (2 billion), Islam (1.2 billion), and Hinduism (900 million) in terms of global ranking of commonly-held belief systems.”
“…nations marked by high levels of organic atheism – such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and France — are among the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated, and most free societies on earth.”
Of the 25 top-scoring nations on the United Nations Human Development Index, which is based on such things as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy rate, per capita income, and educational attainment, all but one (Ireland), have large numbers of atheists. EVERY ONE of the bottom 50 has practically no atheists.
While nations with the highest levels of organic (not state-sponsored) atheism have had a steady increase in atheism over the last century, the global percentage may be falling because countries with the fewest atheists have the highest birth rates.
I highly recommend reading through it yourself. You can skim the first third (everything before the table). The rest is worth careful study. The implications of these data are so broad and so significant that I can’t even begin to discuss them in this post. I will be referring back to this chapter to support future posts on selected topics, however.
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July 14th, 2005 at at 9:15 pm
Wow, this is awesome. I’ll have to read the whole thing myself later. I was surprised by atheists being 4th. I expected nonbelievers to be lower on the list. *shrug*
July 15th, 2005 at at 12:20 am
Fascinating. I love hard data on sociological issues.
Makes me wonder what’s going on in Ireland, though.
July 15th, 2005 at at 6:14 am
“twice as many atheists as there are Buddhists”
Don’t most Buddhists count as atheists?
Anyway, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
July 15th, 2005 at at 7:48 am
I_AM: As a little aside, here, I have to know. Do you get the question “You are…what?” a lot?
July 15th, 2005 at at 8:04 am
I am. Aren’t you?
If it’s a good enough handle for a god, it’s good enough for me.
July 15th, 2005 at at 11:27 am
FUCK YES! FUCK YES!! I KNEW IT!!! I’VE BEEN SAYING IT TO EVERYONE ALL ALONG, AND NOW A STUDY BACKS ME UP!
(what I am referrring to is the findings that the MOST atheistic countries are the HAPPIEST countries to live in)
July 15th, 2005 at at 11:50 am
Yep, this is why I’ve been telling my fiancee that if the shit hits the fan here, I’m moving to Sweden. To kill some time one day I even started looking at which area I would like to live in. Sweden’s high percentage of atheists was also a factor in why I recently bought a new Volvo lol.
There are definitely high numbers of nonbelievers out there, we just have to get them to speak out, even if it offends their friends and family.
I will definitely check out the rest of the article later.
*clicks on an ad*
July 15th, 2005 at at 4:35 pm
Let’s not forget that the number of believers in most of the countries are highly inflated. In the country I came from, non believers are maybe 10 times as many as the microscopic official version. They make list with all peoples living in a community and state them as believers for granted. And with such a small number of peoples declared as atheists, is a formidable pressure to declare yourself as one (yes, even bigger than in US)
July 15th, 2005 at at 7:08 pm
It isn’t just Ireland that seems to defy the correlation between a high quality of life and the overall percentage of atheists living within any particular country. Italy, Spain, Australia and the U.S. also have a very high standard of living, but they have a far greater proportion of believers than France, Sweden or Denmark.
‘Non-believers in God is somewhere between 504,962,830 and 749,247,571′ - lol. How on earth did he get such precise figures???? How was his study actually conducted, how did he acquire his information, and was this little exercise of his truly impartial? Have there been other studies which have contradicted his findings, and if so, could we trust him to mention them?
And the most important question of all: why do I so often come across people who so readily accept any survey/study/research results that merely CONFIRM their previously-held suppositions????? I’ve noticed that atheists are the biggest offenders in this regard (like Aaron Kinney, above).
July 15th, 2005 at at 7:26 pm
It is nice to know that there is a higher precentage of Atheists in other countries than the US. I was under the feeling that we were the most non-religious country, for some reason…
July 16th, 2005 at at 8:25 am
PA, as the Evangelical Atheist pointed out, this was “a compilation, review and analysis of recent studies”. Zuckerman did not do the study himself, so of course it is “impartial”. He seems to make use of a great number of surveys. Presumably he used all the data that was available, so no other studies could possibly contradict these conclusions.
July 16th, 2005 at at 10:19 am
China, with a population of 1.6 BILLION people, is officially atheist.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html#People
July 16th, 2005 at at 10:31 am
Yes, but China is also a Communist state…
July 16th, 2005 at at 10:39 am
PA:
Come back after you’ve read the chapter.
steveven:
ditto
leon:
Zuckerman is careful to distinguish “organic” atheism from state-sponsored atheism.
July 17th, 2005 at at 1:38 pm
“‘Non-believers in God is somewhere between 504,962,830 and 749,247,571? - lol. How on earth did he get such precise figures????”
These numbers are obviously not precise as they indicate a range in which the real number is likely to lie and thus imprecision. It is only the apparent natural tendancy for us to look for round numbers that makes it seem precise, the range 500,00,000 to 750,000,000 is not really much less precise, it just looks that way.
August 2nd, 2005 at at 4:44 am
Hear hear, see above… or below