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What percent of the world is Atheist/agnostic?
- Thread starter Spiderman
- Start date
Altfish
Veteran Member
16% of what?
Does it include children that have yet to be indoctrinated? Or is it just adults?
Spiderman
Veteran Member
How about Adults
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
this shouldn't be in the 'atheist dir
Altfish
Veteran Member
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
probably 7% atheist
5% agnostic
5% agnostic
jonathan180iq
Well-Known Member
Who knows?
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
I've always suspected about 80-85% of people are "believers," and 10-15% of people aren't. My experience seems to confirm these round figures.
By "believer," I mean anyone who tends to believe in empirically unsupported things, or for whom factual reality isn't a primary concern when it comes to what they believe. Theism would fall under this umbrella.
By "believer," I mean anyone who tends to believe in empirically unsupported things, or for whom factual reality isn't a primary concern when it comes to what they believe. Theism would fall under this umbrella.
GoodbyeDave
Well-Known Member
I spent some time trying to compile figures from reliable, local sources. Atheists and agnostics aren't normally separated in censuses, and often lumped in with "others". The figure I got was 11%.
Soundwave99
Member
I have heard this before and if it's true, then the true percentages of non-theists could be much higher (I would guess around 30 or 40%).
Accounting for the above, my estimate would be between 10% and 40% of the world's population are nontheists.
Pretty much what I think as well.
Except that I suspect "belief" is often far more of a reflection of conforming to social expectations than anything else. There is anthropological evidence that god-beliefs are, so to speak, contagious through a social environment.
Were it not for peer pressure and indoctrination, I expect that no more than 15% of all adults would be theists.
The distant future perhaps.
For the foreseeable future I think that the human instinct towards tribalism will keep being reborn generation after generation. As municipalities and political groups become more multi ethnic, religions will remain the "tribe of choice" for most people. Even if they don't believe in the teachings.
Tom
Sure.
Word got me that such a state of affairs has already been reached in places such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries, where apparently adhering to a specific church (usually Christian) is standing tradition, part of of building a social identity and there is even governmental pressure/insistence/subsidizing towards doing so.
Notably, those are also countries with very high percentages of non-theists, hinting that actual theistic belief may have a poor correlation with that tradition.
Tribalism is a powerful drive that will probably remain with us for many centuries. But the days of a theistic majority may well come to an end much earlier than that.
Cephus
Relentlessly Rational
And that number is growing dramatically every single day. The non-religious are the fastest growing "religious" demographic, mostly because we're getting too smart to believe in religious nonsense.
Every child born is a non-theist of some kind or other, until they are taught otherwise. Believing your parents/community is a critical survival factor for a long-maturing creature like ourselves, and as a consequence, children believe what their parents believe --------- with a few exceptions. And those are the ones (like me) who ask questions with a truly inquiring mind, that religion inevitably answers really, really badly.
Andy Sims
NightSerf
This is one of those cases where google is not much of a friend. There are sites that deal with statistical studies of all sorts. The Pew forum has a pretty good religious database. Gallup has done a few good studies. Some universities have departments that specialize in that sort of thing.
Pew is my favorite. Pew Research Center
What percent of the world is Atheist/agnostic?
Where? America? Could be as low as 2% if you follow some religious estimates or the CIA demographic or as high as 33% as the higher range indicated in Wikipedia
Irreligion in the United States - Wikipedia.
Or China with a population accounting for around 15% of total world population, with at least 55% and as many as 75% having no belief in gods.
Across Europe its more tricky from as low as 8% to close to 90% by country.
Anyway about 6 years ago i did the calculation based on averages which worked out between 17% and 22%.
However, as @Altfish has pointed out, children who have not yet been indicated it excludes children, at least 25000000 of whom are not yet indoctrinated.
Where? America? Could be as low as 2% if you follow some religious estimates or the CIA demographic or as high as 33% as the higher range indicated in Wikipedia
Irreligion in the United States - Wikipedia.
Or China with a population accounting for around 15% of total world population, with at least 55% and as many as 75% having no belief in gods.
Across Europe its more tricky from as low as 8% to close to 90% by country.
Anyway about 6 years ago i did the calculation based on averages which worked out between 17% and 22%.
However, as @Altfish has pointed out, children who have not yet been indicated it excludes children, at least 25000000 of whom are not yet indoctrinated.