Worldwide Atheism Trend and Pattern – A Summary Thursday, May 3, 2007
Posted by Henry in agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, China, Christianity, Europe, faith, God, Hinduism, Islam, Italy, Japan, Middle East, North Korea, Portugal, rationality, religion, Scandinavian, science, secularism, South Korea, statistics, survey, Sweden, United States, Vietnam, world.26 comments
This is the sort of article I have been long searching for – a comprehensive, analytical and scholarly summary – filled with hard data – of atheism trends in the world. This 2005 article is written by Phil Zuckerman and seems to have been part of a Cambridge University publication. Although slightly outdated, it nonetheless provides a reliable and useful source for anyone interested in the study of the atheist demographics.
It is not a short article, so I will take the liberty of summarising it further here. Firstly it outlines the difficulties in conducting a survey on the beliefs and disbeliefs of large populations. Then it provides a good statistics on the atheism population in many countries. Then, most importantly, the Top 50 list of non-believing countries is presented, which I will duplicate here (I have stripped out the population columns due to space limits):
Country | % Atheist/actual # Agnostic/Non-believer in God | |
1 | Sweden | 46-85% |
2 | Vietnam | 81% |
3 | Denmark | 43-80% |
4 | Norway | 31-72% |
5 | Japan | 64-65% |
6 | Czech Republic | 54-61% |
7 | Finland | 28-60% |
8 | France | 43-54% |
9 | South Korea | 30%-52% |
10 | Estonia | 49% |
11 | Germany | 41-49% |
12 | Russia | 24-48% |
13 | Hungary | 32-46% |
14 | Netherlands | 39-44% |
15 | Britain | 39-44% |
16 | Belgium | 42-43% |
17 | Bulgaria | 34-40% |
18 | Slovenia | 35-38% |
19 | Israel | 15-37% |
20 | Canada | 19-30% |
21 | Latvia | 20-29% |
22 | Slovakia | 10-28% |
23 | Switzerland | 17-27% |
24 | Austria | 18-26% |
25 | Australia | 24-25% |
26 | Taiwan | 24% |
27 | Spain | 15-24% |
28 | Iceland | 16-23% |
29 | New Zealand | 20-22% |
30 | Ukraine | 20% |
31 | Belarus | 17% |
32 | Greece | 16% |
33 | North Korea | 15% (?) |
34 | Italy | 6-15% |
35 | Armenia | 14% |
36 | China | 8-14% (?) |
37 | Lithuania | 13% |
38 | Singapore | 13% |
39 | Uruguay | 12% |
40 | Kazakhstan | 11-12% |
41 | Estonia | 11% |
42 | Mongolia | 9% |
43 | Portugal | 4-9% |
44 | United States | 3-9% |
45 | Albania | 8% |
46 | Argentina | 4-8% |
47 | Kyrgyzstan | 7% |
48 | Dominican Rep. | 7% |
49 | Cuba | 7% (?) |
50 | Croatia | 7% |
where (?) indicates the relatively low certainty/validity. Note that rather than defining the terms “atheism”, “agnosticism” and “non-belief”, which is a tricky issue in itself, the article lumps all three together to simply mean people who do not believe in God. The range of percentages (for example the top non-believing country Sweden is 46% – 85%) gives an indication of the difficulties in reaching such figures. Finally, the author gives his own analysis on atheism trend and pattern using the data.