% of atheists?

Question

Okay so long story short. I'm an atheist and my girlfriend is a catholic. She asked me a question the other day that I didn't know the answer to, but I am very interested in doing some research on.

What percentage of the population (world wide/U.S.?) believes in a god compared to those who don't believe in a god.

Does anyone know of any polls/websites that might have this information? Or anyone have an educated guess?

Thanks!

Answer 1

i think christianity makes up 33% of the world population. that is just the ones who profess christianity, so i owld say the percentage of christians is about 20% or even less.

Answer 2

It's hard to say, because there are factors such as the wording of polls (some will give definitions of "God" that don't fit what certain people believe), and the fact that some regions of the world may have more in-the-closet atheists than others. I've heard numbers ranging from 1% to 16% and higher. I've heard 10% for the US from more than a few sources though that didn't seem to have an agenda.

Answer 3

The below website should have all the data you need.

http://www.adherents.com/

Various polls, based on how they ask the question, have a range of somewhere around 12-20% that are "non-believers". Those who actually say atheist, however, is usually in th 3-10% range. There are new polls than those cited on that web page, just search "Zogby" and "Gallup" poll websites for their latest polls.

Perhaps of most relevance to the conversation with your girlfriends is that at least 2/3 of the world is an "atheist" when it comes to her god. That means that 4 billion + people do not believe in the god of Yahweh/Jesus.

Answer 4

I've heard about 10% in the US don't believe in gods. Usually much lower if the poll asks for atheists specifically, which suggests a significant percentage of Americans don't really know what 'atheist' means.

Answer 5

It is really hard to get good numbers.

In the US I have seen anything from 3% to 17% atheist/agnostic. The number is normally around 10%. But I could give you sources that vary widely if you are just trying to make a point one way or the other.

It is much higher in Europe and Asia. But the numbers I have seen are so all over the place, I can't even venture a good guess. But it is over 80% in places like Sweden and Japan.

Answer 6

Worldwide it would probably be around 5%. In the U.S. it is slightly higher at 8-10%. European countries have the highest ratio of atheists to belivers - some exceeding 50%.

Answer 7

There are many, many polls that supposedly reflect the percentage of atheists in each country but I believe most of them are highly inaccurate.

Here is an article on the demographics of atheism on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

The above article states:
It is difficult to quantify the number of atheists in the world. Different people interpret "atheist" and related terms differently, and it can be hard to draw boundaries between atheism, non-religious beliefs, and non-theistic religious and spiritual beliefs. Furthermore, atheists may not report themselves as such, to prevent suffering from social stigma, discrimination, and persecution in certain regions. Despite these problems, most studies indicate that the non-religious make up about 12-15% of the world's population.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

In my opinion these polls/statistics are off because of situations such as these: In America for example, most of the population is raised Christian. Many Americans identify themselves as Christians simply because of the fact that they were raised as such but most of them do not actually practice or believe in the religion itself. I think the percentage of atheists in America is much higher that statistics show.

I know that in European countries, the percentage of atheists is believed to be much higher.

For more links and information I would do a search on Yahoo or Google for 'demographics of atheism'.

Answer 8

There was a survey done a while back by one of the National morning shows and 86% of the people in the US believe in God. That would leave 14% that don't believe in God.

Answer 9

There was a Newsweek poll fairly recently that said that 91% of Americans claimed to believe in god. I think many of them are, if not lying, gave the answer they felt they should give. Not nearly that many people behave as if they believe there's a god who can see what they're doing.

Answer 10

About 1/3 of the world is Christian with the large majority being Catholic.

The CIA fact book has good statistics on this and other similar questions, and was accessible on the web. I don't remember the link, but should not be hard to find.

Edit:
The version I last saw had a section on religions, but I'm not seeing it now.

Edit 2:
Christians 33.03% (of which Roman Catholics 17.33%, Protestants 5.8%, Orthodox 3.42%, Anglicans 1.23%), Muslims 20.12%, Hindus 13.34%, Buddhists 5.89%, Sikhs 0.39%, Jews 0.23%, other religions 12.61%, non-religious 12.03%, atheists 2.36% (2004 est.)