Atheism Stack Exchange Archive

Is atheism progressing in the world? Any resources/statistics available?

I am looking for data/statistics regarding the progression of Atheism/theism over the last century.

My personal ‘feeling’ is actually that Atheism is loosing terrain on world scale, but I don’t have numbers to in/confirm this feeling.

Are there any resources, or studies over time on the religious/areligious adherence of people in the world?

Answer 526

There is a study (full report available here) from the pew research center that shows that 1.6% of Americans are atheist, while 16.1% of Americans are "Unaffiliated". In the same report it is shown that in America people professing to be newly Atheist has grown by 1.4%, while 0.3% have left Atheism, i.e. converted.

Also, according to Atheist Empire those claiming to Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist are the 4th largest belief set in the world with 850 million people, behind Christianity, Islam, and Hindu, and is a significantly larger population than Buddhism.

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" – Stephen Roberts

If you consider Roberts to be correct then these statistic are irrelevant, as everyone is Atheist in some manner.

Answer 523

Wikipedia has a breakdown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism. From looking through the article, it looks like mysticism is on the decline where it can be reasonably studied.

Answer 527

A Pew Forum US Religious Landscape Survey (http://religions.pewforum.org/reports) shows that the number of people who are "unaffiliated" is increasing. Although the scope is not global, and only a part of the unaffiliated identify themselves as atheists, I think this can be interpreted as a good sign for atheism.

Answer 521

I don’t have any hard stats, but simply the fact that this QA site exists and that we have conferences makes me think it’s progressing. Also the fact atheist-themed books are consistently making ground financially. The Internet is making a huge impact on spreading the idea.

Answer 725

Are you talking about atheistic governments (such as the then USSR and North Korea), or atheism demographics?

Mark Steyn has argued that religious people have more children (Muslims have a higher birth rate than Christians, who have a higher birth rate than atheists).

Wikipedia has an article on the hypothesized Roe effect - that people who support abortion rights are more likely to have abortions, and therefore breed themselves out of existence.

Sometimes, it seems like theists have a better understanding of natural selection than we do! “Be fruitful and multiply” is a much better description than “Survival of the fittest”.

Answer 1103

Just got to a link on my RSS feed from RichardDawkins.net which might be relevant to the question:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

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