I saw this question posed on another message board and I was intrigued.
Does anyone know the percentage of Atheists in the world over the 20th century?
Some figures from different decades would be greatly appreciated.
I was able to find this info, but I have no idea how accurate it is:
I find the 750,000 number for Scientology extremely doubtful, so I dunno how good that research is.
If we are talking about using recorded history as a benchmark here, it was not very long ago where you pretty much had to believe in some kind of diety or be a social outcast. I believe this was the norm until recent centuries.
As such, since you couldn’t really be an atheist before (most skeptics became deists, most likely), it is not surprising that many people now choose not to believe in anything.
Because, unlike before, now they CAN.
Yer pal,
Satan
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7688 cigarettes not smoked, saving $961.01.
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I slept with a moderator!*
Satan - you mean that if I was an autocratic dictator and you were my lowly subject and I required belief in Mickey Mouse as the creator of the universe, that you would really would believe that?
I find it hard to believe that rule by force or social pressure could actually change what you believe in your heart.
I certainly hope so.
I may not believe in mickey mouse, but if you made me a social outcast or threatened to kill me, I may go through the motions.
As the great Admiral Bob says, sometimes you have to rub blue mud in your belly to appease the locals, but don’t be stupid enough to believe it does anything.
To continue what Satan and Barbarian started: in the past an open atheist was not only a social outcast but also a heretic. And heresy was very bad for the health. I’m of the opinion that the percentage of atheists in the world has always been fairly stable – especially among learned people. It’s just that now such opinions can be open – to a certain extent. There is still a good deal of social pressure to have a belief structure of some kind. For instance, I doubt we will have an openly atheist President or Vice President any time soon. However, I also have no doubt that we have had atheist or agnostic Presidents in the past – but they, like many others, “went through the motions.”
It is. It has been estimated that there are only about 50 to 100,000 scientologists in the world. The cult itself claims to have over 8 million worldwide members, but that’s bunk. I’ve read articles saying that the “chruch” counts anyone on their mailing list as an official member.
Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker argues that the difficulty of explaining the existence of such incredibly complex things as living organisms made it impossible to be an “intellectually fulfilled” atheist before Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Now, logically postulating a Creator in order to explain the complexity of all these “watches” lying around doesn’t really work, because the Creator him/her/itself would seemingly need to be at least as complex as the thing he/she/it created. However, while it may be impeccably logical to say “I don’t know how all these living things came to be–maybe there have always been living things–but talking about God or the gods doesn’t really help explain the phenomenon, so I still have no belief in any gods”, it’s intellectually unsatisfying as hell. Darwin’s theory shows how the complexities of living things could arise from simple non-living antecedants without any conscious creator or designer being needed. (This could still lead to a sort of Big Bang Deism–God made the Big Bang, then let everything else happen–to explain the existence of non-living matter to begin with; I think physicists like Stephen Hawking argue in turn that the Big Bang and physical laws themselves can be accounted for very simply, much more so than by the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.)
I’d also argue that the removal of persecution for religious dissent or disbelief probably does more than just allow the existing heretics or atheists to “come out of the woodwork”. A free society allows for open debate about religious ideas which means many people come into contact with different ideas about religion which they otherwise wouldn’t. In a closed society, many people may never even hear heterodox ideas. Also, any dissenters who do independently evolve such ideas may wind up so isolated, and convinced that they must be crazy because no one else has such weird ideas, that they wind up talking themselves back around to the point where they not only outwardly conform but even inwardly accept the prevailing orthodoxy. People in modern Western societies are also more likely to have nontraditional religious views other than atheism, from New Age beliefs to vague belief in some “higher power” to a variety of very fervent religious sects which would never have been tolerated by “the Church” in an earlier era.
So I think it’s plausible to argue that both the rise of religious freedom and the rise of modern science have eroded theological orthodoxies to the point where atheism and other dissenting or heterodox views have actually increased.
Just to throw some facts into this post (this is still in General Questions, after all), this table from the Britannica does seem to show an increase in the incidence of atheism in the U.S. over the course of the 20th Century. There’s an even more marked erosion in the demographic position of professing Christians relative to non-Christians of all types.
Thanks for the replies, folks. I do appreciate it.
I was thinking that perhaps the UN would have some numbers but I couldn’t find anything.
Ah well.
I’ve seen the claim that 10% of Americans are athiest or agnostic printed in some official source, somewhere, at one time or another. 'Fraid I don’t remember what that source is anymore, though. A dungload of good I am, eh? 
I can’t help you on the world-wide statistics, but I found some stuff on the OCRT website. The Canadian census records show that in 1991, 13% of the Canadian population reported that they were athiest, agnostic, or had no religious beliefs; that is nearly twice the percentage who reported the same in 1981 (7.4%). A Barna Research survey referenced on the OCRT’s atheism page indicates that roughly 7% of American adults describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Unfortunately, this only provides one data point and can’t be used to detect a trend. Also, I personally suspect Barna to be rather biased (Barna’s survey results page hawks George Barna’s book Re-Churching the Unchurched :rolleyes: ). Another essay by the OCRT references a 1999 World Almanac estimate that 9.1% of American adults describe themselves as atheists.
So there you have it: biased surveys, on a topic that people frequently lie about on surveys anyway–not much statistical help, really. I have the impression that atheism is on the rise in general, particularly in North America, but I can’t really back it up.
Is atheism on the rise? I don’t know.
Is agnosticism on the rise? I doubt it.
<crawls back under rock>
One statistic I’ve seen is that 90% of Americans responded “yes” to the question “Do you believe in God?” This would seem to encompass Christians, Jews, Muslims, and most ‘non-religous’ people (most of whom have basic Christian beliefs, but don’t formally identify with any one group). That would leave 10% for atheists, agnostics, and all non-monotheistic religions. That seems about right to me (Asian-Americans are only about 4% of the population, and it’s my experience that substantial fraction of them don’t practice their ancestral beliefs, having become either Christian or atheist) But, as has been mentioned, this is a question that everyone wants to distort to their advantage, so I wouldn’t place to much faith in anyone’s statistics on this subject.
Worldwide, I think the percentages would be skewed by the fact that Catholicism is experiencing significant gains, and Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are very strong in countries that are quite populus and/or enjoy high birth rates.
I will attempt to atone for that last comment. I think some of these quotes will underscore the abovementioned variability:
“As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion. The estimate of nonbelievers increases significantly, to about 21 percent of the world’s population, if negative atheists are included.” --From a now-busted site cached on Google (“Negative atheism” is defined similarly to agnosticism here. Whatever.)
"How many Atheists are there in the general population?
USA - between 7 and 10% based on a 1989 Gallup poll
Canada - 12.5% as of 1991
Australia - 12.9% as of 1991" --From http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/a/aiken/WWW/atheist.html (Added bonus! Wonderful Cecil subject photo: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/a/aiken/WWW/christia.jpg )
“The last century has seen the percentage of non-religious people increase and the percentage of atheists in the population is now estimated to be between 10 and 13% right now.” --From http://www.liberator.net/articles/TremblayFrancois/herdingcats.html
The only reasonably well-cited page I’ve found is this one:
http://www.adherents.com/Na_33.html
A brief overview:
Africa: 316,000 - 440,000 (0.05 - 0.06%)
Asia: 161,000,000 - 175,000,000 (about 5%)
Australia: 7,200 (!?) (0.04%) (Compare to quote above.)
Europe: 17,604,000 - 40,845,000 (3.5 - 5.5%)
North America: 1,319,000 - 1,875,000 (0.5 - 0.6%)
And South America is not mentioned.
Allow me to be the first to say, “those numbers are whacked.”
Boy, I’ll say. China has 1 billion people, who have been officially atheist for 50 years…and Communism aside, I don’t think Taoism, Buddhism or Confucianism are particularly theist religions.
A website had one of those one question polls on it. A belief in no deity was at about 66% response. The rest was split between the other major deities.
In today’s society, people are probsbly more comfortable in saying that they are an atheist, since in other years, it was condemned and one was proably though to be a Commie.
Also with the fake televanglical Christian TV Shows, and all the hypocrisy within the Church is enough to make anyone not believe, at least for me and a few other friends.