Saturday, December 19, 2009

Godless creep up to around 30% in Australia

A recent Nielsen survey in Australia on religious belief puts the number who don't believe in god at 24% and not sure/don't know at 6%.

The percentage of Christians is 64%, with other major faiths totalling around 5%.

The numbers are not changing rapidly, but disbelief is much higher among the young, so it looks like the numbers of nonbelievers will continue to grow, albeit slowly - census information from New Zealand shows that people don't adopt religion faster than they leave it as a cohort ages, and there's nothing to suggest that this trend would be any different in Australia; that is, the overall percentage of nobelievers will likely be well in the majority in a few decades.

Belief in life after death is only 53%, and belief that the bible/quran/etc is the word of god is only 34%.

But there were some worrying numbers, too, with Darwinian evolution not far in front of some form of "god guided" development (42% to 32%), and YE creationism coming in third, but with alarmingly high numbers (23%); in this case I'd particularly like to see the exact wording of the question that was put, because the numbers seem quite out of kilter; it would suggest that there are very few theists (only about 20% or so of theists in all) who accept Darwinian evolution, assuming almost all nontheists do.

1 comment:

Cujo359 said...

census information from New Zealand shows that people don't adopt religion faster than they leave it as a cohort ages

Fascinating. If I were to guess, I'd guess that this is not the case in America. But maybe my smallish personal sample isn't representative.