Atheism is particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God". The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%. [8]
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Atheism in the United Kingdom
A poll in 2004 by the BBC put the number of people who do not believe in God to be 40% [9], while a YouGov poll in the same year put the percentage of non-believers at 35% with 21% uncertain [10]. In the YouGov poll men were less likely to believe in god than women and younger people were less likely to believe in god than older people.
Atheism studies and statistics
The following surveys are in chronological order, but as they are different studies with different methodologies it would be inaccurate to infer trends on the prevalence of atheism from them:
* A 1995 survey [18] attributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica indicates that the non-religious are about 14.7% of the world's population, and atheists around 3.8%.
* The 2001 ARIS report found that while 29.5 million U.S. Americans (14.1%) describe themselves as "without religion", only 902,000 (0.4%) positively claim to be atheist, with another 991,000 (0.5%) professing agnosticism.
* In the 2001 Australian Census [19] 15.5% of respondents ticked "no religion", and a further 11.7% either did not state their religion or were deemed to have described it inadequately (there was a popular and successful campaign at the time to have people describe themselves as Jedi).
* The 2001 New Zealand census [20] showed that 40% of the respondents claimed "no religion".
* In 2001, the Czech Statistical Office provided census information on the ten million people in the Czech Republic. 59% had no religion, 32.2% were religious, and 8.8% did not answer. This suggests that the Czech Republic is probably the most atheistic country in the world.
* In 2002 survey in Russia, 32% self-described as atheist. Of the 58% self-describing as Russian Orthodox Christian, 42% said they had never been in a church.
* A 2002 survey by Adherents.com [21] estimates the proportion of the world's people who are "secular, non-religious, agnostics and atheists" as about 14%.
* In a 2003 poll in France, 54% of those polled identified themselves as "faithful", 33% as atheist, 14% as agnostic, and 26% as "indifferent". [22]
* A 2004 survey by the BBC [23] in 10 countries showed the proportion of the population "who don't believe in God" varying between 0% and 44%, with an average close to 17% in the countries surveyed. About 8% of the respondents stated specifically that they consider themselves to be atheists.
* A 2004 survey by the CIA in the World Factbook [24] estimates about 12.5% of the world's population are non-religious, and about 2.4% are atheists.
* A 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center [25] showed that in the United States, 12% of people under 30 and 6% of people over 30 could be characterized as non-religious.
* A 2005 poll by AP/Ipsos [26] surveyed ten countries. Of the developed nations, people in the United States had most certainty about the existence of god or a higher power (2% atheist, 4% agnostic), while France had the most skeptics (19% atheist, 16% agnostic). On the religion question, South Korea had the greatest percentage without a religion (41%) while Italy had the smallest (5%).
