4.1.1

Statistics & Reasons

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Statistics & Reasons

The UK has seen significant growth in non-religious people, with declining belief in God.

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Statistics

  • Reliable statistics show that there is a growing number of people in the UK who are not religious and do not believe in God.
  • Less than half of the UK population claims to believe in God, gods or any type of deity.
    • This is a strikingly low number in comparison to fifty years ago.
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Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists

  • There are over 30 million atheists and agnostics in the UK.
    • The number of those who believe in any God continues to drop each year.
  • Atheists are those who affirm that there is no God.
  • Humanists are those who affirm the same but believe that care for our fellow humans should be our true concern.
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Secularisation

  • Secularisation is on the rise in the UK as many people feel that religion is false, a deception or irrelevant.
    • People believe that science consistently produces reliable evidence for its claims.
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Decline after Enlightenment

  • Belief in God began a steady decline after the nineteenth-century Enlightenment.
    • This decline has continued to gain momentum through rationalisation, secularisation and postmodernism.
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Famous Atheists

  • Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of ‘the death of God’ back in the nineteenth century.
  • Richard Dawkins, who some say is the most famous atheist today, wrote about ‘the God delusion’.
  • From a psychoanalytic perspective, Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth century also contributed to the growth of Atheism.
    • Freud claimed that belief in God or religion was a neurosis - a form of mental illness - which needed to be cured.

Jump to other topics

1Year 7

1.1Origins of Abrahamic Faith

1.2Judaism

1.3Christianity

1.4Buddhism

1.5Disciplinary Knowledge

2Year 8

3Year 9

3.1Life & Death

3.2Extremism

3.3Equality

4Additional Concepts

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