Statistics & Reasons
Religious Studies: KS3, topic 4.1.1
Statistics & Reasons
The UK has seen significant growth in non-religious people, with declining belief in God.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Test yourself on Statistics & Reasons
How much of the UK population claim to believe in God, gods or any type of deity?