How many people believe in God, in Christ?
EVERY year during this season, the state — despite the Constitution’s declaration that the separation of state and church is “inviolable” — reinforces belief in God, and specifically in the Christian Jesus Christ by declaring the Church-designated Holy Thursday and Good Friday as holidays.
Most of us held beliefs in childhood fantasies like ghosts, Santa Claus, or angels. For most though, many of these ideas faded as we matured and embraced the tools of science and rationality — hallmarks of human civilization’s progress. These tools have allowed us to distinguish between myth and reality, replacing whimsical notions with evidence-based understanding.
Indeed, humanity has developed the most powerful instrument in comprehending reality and debunking myths and falsehoods that humans have invented to explain what they can’t understand and to alleviate their fears.
Science hasn’t been limited to studying matter and life; it has also been applied to understanding human society through fields like archaeology, philology, psychology, literary and textual criticism, and sociology. These social sciences have increasingly been used to examine a deeply significant aspect of human culture — religion.
Christianity
Among the world’s largest religions, Christianity — and its central figure, Jesus Christ — has come under intense scrutiny. Christian doctrine holds that Jesus’ death and resurrection saved countless humans, past, present and future, from eternal damnation. However, over the past few decades, a surge of scholarly research has challenged the foundational dogmas of what was once the Roman Empire’s official religion.
These studies earlier were confined to a small academic elite, discussed primarily within scholarly circles. However, over the last decade, hundreds of these works have been published in accessible language, thanks to the commercial publishing industry, which has turned some academics into millionaires. Notably, many of these authors were former clerics who later declared themselves atheists, or at least rejected Christianity. One professional theologian, for instance, remarked with irony that he could no longer ignore “what my God-given faculties of mind have proven false.”
In recent years, the accessibility of this research has expanded through digital platforms. Vloggers and short documentaries on YouTube have made these findings widely available, presenting complex ideas in a digestible format. Instead of spending time on entertainment platforms like Netflix or Apple TV, one can explore these revelations from the comfort of one’s couch. Two compelling documentaries to start with are “Creating Christ” and “Caesar’s Messiah,” both of which offer mind-blowing perspectives. Additionally, Dr. Richard Carrier, a prominent scholar on early Christian history, has gained attention for his work, including “On the Historicity of Jesus,” where he applies advanced mathematical logic to estimate the likelihood of Jesus Christ’s existence. His engaging presentations are also available on YouTube.
Science
But just like the phenomenon that many still think the Covid virus was fake, science has hardly made a dent on people’s belief in God and Christ.
A research that I asked the artificial intelligence app Perplexity to undertake, reported the following:
According to the Pew Research Center’s 2010 global religious landscape study, about 84 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious group, which generally implies belief in some form of deity or higher power, including God in monotheistic religions.
This includes 2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, nearly 500 million Buddhists, and others who practice folk or traditional religions. Many of these religions include belief in God or gods, though the concept of God varies widely.
Additionally, while about 16 percent of the global population is religiously unaffiliated, surveys indicate many among them still hold some belief in God or a universal spirit.
Christianity, which centers on belief in Jesus Christ as divine, accounts for about 32 percent of the global population, or roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide. This includes all major Christian denominations that affirm Jesus Christ’s divinity.
Belief
In contrast to the overwhelming belief of the general population in the existence of God, and Christians in Jesus Christ, the percentages of scientists who don’t believe in God and Christ are high, suggesting that people who are more intelligent than the average person or those who study things tend to reject the idea of divinities.
A 2016 study by the Faraday Institute on Science and Religion involving eight nations and 9,500 biologists and physicists showed gaps in belief in God between these scientists and the general population, which however was huge only in developed countries, indicating the higher level of education in these richer countries. (see chart)
A 1996 survey found that only 22 percent of physicists believe in God, making them one of the groups with the highest levels of skepticism among scientists. About 78 percent of physicists and astronomers either disbelieve or doubt God’s existence.
In another study, 29 percent of physicists were reported to believe in God, which aligns with findings that physicists are less likely to believe compared to chemists or mathematicians.
Biologists traditionally show high rates of disbelief. In 1916, 70 percent of biologists disbelieved or doubted God’s existence, and this trend has remained consistent over time.
A more recent survey found that belief in God among biologists is still relatively low compared to other disciplines, though exact numbers are not always specified.
Across all scientific disciplines: About 33 to 40 percent of scientists overall believe in a personal God. Chemists have a higher rate of belief in God at 41 percent, while mathematicians show the highest belief at 44.6 percent among physical sciences.
This could be a case of people who use science to study nature finding out that there are natural mechanisms to explain the world, rather than positing fairies as creating flowers. Most people also do not spend their time studying whether God is simply a myth, and just go about their lives believing in a deity and the comfort it gives.
On the other hand, a case could be made that scientists who have exhaustively studied nature end up believing in a God, which explains why mathematicians and physicists show the highest belief at 44.6 percent among physical scientists.
Calibration
Two reasons for these are, first, some scientists have realized there is precise calibration of fundamental physical constants, such as electromagnetism, gravity and nuclear force. This suggests to some physicists that the universe is not a product of random chance but may have been designed with purpose. Another is their realization that the concept of a beginning to the universe, as suggested by Big Bang cosmology, raises questions about what caused the universe to exist. Many physicists find it plausible that a transcendent intelligence or causative power outside physical reality initiated the cosmos. However, the celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has debunked these by narrating specific episodes in the history of science, when even top scientists concluded that God exists because of something that they couldn’t explain. Tyson called these the “God of Gaps.” These mysteries though were later explained thoroughly without having to posit the existence of God.
Tyson famously said: “God is the philosophy of ignorance, science is the philosophy of discovery.”
What makes the existence of a personal God doubtful, at least for me, is this: If God is so powerful, why do humans worship totally different Gods, why do people born in the one society (i.e., Muslim) very, very seldom get converted to the religion (e.g. Christianity) of another society? This obviously means religion is merely a social belief, not a Truth.
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How many people believe in God, in Christ?
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