How Many People in the World Believe in God?

The short answer to this question is, usually not a lot. Because people who respond to surveys often lack the patience to read through a long question, researchers tend to use the smallest number of words they can, such as, "Do you believe in God?" or "In your opinion, does God exist?" The trouble with such questions is their lack of specificity. They are inherently ambiguous.

In reporting its results from a survey within the pasts ten years, one well-known organization that also asks whether the person believes in heaven, a devil, or angels, reported, "More than 9 in 10 Americans still say 'yes' when asked the basic question 'Do you believe in God?'; this is down only slightly from the 1940s, when [we] first asked this question." Such approaches to the study of belief are common.

Yet, a person who believes any of the following statements might answer yes. God is . . .

  • though not a person, the universal spirit behind existence

  • everything . . . and everything is God

  • appears every night and tells me to do things

  • a synonym for goodness

  • created the world and turned its future over to humankind

  • a western word for many gods

  • an eternal, uncreated, benevolent, and conscious being who created everything else

  • ethically good but unwilling or unable to prevent human barbarity

  • an uncaring sinister creator who waits to see if humanity destroys itself

Other surveys, instead of asking for yes-or-no answers, prompt the person to indicate how much he or she agrees with sets of statements. This still doesn't solve the problem of ambiguity, however, of what the words in the questions actually mean to the person responding.

It is possible to ask a series of questions that, together, get at what the person means by God, but these are comparatively rare, in part because, to do such surveys well, they are costly. And, because the results can be complicated and nuanced, they rarely produce the sort of conclusion that make for good soundbites on the evening news. As an example of such complexity, a good number of people who claim to be atheists also say they believe in God or at least in a universal spirit.