General

0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world

Icelandmag, May 18, 2016.
Iceland
seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation,
according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are
religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. 
Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the
creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25
believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no
opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other
means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.

The
poll
, which was conducted by the polling firm Maskína on behalf
of Siðmennt, The
Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association
, an association of
Icelandic atheists, found that 46.4% of Icelanders identify as
religious, which is the lowest figure to date.



Younger people and inhabitants
of Reykjavík are least religious

Older people are far more likely to
profess religious beliefs and to identify as Christian than those who
are younger. 80.6% of those older than 55 identified as Christian and
only 11.8% said they were atheists. At the same time 40.5% of people
who were 25 years or younger said they were atheists, and only 42%
said they were Christian. 

Traditional Christian beliefs also seem
more common outside of Reykjavík, where 77-90% of people identified
as Christian and 7.1-18 were atheists, compared to 56.2% of people in
Reykjavík who identified as Christian and 31.4% as atheist.



0.0% of people younger than 25
believe God created the world




The poll found an even more dramatic
difference between different generations when it probed how people
believed the world had been created. Of those younger than 25 93.9%
said the world had been created in the big bang and 0.0% believed God
had created the world. 77.7% of those between 25 and 44 years old
believed the world had been created in the big bang and 10.1%
believed God had created the world. In all but the oldest age
category a majority accepted the big-bang theory. 

Only 46.1% of those
older than 55 believed in the big bang, and nearly a fourth, 24.5%
believed God had created the world.


People in the oldest category were
also most unsure about the origins of existence, as 16.6% of those
older than 55 saying they either didn’t know or had no opinion on
the origin of the world.



Growing support for separation
of Church and State

 

The
poll also found a growing percentage of Icelanders support the full
separation of church and state. Out of those who expressed an opinion
on the subject 72% supported the full separation of church and state
and 28% oppose the separation of church and state. 

Currently the
Icelandic constitution stipulates that the state church of Iceland is
the Icelandic Evangelical Lutheran Church.