When you don’t find any

The Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association commissioned a survey on religion. For people who don’t want to read the survey report (in PDF, in Icelandic), there’s a story at Iceland Magazine. The main point is in the headline: 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world, new poll reveals.

That’s a pretty strong claim, so what did the survey actually do? Well, here you do need to read the survey report (or at least feed snippets of it to Google Translate). Of the people they sampled, 109 were in the lowest age category, which is ‘younger than 25’.  None of the 109  reported believing “God created the world” vs “The world was created in the Big Bang”.

Now, that’s not a completely clean pair of alternatives, since a fair number of people — the Pope, for example — say they believe both, but it’s still informative to some extent. So what can we say about sampling uncertainty?

A handy trick for situations like this one is the ‘rule of 3’.  If you ask N people and none of them is a creationist, a 95% confidence upper bound for the population proportion is 3/N. So, “fewer than 3% of Icelanders under 25 believe God created the world”