Some researchers think so – at least in some countries. And they even have a mathematical model that explains their data.
The title of this blog post is in the form of a question, however, because I haven’t read their paper yet and I’m a bit skeptical – even if I’d really like their result to be true. If there’s anyone who’s knowledgeable about statistics and isn’t on a bus to an airport, please enlighten us in the comments.
Everyone else can continue to speculate wildly and come up with flashy headlines like the rest of the media.
It won’t go extinct. We still have holocaust deniers, flat earthers, and other staunchly wrong groups. No matter how sensible non-belief becomes in the mainstream, we will still have those fringe folk doing their thing.
Foe Evangelist used Outrage… Its not very effective.
If religious people were grouped together with holocaust deniers and flat earthers, it would already be enough for me.
They’re using census data, according to the article, so I wonder if it’s less a trend of increase in non-belief and more people actually declaring themselves as non-believers. If that’s the case, I think it might just level off once the data is actually more-or-less accurate and then non-belief would show the same rate of growth as any other option in the “religion” category on the census form.
I haven’t read the paper–but did read the discussion–and something that pops up is that the model was originally based on looking at the extinction of languages.However–one should note that languages require constant use or they begin to fade away/get rusty–and they require effort. Belief in a god doesn’t actually require all that much effort–it can be much more of a passive thing. Thus, you have huge segments of the population that “believe in god” but never go to church–except christmas and easter–and yet still consider themselves religious.Thus–the model may not really apply as well as the researchers think. Time will tell, but I could see some kinds of errors in application already.(perhaps I should go read the paper though..)
I’m praying for religion to just disappear…
Eradication of religion would be impossible – people will still believe things not supported because it makes them feel good. Maybe they won’t take the form of the current big three, maybe nobody in the future will believe in Jesus or Muhammad, but there will be something that could be interpreted as spiritual.But progress marches on, and if science as a whole starts to gain public support and appreciation (I like to think of it as saying to the general public “We make your computers, guys”) then there’s no reason the number of people who subscribe more to a spiritual than rational worldview shouldn’t decrease.But not vanish. And if 90% of the people in some time can say that they have no need for supernatural entities, that should be good enough.
I think the paper builds on a fallacy: equating religious belief with organized, state-recognized religion (i.e. the boxes you can tick in the census form). Religion is not going away, but it’s fragmenting into a million shards: “The Secret”, spiritism,
alternativecomplementary medicine, and yes, as MrZ points out, all sorts of conspiracy theories. The scary thing is that most adherents may not even consider themselves religious (unless they are also members of an organized religion), yet they hold these beliefs more firmly and defend them with more fervor than your average {church,mosque,synagog,temple}-going Joe.In fact, I think that religious belief is a built-in feature of our brains which very few people are able to overcome. Even atheists and skeptics can be “religious” in some areas: Yankees or Red Sox? Mac or PC? PlayStation or XBox? Coke or Pepsi? These preferences are rarely if ever based on rational decisions.In that vein, I highly recommend Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense, which argues that objectivity (and thus empirical science) is an historical anomaly.To add–the study notes about their model on the first page: “We begin by idealizing a society as partitioned into two mutually exclusive social groups, X and Y , the unaffiliated and those who adhere to a religion.”Um–that’s a kinda problematic assumption when it comes to religion. How often have I heard, “I’m not religious, I’m just spiritual” –which one could subsume under an understanding that “unaffiliatd” merely means that they don’t subscribe to any particular church–but still believe in gods and what not–but that then doesn’t necessarily lead to the “extinction” of religion so much as one of those periods where there is a lot of undifferentiated belief for a period of time… Again–the use of a “utility” model here seems suspect. Language is used because it is damn useful–and it competes for time and brainspace in most people. I speak German (I lived in Germany for 3 years) but it gets rustier and rustier the longer I don’t have need to speak it. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are far more peripheral in terms of their “usefulness”–and thus selection pressures or competition type stuff (to use crude evolutionary ideas) aren’t as harsh. This is not to say that I don’t hope that these religions die off–I think most religions are pretty stupid and that they are bad things in that they encourage hierarchical/subservient type behaviors that can easily be exploited by nasty people–but I don’t think this kind of model is all that well matched..
The study is talking about people who designate themselves and unaffiliated with any religion, which still leaves room for believe without affiliation to a major religion. However, in modern rational civilizations, religious belief is generally on the decline. But social structure and people are a funny thing. If society shifts slightly or world events move in a particular direction, religious belief could rise. However the article does point out, and I think correctly, that religion has a certain utility and social significance and as those items drop in value, the value of retaining religion drops as well.
Seriously though….any kind of news like this may help to bring out all of those closet agnostics and atheists…If there is a public awareness of there being more atheists and agnostics, it just might really catch on….it’s makes it easier to fight and expose some of the crazier sides of religion…
Religion might go extinct but something similar will crop up. Like China for example or fascism or something like that.
I love it how you’re skeptical of a paper that says that skepticism will eventually overtake religion.but yeah, it IS questionable
tricstmr’s got it right. The researchers assume that a sufficiently robust community of believers is required to sustain the religion, and that’s probably a faulty assumption. Think of secret Jews in Spain or elsewhere who lit Shabbos candles in secret for generations and without connection to a broader Jewish community. Religion does provide a utility bonus in the form of community, but it’s primarily valued by its adherents for its salvation claims and the comfort it offers them. Weakly affiliated members may drop off if the community shrinks, but I see no evidence that these researchers can accurately estimate the proportion of weak vs. committed believers.–Leah @ Unequally Yoked
See The Future of Religion : Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge http://www.ucpress.edu/book.ph…This was published 25 years ago, but I expect that the points it makes haven’t changed much. Individual religions may fade, but there are always newcomers.Sadly many of my books, including this one, went to the storage locker when we renovated our house several years ago, and haven’t made it back yet. However, Google Books has offered up page 431:”Our confidence that religion will persist follows directly from our analysis of what religion is and does, which we outline in Chapter 1. We conclude that supernatural assumptions are the only plausible source for many rewards that humans seem to desire intensely. Only the gods can assure us that suffering in this life will be compensated in the next. Indeed, only the gods can offer a next life — an escape from individual extinction. Only the gods can formulate a coherent plan for life, that is, make meaningful in a fully human way the existence of the natural world of our senses. It can be easily demonstrated that, as long as humans persist in such desires, systems of thought that posit the supernatural will always have a competitive edge over purely naturalisticmeaning systems.”An interesting point they made about cult cohesion: An individual cult member may have private doubts about the cult beliefs, but keep them private because they want to be accepted by the other members, who—they believe—fully accept those beliefs. Meanwhile, each of the other members find themselves in the same situation. Everybody plays along, each believing that they are the only doubter. Perhaps today’s increased outspokenness of non-believers will encourage more people to speak up.
Personally, I doubt religion is going to go extinct altogether. But I do expect it to become a lot less common, and theists being viewed more and more as a relic of the past. If I were to give exact numbers, I’m expecting 40% of the world population to still be theist in 2100 and 10% in 2200.
The next feed in my aggregator after Blag Hag is Cristina Rad’s blog, and she has a new article up this morning. The title is Criticizing Islam; much of it is about the difficulty of leaving Islam. Group cohesion is hard to break when the punishment for apostasy is death.The “pictures and names at the end” she refers to in her introduction are people who have publically renounced Islam.Check it out. I don’t believe you will be asking, what does she really think? :-)http://cristinarad.blogspot.co…
Drakk’s made a good point. If people have an emotional, psychological need for religion, they’ll believe whatever does the trick.Education, scientific progress, only go so far, at least for now.I’m struggling with a concept similar to Marx’s that people will overthrow the owning class and take control of the means of production. In the US, the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us is widening faster than most other countries. As people become fully aware (if they do) of how that will impact them individually, will they turn back to religion for solace or will they eventually, belatedly, rebel against the ruling class? Or are there other “opiates” than religion available now? Food, reality TV, etc., come to mind.
FFS tell me when it happens here in western Iowa!
There will sightings, like the Tasmanian Tiger, supposedly extinct ;)
It would be nice to think that religion is linked to intelligence but it is not. At its roots religion is about giving up adulthood. About not having to think about the big decisions of right & wrong, life & Death. Especially death so many are absolutely scared schiteless of death of ending self. Religion gives an answer of sorts that allows a self delusion of what is later.
flat earthers, man. flat earthers.It’s almost admirable how you can be s extremely wrong without dying.
False religion will…or watered down Christianity will, but Catholicism remains to the end of time when God Himself ushers in the final epoch. Which could be sooner than you think. Do the math. How long can you contain Islamic crazies all over the world who are getting their hands on deadlier and deadlier weapons? How soon before they detonate some massive concentration of explosives…all because of their perverse heretical version of God? And spin the world slightly off it’s axis to the destruction of all??The best calculations are in…it isn’t a matter of IF, its a matter of WHEN. Of course you atheists may beat Islam to the punch. Red China and Red Russia are ripe for the appearance of some new creative stupidity.
Doubt is part of the human condition. It is only unreasonable doubt that makes one damnable. Dont they teach you anything in school these days?For every time the fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” God has made a response.Lots of verbiage amongst the atheists. As it should be. They were always talkers, never listeners. Never thinkers, or ascenders.
I’m thinking so. I can tell you straight out that the vast majority of Australians are filling in some random Christian faction instead of ‘Other’* (or whatever our non-religious option is, I wasn’t old enough in the last one), mostly for the reason that they’re not too sure about it (or they don’t know that there’s a word for not believing in anything). In other countries, reasons vary – even though census data is more-or-less anonymous, people still think that if they fill out something differently something will happen. *: Less than 10% of the population goes to church on a weekly basis. That leaves a 90% ‘weddings-wakes’ crowd. We suck at religion.
Ah, but that doesn’t protect religion against people like me. I can innocently question specific dogma (“why would God let the Earthquake kill all of those innocent people? Why is it that people all over the world pray to God but are all sure that their religion is the correct one? Why should I pay for original sin when I’m not the one who ate the apple?) and the religious will be forced to defend their beliefs and will do a poor job at it. If I declared myself an atheist they would just stop listening, but I never do that to them. Instead, I let them assume that I’m just an inquisitive Christian. I can degrade everyone else’s faith without risking expulsion myself because I’m just “asking questions”. That is how you end religion.
Dont they teach you anything in school these days?Please enlighten me. What is it that you feel Messrs. Stark and Bainbridge are missing? Or was it something that I wrote?
I would hope that they’d turn to the democratic process. I do think that the rich have unfair advantages (they get affirmative action to college because of their parent’s donations, they can get a cushy position at their Dad’s friend’s business, ect) but the solution to this is to set the tax rate to correct for this, not have a violent revolution.
First of all, Russia is no longer Red. That ended 20 years ago. Now they are a corrupt democracy where the Russian Orthodox church is reasserting it’s power. Second of all, it is interesting to see a Fundamentalist Catholic again. Most of the “all denominations besides mine are from the devil!” crowd is Protestant. Third of all, you seem almost giddy in anticipation for mass murder. People who actually want to see the end of the world should never be put in charge of it.
I don’t think religion is heading toward extinction because it is a virus that mutates a lot. It takes a lot of time and energy to develop vaccines to prevent a person catching this virus and antidotes to treat a patient after it enters the mind.Modern science has advanced quickly enough that older forms of this virus aren’t able to damage our mind as efficiently as they did in the past, but there are just too many dumb people out there that will eat contaminated foods, especially when they are young.
Yes, we will always have irrational people, but the key is to make that percentage of the population as small as possible.
The increase of Atheism is based on three things: 1. Free speech (harder for a religion to enforce itself through force) 2. wealth (if you don’t fear starvation as much then you don’t need to have a god to comfort you) and 3. support for the scientific method (this should be self evident). If we increase these three properties around the world, religion will slowly fade. Not completely, as others have pointed out. But enough so that they lose their power.
God has made a response, huh? Funny how these responses are always things that can just as easily be explained by scientific laws. If God was real, he’d make a sign that science couldn’t match in order to be fair to those who weren’t sure about his existance. But that sign never comes.
The authors of the article made a simple dynamic feedback model which models how the % of people affiliated with a religion declines. Their model nicely fits the census data they’ve found, which means that their theoretical assumptions might be right or in the right direction. An important question is: what’s the value of their model over just drawing a line through the empirical data?The authors ask themselves the same question:”One might ask whether our model explains data better than a simple empirical curve. Logistic growth would be a reasonable null hypothesis for the observed data, but here we have provided a theoretical framework for expecting a more general growth law (1), and have shown that data suggest logistic growth as a particular case of the general law. Our framework includes a rational mathematical foundation for the observed growth law.”In other words, they offer a theory with an accompanying mathematical operationalization for the fast increase in non-religious people instead of just saying “Look, the % of non-religious people is increasing very fast.
The Daily Mash just put out an article on this very subject and its effects on religious music: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/…
They already are, in my mind.
I laughed really hard at “do the math.” Does it go something like this?religious crazies + power = destructionAnd that applies only to Islam because. . . ?
It saddens me that “This Ole Church Would Make A Pretty Good Gym Or Something” is not a real gospel music group. I’d listen to their stuff.
They do make quite a number of simplifying assumptions.The number one suspect assumption they are making is that, on a decade time scale (as opposed to timescales of several centuries, or from year to year), the variance in percentage of believers is due mostly to factors that have to do with the pre-existing number of believers. They admit as much:”Our assumption that the perceived utility of a social group remains constant may be approximately true for long stretches of time, but there may also be abrupt changes in perceived utility, a possibility that is not included in the model.”So this would discount the idea that increasing atheism since 1900 is due primarily to scientific/technological advancement or philosophical argument, or due to any change in the benefits inherent to religion or irreligion. Instead, it would be due to snowball effects, such as increased promotion of existing scientific/philosophical arguments due to an increase in total numbers of irreligious people, increase in size and number of welcoming communities that are alternatives to religion, increased ability to criticize religion and vindicate atheism, that sort of thing.This is plausible, I think, but not certain by any means. It also can’t be an accurate assumption on the century-level time scale, because a decrease in the perceived utility of religion must have happened to knock these populations away from their previous states of religious equilibria (they suggest that it is “the birth of modern secular societies” and by extension the Enlightenment that is most responsible for kicking this process off).The number two suspect assumption they make is that religion and irreligion can capitalize on increased populations in the same way. It’s this part:”We require Pxy(x; ux) = Pyx(1 – x; 1 – ux) to obtain symmetry under exchange of x and y”I actually find this rather dubious. The model they are using suggests that the effects of increased population (x) can be separated out from the utility effects in this simple multiplicative way, so that a small but appealing religious minority is equally situated to a small but appealing irreligious minority. But, in fact, it may be the case that religions are better at capitalizing upon a (regional) majority than irreligious groups are, in which case the fundamentally different social natures of religion and irreligion would come into play. There is very good evidence that conversion to religion is motivated much more strongly by social conformity than deconversion is (although one can argue that this conformity discourages deconversion at least as much as encouraging conversion, so the assumption of an approximate symmetry in the model may not be that bad after all).Thirdly, there’s also a serious problem in that different religions may have different perceived utility. As irreligion becomes more of a threat, it may apply selection pressure on religion (and vice versa, in a Red Queen sort of way). There’s therefore a strong possibility that religion may change utility substantially as it becomes a minority view and the overall balance of which religions are prominent shifts.This is part of both of the previous assumptions. This applies in a different way to religion than to atheism, and it may shift the perceived utility of religion as a whole.Fourth, they narrow the class of curves down to logistic curves (a=1). This isn’t so much a serious problem so much as a reasonable estimate they seem to have taken for convenience. It’s equivalent to a simple model from ecology; the atheist community grows by “eating” believers and making them into atheists, leveling off when there are no more believers to eat. However, it’s really just an Occam’s razor sort of argument; it’s the simplest relatively accurate model, rather than the definitely most accurate, and thus should be open to revision.
There are a few criticisms which I think cannot be leveled against this paper.1) I don’t think it’s accurate to say that they are going too far out of their way to fit these curves, or that the fits are meaningless because they are adjusting too finely. There are only two parameters being adjusted, with a third that could be potentially adjusted but which they take to be equal to one; if nothing else, they have shown that this class of curves represents the rise of irreligion quite well in a variety of cases, and with very little fine-tuning.In fact, they picked the most obvious set of curves they could possibly pick, what anyone would suspect just looking at the data and guessing. The paper is mostly devoted to trying to figure out why things seem to be following that curve, what the parameters mean, and why such a simple curve works, which are worthwhile.2) They’ve made sure that you can’t hold the effects of regional variation/isolation against them. In their model, it’s clear that geographical separation only delays the effects of change, but without changing the eventual result.3) They simply aren’t saying that religion will disappear entirely (despite the stupid news headlines). If a<1 and not a=1, even by a little bit, a community will be able to sustain itself indefinitely within their model (mainly because almost every religious person will be completely surrounded by potential converts, as opposed to in most societies where there are very few irreligious people to be converted and religious growth is limited by a low supply of nonbelievers). If their model breaks down with respect to tiny religious minorities, religion will stick around. If there’s some “noise” where people become or remain religious for very unusual reasons, there can still be religion. What they are saying is that, unless religion starts to leverage an effect that was not in play in the 20th century, the simple fact that there are a lot of religious people will not save religion from being increasingly marginalized as people continue to drop out in greater numbers than they join up.
Stuff it, moron! Your lame assertions count for nothing in the real world.
In my opinion the so called “End Time” will be caused by Christians who just can’t wait to get to heaven….They have really become aggressive in my life time with their “JESUS is the only way” BS…so while all the religions of the world slug it out (like they have been for the last couple of thousand years)…the rest of us have to suffer…
The Nasty Christian, You are the epitome of why so many people turn away from Christianity. You are an asshat. You claim to know. Claim divine right, yet you know nothing. If you actually knew what you claim to know your tongue would have a much less sharp edge. You cling to your holy text yet even it says you are not the type of person that your christ wants in heaven with him. If your god was to stop all evil in this world, he’d start by shutting your mouth. It’s not the Islamic crazies I have to worry about. It’s the pathological je$u$ crazies that are my main concern. More evil has been done by believers in your deity than all other evils put together. Your hatred, misogyny, bigotry, and mind numbing stupidity is just what is required to inflame a war that can be called Armageddon. Everyone that reads this should know that YOU are a perfect example of how NOT to be.
I know you probably won;t answer this, but are you a Poe? If you are…you’re good.