This story was recently taken up by the Guardian Express and the International Business Times, whose writers were responding to a prediction in my book Why Atheism Will Replace Religion. Unfortunately these writers got the story wrong in various ways.
Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but with all plausible measures of the quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state, and more equal distribution of income. Clearly there is less of a market for religion in societies where ordinary people feel secure in their daily lives. In the most developed countries, such as Japan and Sweden, the quality of life is so good that the majority is already secular.
I never claimed that religion would disappear by 2041, only that it would lose its present majority clout. Currently about three quarters of the world’s inhabitants are religious in the sense of seeing religion as important in their lives. My estimate implies a less-than-1-percent decline per year to the 50-percent transition to minority status. At a similar pace of decline, it would take three times longer for religion to fall below 1 percent (i.e., a decline of 75 percent rather than 25 percent). On the one hand, I have no way of knowing whether religion can decline to that extent. On the other, I am on much firmer ground in predicting that the global population will switch over to majority secularism because there are several countries, from Japan to Sweden, where that has already happened.
‘Atheism to Replace Religion by 2041’: A Clarification
by Nigel Barber
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-barber/atheism-to-replace-religion-by-2041-a-clarification_b_3695658.html
This story was recently taken up by the Guardian Express and the International Business Times, whose writers were responding to a prediction in my book Why Atheism Will Replace Religion. Unfortunately these writers got the story wrong in various ways. I want to correct some of their errors and clarify the actual claim.
The Correction
The Las Vegas Guardian Express writer, Rebecca Savastio, falsely attributes to me the claim that religion “will completely disappear by 2041.” What I do project is that religious people will be a minority by that date, which is a very different prediction.
Writing for the International Business Times, Conor Adams Sheets editorializes that “it is quite a leap in logic to suggest that rising financial security will lead inexorably to a rejection of religion.” His rationale, apparently, is that some “thought leaders” have expressed a different opinion.
Yet the data on this issue could not be clearer. Given what we now know about the predictive relationship between economic development and rising secularism, it is perversely illogical to argue that “religious beliefs will enjoy a resurgence as the world continues to develop.” Numerous empirical studies point in exactly the opposite direction.
Given the strength of the data, the claim that religious belief will increase with economic development is as much of a logical stretch as claiming that although short people weigh less than tall people today, they will magically weigh more in the near future. Tall people are clearly heavier on average, and developed countries are clearly more secular today. The same correlations will hold up in the future. So let’s wake up to the facts.
The Clarification
Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but with all plausible measures of the quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state, and more equal distribution of income. Clearly there is less of a market for religion in societies where ordinary people feel secure in their daily lives. In the most developed countries, such as Japan and Sweden, the quality of life is so good that the majority is already secular.
In my book I asked how long it would take for the average country in the world to reach a similar level of development as countries that already have secular majorities. This transition was measured either as a minority believing in God or a minority seeing religion as important. The average rate of economic development was assessed both in terms of GDP (corrected for local prices, PPP) and the human development index (HDI), which includes health and education as well as GDP. So I calculated four estimates of when the average country in the world is likely to transition to a secular majority, and the average estimate was 2041. The more reliable HDI method predicts an earlier transition than does GDP alone.
All such extrapolation is notoriously risky, of course, and all bets would be off if the world fell into a 20-year depression (as it currently shows no sign of doing, already recovering to trend growth levels following the 2009 downturn). Ditto for a major asteroid collision, or a catastrophic failure of Earth’s ecosystem.
The argument that religious people will outreproduce their secular neighbors is intriguing but ultimately flawed, because development reduces fertility for everyone, as illustrated by contemporary American Mormons, and by Ireland, which is newly secular and newly wealthy.
Will Religion Ever Disappear?
I never claimed that religion would disappear by 2041, only that it would lose its present majority clout. Currently about three quarters of the world’s inhabitants are religious in the sense of seeing religion as important in their lives. My estimate implies a less-than-1-percent decline per year to the 50-percent transition to minority status. At a similar pace of decline, it would take three times longer for religion to fall below 1 percent (i.e., a decline of 75 percent rather than 25 percent). On the one hand, I have no way of knowing whether religion can decline to that extent. On the other, I am on much firmer ground in predicting that the global population will switch over to majority secularism because there are several countries, from Japan to Sweden, where that has already happened.
The Human Beast
Why we do what we do
by Nigel Barber
Why Atheism Will Replace Religion
Why atheism grows faster than religion
by Nigel Barber
Psychology Today
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201005/why-atheism-will-replace-religion
Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe (Barber, 2012). In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?
First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.
The question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence (see my earlier post on this).
Atheists are more likely to be college-educated people who live in cities and they are highly concentrated in the social democracies of Europe. Atheism thus blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure. But why?
It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion.
In addition to being the opium of the people (as Karl Marx contemptuously phrased it), religion may also promote fertility, particularly by promoting marriage, according to copious data reviewed by Sanderson (2008). Large families are preferred in agricultural countries as a source of free labor. In developed “atheist” countries, women have exceptionally small families and do not need religion helping them to raise large families.
Even the psychological functions of religion face stiff competition today. In modern societies, when people experience psychological difficulties they turn to their doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. They want a scientific fix and prefer the real psychotropic medicines dished out by physicians to the metaphorical opiates offered by religion.
Moreover, sport psychologists find that sports spectatorship provides much the same kind of social, and spiritual, benefits as people obtain from church membership. In a previous post, I made the case that sports is replacing religion. Precisely the same argument can be made for other forms of entertainment with which spectators become deeply involved. Indeed, religion is striking back by trying to compete in popular media, such as televangelism and Christian rock and by hosting live secular entertainment in church.
The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people’s daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.
References
Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook/dp/B00886ZSJ6/
The Human Beast
Why we do what we do
by Nigel Barber
The Real Reason Atheists Have Higher IQs
Is atheism a sign of intelligence?
by Nigel Barber
Psychology Today
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201005/the-real-reason-atheists-have-higher-iqs
Recent posts have proposed convoluted theories accounting for why atheists score higher on IQ tests than religious people. There is a much simpler explanation. Like a lot of correlations of this type, it is probably less exciting than it appears.
Atheists are probably more intelligent than religious people because they benefit from many social conditions that happen to be correlated with loss of religious belief. When one looks at this phenomenon from the point of view of comparisons between countries, it is not hard to figure out possible reasons that more intelligent countries have more atheists as Richard Lynn (2009) reported.
Here are some. Highly religious countries (Barber, 2012):
･ Are poorer.
･ They are less urbanized.
･ Have lower levels of education.
･ They have less exposure to electronic media that increase intelligence (Barber, 2006).
･ Experience a heavier load of infectious diseases that impair brain function.
･ Suffer more from low birth weights.
･ Have worse child nutrition.
･ Do a poor job of controlling environmental pollutants such as lead that reduce IQ.
Given that each of these factors are recognized causes of low IQ scores (Barber 2005), there is little mystery about why religious countries score lower on IQ tests. Of course, the same phenomena are relevant to comparisons within a country, although within-country differences in these factors are generally smaller. Even so, the wealthier individuals in a country experience life differently than the poorer ones, developing higher IQ scores and greater religious skepticism.
As to the more exciting explanations, I doubt that religion causes stupidity if only because some of the most brilliant people of history, such as Isaac Newton, were highly religious like most of their contemporaries.
Whether intelligence causes people to reject religious belief is more complex. It is certainly plausible that highly intelligent people would have a problem accepting some of the more improbable beliefs required by their church Moreover, modern science offers explanations for phenomena that were previously explained in terms of religion and intelligent people may prefer the scientific account..
In short, discussing correlations between IQ and religiosity without a grasp of the relevant underlying factors is something of a parlor game. It recalls the long and tiresome debate about the correlation between IQ scores and skin color that got a lot of people very excited but proved a scientific dead end.
The really interesting question buried in all of this is why atheism is sparked uniquely by contemporary conditions in developed countries. I will return to this in a future post
References:
Barber, N. (2005). Educational and ecological correlates of IQ: A cross-national investigation. Intelligence, 33, 273-284.
Barber, N. (2006). Is the effect of national wealth on academic achievement mediated by mass media and computers? Cross-Cultural Research, 40, 130-151.
Barber, N. (2012). Why atheism will replace religion: The triumph of earthly pleasures over pie in the sky. E-book, available at: http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook/dp/B00886ZSJ6/
Lynn, R., Harvey, J., & Nyborg, H. (2009). Intelligence predicts atheism across 137 nations. Intelligence, 37, 11-15.