From Nigel Barber:
Thanks to the many people who responded to my previous post. Some comment writers put words into my mouth by suggesting that this would happen "soon." Others claimed I said that religion would disappear completely. Let me clarify these and other issues.
Worldwide, disbelief in God is around a tenth of the population according to surveys conducted around 2004 for 137 countries that remains the best estimate. Even if it were true that the other nine tenths will eventually lose their faith in God, this would take a long time.
How long? The world population continues to grow and much of the growth is in religious countries where women have larger families. Religion is thus unlikely to decline appreciably for several decades, after world population begins to decline.
In writing about atheism (strictly disbelief in God) replacing religion, I meant two things. First, at some distant point in the future, the number of believers will decline as the number of non believers increases. How far can this process go? Based on what has already happened in a handful of developed countries, mostly in Europe, it is clear that disbelief in God can become a majority opinion. So disbelief in God may replace religion as the majority view which would be a remarkable transition from the 99% of believers in underdeveloped countries.
Of course, any predictions concerning the future of belief in God are predicated on our notions of economic development. I happen to believe that economic development will continue throughout the world and that increasing prosperity will bring down birth rates of poorer countries, just as happened for developed nations.
It is not hard to imagine scenarios where this does not happen from rogue asteroids to radical global warming, and the emergence of epidemic diseases like bubonic plague, any of which that could arrest economic development and secularization.
If the world economy does continue to grow and lifts currently poor nations into prosperity, how sure can one be that the improved confidence of survival and better living conditions (i.e., existential security) will translate into higher levels of disbelief in God? My statistical analysis of this problem finds that as much as three-quarters of the country differences in disbelief are explainable in terms of existential security and control variables. This means that as such matters go we can be very sure indeed (less than one chance in 10,000 of being wrong).
To summarize, if economic development is inevitable so are increasing levels of religious disbelief.
Much is made of the U.S. as a bastion of religion but this is exaggerated. Some 13% of American adults reported in 2008 that they had no religion which is above average for the world and a further 3.5 million (or 1.5% of adults) self describe as atheist or agnostic. Another 5% of people refuse to answer the question which is three times as many as refused 20 years ago. Religious practice is also in decline based on attendance data (Norris & Inglehart, 2004, p.92) a fact is sometimes missed due to poor wording of survey questions by Gallup and others.
Some readers were offended by the notion that religion serves as a security blanket but that is seemingly more a matter of semantics and rhetoric than a real issue. After all, most religions, including Christianity promise peace of mind and it is not something to be scoffed at either considering the health impact of psychological stress.
Others contented themselves with arguing that religion is always more than just coping with uncertainty and distress. I can certainly appreciate that there are other aspects to religion including rituals, rules of conduct, ethical implications, and so forth. Yet, the moral high ground claimed by religious people is an illusion as I pointed out in detail in three previous posts.
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