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Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says

2011-03-22 10:50:21

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas

Half-empty church In the UK, Wales has the highest proportion of religiously

"non-affiliated"

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set

for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the

number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US,

indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in

which a number of factors play a part.

One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar

model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken

world languages.

At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and

the "utility" of speaking one instead of another.

"The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation

for Science Advancement.

"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more

attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or

utility.

"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking

Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's

some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not."

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in

which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the

Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

A man fills in a census form Some of the census data the team used date from

the 19th century

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that

folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the

Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech

Republic, where the number was 60%," Dr Wiener said.

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for

the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious"

category.

They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar

across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the

mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward

extinction.

"I think it's a suggestive result," Dr Wiener said.

"It's interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those

simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going.

"Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual,

but maybe a lot of that averages out."