Religion set for extinction in the West: Study

A study using a mathematical model has shown that religion is set to become extinct in nine Western-style democracies, as there is a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

A team of researchers took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

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 showed that religion will all but die out in those countries.

Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

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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," the BBC quoted Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, as saying.

"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," he said.

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion," Wiener said.

"In the Netherlands the number was 40 percent, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60 percent," he stated.

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. 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," Wiener said.

"Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out," he added.

The findings were reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US.