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Religion may become extinct in nine nations

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#81

Post by tokenadult »

sigzero wrote: post #60
TamDenholm wrote: post #58

I've always thought religion would become less and less prevalent. Being non-religious was extremely rare before evolution was discovered and now its growing in popularity since we now know more, i think that trend will continue. Evolution has had about 150 years, religion has had multiple thousands of years. In my opinion its just a matter of time before religious belief becomes a minority everywhere.

What do we know? That one species can evolve into another? Never been remotely proven. That one species can adapt itself to its surrounding. Sure that happens. It doesn't change its species though. "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened.

"Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened.

Carefully read all the evidence here

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

and report back to us after you have pondered the cited sources and digested what they say.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#82

Post by a-priori »

bsandbox wrote: post #29

I'm unaware of any collection of humans in history that did not practice some form of religion. I suspect that religion will become extinct only when we humans do too.

You're right that religion seems to be a human universal. I believe that every human population ever studied practices it in some form or another.

But, what may be declining is not religion per se, but rather monotheism. Zoroastrianism, one of the first monotheistic religions, emerged only in the 2nd century BCE. For the entirety of human history before that, about 200 millennia, humans practiced some form of nature worship, ancestor worship or polytheism.

It may be that the age of monotheism is coming to an end, but what comes next is anyone's guess.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#83

Post by ranprieur »

As far as I can tell, they're defining "religious" as people claiming to be religious, and "non-religious" as people claiming no religious affiliation. So they're assuming that everyone means the same thing by the word "religion", and that these people's unspoken definition is a useful concept.

Atheists like to talk about the harm done by "religion". But this harm might be done by deeper habits of thinking that will persist in people who identify in surveys as "non-religious".

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#84

Post by winestock »

gcheong wrote: post #78
winestock wrote: post #5

Religion isn't the only thing becoming extinct in those nations. Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X " where X is a nation from the list given in the above-linked article: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. (Nation/ Total Fertility Rate) (Australia/ 1.97) (Austria/ 1.41) (Canada/ 1.58) (Czech Republic/ 1.49) (Finland/ 1.85) (Irela…

"Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive." I think you're missing that population control within available resource constraints is also part of the fitness equation. Also it's very likely that population expansion or contraction is more cyclical over the long term than a two year period of data would show.

Biology isn't my strong suit, so I hope that I'm not misunderstanding you, but wouldn't your statement imply selection at the group level?

Additionally, although the figures I quoted were over a two-year figure, they exemplify a larger trend. For example, the Wikipedia article on Australia's demographics show that Australia hasn't had replacement level fertility since 1975.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#86

Post by dantheman »

winestock wrote: post #80
steadicat wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to show some numbers to support your argument? Here: Nation Total Fertility Rate ------------------------------------ Iceland 2.14 * Ireland 2.10 * New Zealand 2.10 USA 2.01 Norway 1.98 * Australia 1.97 France 1.97 UK 1.96 Turkey 1.92 * Finland 1.85 Denmark 1.74 Luxembourg 1.70 Sweden 1.67 * Netherlands 1.66 Belgium 1.65 Estonia 1.63 * Canada 1.58 Greece 1.50 * Czech Republic 1.49 Portugal 1.49 Spain 1.47 * Swit…

The number for Iceland is the only one that surprises me. The rest exemplify the general trend in the West in modern times: religion has been on the wane and irreligious people are not as interested in baby-making as religious believers. Let's not get fooled by reputations. We may think of Spain, Portugal, and Italy as being very religious countries, but the Catholic Church more or less gave up trying to do its job s…

Don't confuse correlation with causation - less interest in baby-making could be due to:

* better education * higher income

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#88

Post by gcheong »

winestock wrote: post #84
gcheong wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive." I think you're missing that population control within available resource constraints is also part of the fitness equation. Also it's very likely that population expansion or contraction is more cyclical over the long term than a two year period of data would show.

Biology isn't my strong suit, so I hope that I'm not misunderstanding you, but wouldn't your statement imply selection at the group level? Additionally, although the figures I quoted were over a two-year figure, they exemplify a larger trend. For example, the Wikipedia article on Australia's demographics show that Australia hasn't had replacement level fertility since 1975.

My statement really should have been worded as a question as biology, admittedly, it is not my strong suit either so I won't attempt to address your question but hope that someone with a better understanding will chime in here.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#89

Post by bermanoid »

sigzero wrote: post #60
TamDenholm wrote: post #58

I've always thought religion would become less and less prevalent. Being non-religious was extremely rare before evolution was discovered and now its growing in popularity since we now know more, i think that trend will continue. Evolution has had about 150 years, religion has had multiple thousands of years. In my opinion its just a matter of time before religious belief becomes a minority everywhere.

What do we know? That one species can evolve into another? Never been remotely proven. That one species can adapt itself to its surrounding. Sure that happens. It doesn't change its species though. "Macro" evolution just doesn't happen nor can it be proven to have happened.

Even assuming your claims were true, what, are we supposed to accept the religious explanation as more plausible? Because not only has that never been proven, it's a lot harder to swallow in the first place, which means we should expect even more evidence that it's true before we take it seriously.

And besides. It's pretty much rock solid that one species can evolve into another, or at least that multiple current species sprang from single earlier species. When you look at genetic data across living things, the signs of a tree-like structure are absolutely fucking unmistakable.

Sure, it's not a trivial problem to actually extract the entire tree of life (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics - the difficulty is that we only get to touch DNA from the leaves of the tree, and we have to infer the rest), but the tools biologists use are more than powerful enough to distinguish a set of leaves that likely came from an underlying but hidden tree structure from "leaves" that came about in some other way. I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but IIRC from conversations I've had with bioinformatics folks the confidence levels are extremely high, the only debate is over which particular tree should be inferred from a given set of leaves.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#90

Post by Someone »

I found it weird that they claim to have used census data from the Netherlands. The last census in the Netherlands was 40 years ago (http://www.volkstellingen.nl/en/) I would hope they used other sources (data from the CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) would be the primary candidate)
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