I actually think it's the opposite, but it's how we interpret the trend. Beneath the bluster of religions I think the underlining trend is away from religions, and religions know this and are alarmed, and so are pressing their influence wherever they can. This is what I mean about the heat religions generate distracting us from the light. Religions make a lot of noise, and it's easy to think that people are turning more and more to religion in troubled times, but I question that.

Animals are never more dangerous than when cornered.

Atheism doesn't have to serve 'reproductive fitness' whatever you think that means.

@David1955
Nothing has to. And… we don’t have to avoid extinction. The concept of reproductive fitness is a well established scientific principle, easily found on the internet. It doesn’t depend on what I think.

I think even though atheism is losing ground worldwide, it is still gaining ground among the more educated.

When I looked at the Pew research on religiosity, I immediately thought about the many third world countries where religion is growing. Like the pope many other religions understand that they have a lot better chance of growing in countries with poor economic opportunities and living conditions. Religion offers these poor people respite from their grim lives. I have often thought that one of the reasons many Christian fundamentalist religions are so opposed to birth control of any kind is because they know that children brought up in religious homes are more likely to continue that religion.

When I look around locally, it's obvious that religious families reproduce more often and both earlier and longer.

I'm fortunate to have a wide circle of Friends and I do not know anyone very well that has more than two children. I don't think it has to do with reproductive fitness but is instead the result of education (both informal and formal) and an effort to do everything possible for our offspring to be healthy and successful. I often hear religious people leaving all of those issues up to God. Fortunately for them, many of their employers are more comfortable being around religious people.

@Lorajay
It may be gaining ground among the “more” educated, and not among the “most” educated.

Evolution doesn’t depend on relative education. It depends on reproduction. If religious groups reproduce more, they pass their traits on to future generations. That’s what reproductive fitness is.

Traits (maybe a tendency to disbelieve, for example) which are carried by people who reproduce less than competing groups, are more likely to die out.

I’m not commenting here on what I think is better, just what I think the evidence shows.
Evolution doesn’t really “care” whether people are miserable or poor or educated. It “cares” greatly whether they reproduce.

@skado we seem to both agree that most religious people out breed us.

I think it's an important part of the analysis to comment on the fact that that will mean unsustainable population growth that will have many other consequences.

If we go through a worldwide famine wealthy countries (aka westernized and less religious) will out live the poorer more religious countries. So evolution is overall not a reason for religion to grow or decrease in number. Any group ideology or belief can be the reason for humans to procreate more or less, religion is not the end all be all. A group of nihilists can decide to spread their seed as much as possible (because why not?). Nihilism is not any form of religion. I think it's time to hop off this religious naturalism crap.

@Tejas
Thankfully you are free to hop as you see fit.

@Lorajay
Yes, we agree that the religious outbreed the non-religious, and that overpopulation is a critical problem. But correlation is not causation, and breeding habits are not the only part of human behavior that religion and non-religion impact.

I'm as capable as anyone of being wrong, but it appears to me that the main role religion has played in the human story is to serve as a counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch caused by the invention of agriculture. We were evolved to function in tiny, nomadic, egalitarian societies. Functioning in complex agricultural societies composed of thousands of strangers could be accomplished only by a cultural assist that curbed some of our natural instincts (thou shalt nots) and unified our sense of purpose under a single master (albeit imaginary).

Take away that counterbalance and not only do we have a dramatic reduction of population (good) we have a total collapse of civilization (not so good).

We have a very tiny needle to thread. Our desire for a civilized life is not going away - we can't put that genie back in the bottle. No one is going to opt for going back to hunting and gathering.

The thing that saved H.sapiens from extinction due to the rapid environmental changes brought on by civilization was a greatly enlarged and institutionalized religious prohibition of uncivilized behavior, and promotion of society-wide identity, purpose, and conformity.

Globalization, overpopulation, and runaway technology compromise just such a test of our species' flexibility and creativity. Yet again we need a cultural solution to an extinction-level threat that is moving too rapidly to be addressed by biological evolution. Only cultural evolution has any chance of moving so rapidly, and only the human capacity for and natural tendency toward religious adherence (in an absence of society-wide intellectual acuity) could possibly fill that bill, if even it could.

Short of a global religious consensus that population reduction is the "right" goal, I have no idea how we might avoid a population catastrophe. And I have no idea how we might continue to maintain a stable and coherent society by any means other than the one we have, so far, always used.

Thankfully (hopefully) the world of solutions is not limited to my imagination.

[pewresearch.org]

@skado I was thinking of the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Yes, the Muslim religion is growing, but in many places you either convert or die. I doubt it would be growing if people were given a choice. Sort of reminds me of how Christianity spread around the world. People were given the choice of covert or die then too. Death threats include those who leave religion too.

@snytiger6
It’s good to specify whether you’re talking about the human population or only a subset of it.

“IFs” don’t really make much difference in science. If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bike.

[pewresearch.org]

I think many of us were considering the religious in this country. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see any accounting for population growth. Of course numbers are rising in countries where those not part of the main religion are forbidden and even punished.

“Non-belief is not losing ground.”

Please cite evidence, thanks.

[pewresearch.org]

@skado The following links will take you to news articles about non-belief in the UK and other countries in Europe.

[dailymail.co.uk]

[weforum.org]

@ASTRALMAX
I’m well aware of isolated trends, thanks. But the overall picture is very different, and less well known.

@skado No, thanks.
I made a comment, not submitted a thesis.

@KKGator
No obligation. I’m just genuinely curious to understand why so many people believe that. So far, when I ask people to help me understand… no one has.

@skado I looked at the Pew research and made comments in another post. If religion is growing, we need to make sure that our offspring have tools to avoid following the crowd off the cliff.

Religious growth in the Pew prediction seems to be tied to fertility and increased population. It won't make much difference whether people are religious or not if our population worldwide keeps increasing because many people will starve to death. Famine will also instigate more wars.

@Lorajay
In order to teach our children not to follow the crowd off the cliff we first have to know which cliff images are real and which are imaginary. The problem right now is that we are practically surrounded by cliffs and cliff images, and it isn’t easy to distinguish between them.

We need to get more specific in our language, instead of lumping everything under a simple umbrella like “religion”.

It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to do on social media (where so many of us live these days). But yes, overpopulation is a threat, and nuclear proliferation, and climate change, and mass ignorance, and so many others.

But religion, from a scientific perspective, has survival benefits for our species. We need to understand those benefits, and try to remove the unnecessary and detrimental “barnacles” that have accumulated around religions, before we go heaving it wholesale into the garbage bin.

@skado you need to decipher those benefits. I do not feel like it is necessary. The benefits I've observed from religion are community, efforts to establish an ethical system and softening the natural fear of death.

I have community both here and in my non digital associations. Almost all religions have the same ethical values regarding how we treat others and I believe those values were derived from the obvious benefits to the individual as well as society. I do not fear death partially because it's it's inevitable for all of us. I've also seen in many instances that it is a benefit to the truly sick.

Are there other benefits you think religion offers?

@Lorajay
In order to see the benefits, we have to zoom out from our own, individual needs, and look at the relationship between H.sapiens and its environment.

We are a social species. Our outrageous success as a species is due mostly to our capacity to cooperate in large groups of not-exceptionally bright, or not exceptionally well-educated, or not exceptionally rich individuals - that is to say… ordinary folks.

In order for ordinary folks to cooperate with large groups of strangers there needs to be a consensus reality, and a consensus purpose.

Millions of years of evolution on the African savannas laid the genetic foundation for cooperation with kin and familiar tribe-mates numbering around 150 individuals, but not for cooperating with countless thousands of strangers.

In order to do that, we had to invent a culturally enforced and universally (society-wide) accepted imaginary reality that bound the entire society into a single tribe. Otherwise all we would have is multitudes of warring tribes.

When nomadic hunting and gathering turned to sedentary farming, the size of societies jumped from 150 to thousands to millions overnight (in evolutionary time) and we were not genetically prepared for that. So we had to compensate culturally, and the core of that compensation was religion.

The fact that a tiny minority like you and me don’t buy the imaginary reality is not particularly destabilizing to society. But what would be destabilizing would be for a sizable percentage of the population to veer from consensus reality, at which point we would lapse back into what is genetically sustainable - warring tribes of only 150 individuals.

And at that point, my comfort and yours would be disrupted by constant chaos, fear, disease and random murder - in other words, a collapse of civilization.

The fact that you and I can live just fine without a religious practice or belief is entirely dependent upon the context of a stable surrounding society. And a stable society of ordinary folks numbering in the millions is entirely dependent on their having a shared narrative that their not-exceptional intellect can grasp.

@skado the Muslim world and the Christian world is divided by sex and throughout history even though they all had a shared narrative both Muslims and Christians have fought each other.

I can understand your point about the shared narrative. The history of humankind tells me that greed and egos often ignore that shared narrative.

@Lorajay
Thats true. The fact that a solution is available does not at all guarantee we will make use of it. The prognosis is not particularly rosy.

The only choices on the menu are to try or not to try.