"The view that religious belief will give way to atheism is known as the secularization thesis. The specific version that I have described is known as the existential security hypothesis. The basic idea is that as people become more affluent, they are less worried about lacking for basic necessities, or dying early from violence or disease. In other words, they are secure in their own existence. They do not feel the need to appeal to supernatural entities to calm their fears and insecurities.
(So then that explains why upsacale churches are more "liberal" about the Bible and reject many of its teachings? Or why the upscale wings of churches rebel against their churches docrines?)
The notion that good living conditions are associated with a decline in religious belief, importance of religion, church attendance, and so forth, is supported by a mountain of evidence assembled by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their book, Sacred and Secular (1), as well as numerous more recent works (2). (It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Mark 10:25)
The most obvious approach to estimating when the world will switch over to being majority atheist is based on economic growth. This is logical because economic development is the key factor responsible for secularization. In deriving this estimate, I used the 9 most godless countries as my touchstone (excluding Estonia as a formerly communist country). The countries were Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These 9 countries averaged out at the atheist transition with exactly half of the populations disbelieving in God according to Zuckerman's compilation of data on disbelief in God in around 2004. Their gross domestic product (GDP) averaged $29,822 compared to $10,855 for the average country in the world. How long will it take before the world economy has expanded sufficiently that the GDP of the average country has caught up to the average for the godless countries in 2004?
( Iooked it up-the U.S. is higher in per GDP per capita than any of his 9 "most "godless" nations-yet the U.S. is still one of the more religious-sort of trips up his hypothesis)Using the average global growth rate of GDP for the past 30 years, of 3.33 percent (based on International Monetary Fund data from their website), the atheist transition would occur in 2035.
Belief in God is not the only relevant measure of religion, of course. A person might believe in God in a fairly superficial way without religion affecting their daily lives. One way of assessing the depth of religious commitment is to ask survey participants whether they think that religion is important in their daily lives as the Gallup Organization has done in worldwide nationally-representative surveys.
If fewer than 50 percent of the population agreed that religion was important to them, then the country has effectively crossed over to a secular majority. The godless countries by religiosity were Spain, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, Uruguay, Germany, and France. At a growth rate of 3.33 percent per year it would be 2041 before the average country in the world would be at an equivalent level of affluence as these godless nations.
If national wealth drives secularization, the global population will cross an atheist threshold where the majority see religion as unimportant in their daily lives by 2041.
Averaging across the two measures of atheism, the entire world population would cross the atheist threshold by about 2038 (average of 2035 and 2041). Although 2038 may seem improbably fast, this requires only a shift of approximately 1 percent per year whether in religiosity (0.9 percent) or belief in God (1.2 percent)." (I think he likes the idea)
Nigel Barber, evolutionary pyschologist in Psychology Today
