Quick: do you think that the future will be more or less religious?
Robert Rowthorn, an emeritus professor of economics, likened religion as a gene (after all, you are most likely to "inherit" your parents' religion) and came to an interesting conclusion:
Rowthorn’s model shows that, even when the religious defection rate is high, the overall high fertility rate of religious people will cause the religiosity allele to eventually predominate the global society. The model shows that the wide gap in fertility rates could have a significant genetic effect in just a few generations. The model predicts that the religious fraction of the population will eventually stabilize at less than 100%, and there will remain a possibly large percentage of secular individuals. But nearly all of the secular population will still carry the religious allele, since high defection rates will spread the religious allele to secular society when defectors have children with a secular partner. Overall, nearly all of the population will have a genetic predisposition toward religion, although some or many of these individuals will lead secular lives, Rowthorn concluded.
That poll has been found to be flawed, possibly severely.
If he wants to just say it will happen that's fine, but he brought science into it
It does seem to be true that religious people have more children than non-religious people. Children tend to do what their adults do, and so therefore most people will tend to be religious. However I think this has already happened and the basic ratio has been the same since the beginning of eternity.
Religion in general is more an idea that everything is somehow good than anything. It makes sense to me that people who believe the universe is basically good would want to introduce more conscious entities into it compared to those who don't see it as basically good.
That's not to say that a person has to be 'obviously religious' to think everything is good.. but most people seem to like to hang around in groups where they feel everyone believes basically the same rules.
As far as why children of religious parents would decide to be non-religious, I imagine the universe wants to keep things interesting :)
As for his belief that actual genes are involved in the process of belief, that too is not a new one.
But there is a problem with how he projects that into the future. He says, "studies have shown that, even controlling for income and education, people who are more religious have more children, on average, than people who are secular" which is true, but that doesn't mean religious people will overrun the world. Adherence to religion has been shown to be inversely linked with education.
If education wasn't in the picture then the number of religious adherents might grow, but as access to education increases and the average level of education goes up, the number of religious people will go down.
I really hope this study is wrong. Religion ruins everything.
Suppose religiosity is inherited. Ancient civilizations were all very religious. Hence we, their descendants, would also be religious. But many modern countries are very secular. Where did all that secularity come from? Surely it can't be genes. That makes no sense.
More likely the reason modern countries are more secular is that they are more urban. When you live off the land, you are in intimate contact with nature, which is more powerful than you and serves as something onto which you can project your religious instincts. When you live in a city, your world is man-made, and you lose the feeling that something non-human controls your life. There's no place to put your religious instincts.
And let's not forget Nietzsche, who said "God is dead" and also said "we ourselves have killed Him." He meant that Christianity's call to "know the Truth" gave birth to science and scepticism, which in turn undermined Christian faith.
Using materialist explanations (like genetics) for psychological, social and spiritual phenomena is bound to produce absurdities like this one.
Alejo