A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say its researchers. The data was fed into the team’s mathematical model in an attempt to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. Their means of analysing the data invokes what is known as nonlinear dynamics – a mathematical approach that has been used to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.

Census data stretching back as far as a century from these countries were used: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Dr Wiener of the the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona explains:

“In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%. Our theory 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.”

In other words, the more people join Michael Stipe in “losing their religion”, the more other people will also do it.

Dr Wiener did however say that the team was “working to update the model with a network structure more representative of the one at work in the world.”

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society. But I do believe this is a suggestive result.”

[Source: BBC News]