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Permalink Reply by Bill Butler on December 9, 2011 at 7:03am

It will take centuries at least religion is far too ingrained to be quickly discarded just look at how things stand today with world wide media and connectivity this has helped raise awareness and spread the message but still millions ignore the evidence and embrace faith.  We will be stuck with a religious majority for a long time to come because people like easy answers and what is more simple than God did it. 

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Permalink Reply by Rich on December 9, 2011 at 11:00am

I hear ya fella. It aint no wonder I dont wanna have kids.

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Permalink Reply by LUCIANO DOMENICO on December 9, 2011 at 7:40am

maybe with the ascension of the concept of " Green God"  (the idea that respecting the nature and preserve it constitue a new form of superior morel and social contract) we have a change in the paradigm of what is sacred, and what is to be " saved" .. Well, we wont be free of religions, but maybe we we' ll have a harmless paradigm..

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Permalink Reply by Sal Khan on December 9, 2011 at 7:45am

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197

The link above shows how maths and science have been used to predict the end of religion in certain countries. Pretty interesting. In my opinion, as long as the US is a super power religion will thrive. Obviously in Britain Secularism and Atheism is more widely accepted but even here it's going to take a while to become mainstream. 

I imagine many peoples fear of the unknown and death will ultimately allow religion to linger on for a good while longer. But I hope the influence of religion in all aspects of life in the west will disappear within a century or so.

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Permalink Reply by Rich on December 9, 2011 at 11:01am

So what you are saying is, Americans are idiots? lol. (im joking, before the senso's start)

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Permalink Reply by Sal Khan on December 9, 2011 at 11:11am

Aha I'm not that harsh lol. 40% of them believe in creationism ... That's a lot lol. I imagine the main problem with Americas religious population is that it's so damn big! 

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Permalink Reply by Jared on December 9, 2011 at 12:17pm

Yeah and if we even really were able to look into the minds of that 40% I would bet that a good chunk really deep down know its bullshit and they just ignore that little voice in their heads telling them this god stuff is silly. The scary ones are the people that really do believe in it all and don't question it at all like with the people in that Westboro Baptist Church.

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Permalink Reply by Stutz on December 9, 2011 at 9:01pm

You're right about the religious population, Sal: the problem with the US is not so much that Americans are stupid, but that there are so many stupid Americans. The minority of open-minded, educated Americans are the equal of any people anywhere.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on December 9, 2011 at 11:30am

You have to consider our evolved cognitive mechanisms when answering this question. It's never just going to be about the penetration of math and science into the typical citizens mindset. Religion, and superstitious thinking in general, it's natural. We evolved to be pattern seekers. We find them when they're not actually there. We evolved to see agency. Sometimes we see agency when it's not there. We evolved to have a theory of mind. So it's natural for us to see a pattern where none exists, attribute to it agency, and then grant it a mind like ours. So if you're talking about a truly religion free world, not just a world where religion is a tiny minority view existing at the margins, then it would mean we'd have to evolve away from patternicity and agenticity. But that seems far-fetched in the extreme. (Theory of mind is so critical to the way we think and interact with each other that it's simply not candidate at all.)

If, on the other hand, all you mean is when is religion going to be a minority view existing at the margins of society. I would think that if current trends hold you're talking about maybe in the next 1 to 2 hundred years or so. But if our reliance on science increases and the speed at which we make scientific discoveries increases, if perhaps we find the Theory of Everything and it puts the universe in a new perspective, if we discover intelligent alien life, if we end up being able to download our consciousness into a computer; if things like that happen then it could be much faster. But then there's always the chance that religion could undergo a resurgence. It's certainly happened before.

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Permalink Reply by Rich on December 9, 2011 at 12:26pm

I think even if we find that 'Theory of everything' its still not gonna convince the true believers. 

Most intelligent species on earth.....its embarrassing really.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on December 9, 2011 at 12:48pm

Well, but I didn't say it would. I just said that that might be one of the things that would accelerate the process of society arriving at a point where religion was a minority viewpoint at the margins, not that it would be a factor in convincing everyone. :)

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Permalink Reply by Stutz on December 9, 2011 at 8:57pm

I don't think that pattern seeking, agency, and theory of mind make religion inevitable, even if it's a small minority view. Superstitious thought, perhaps. "How far are we from a religion-free world?" is a different question than "How far are we from a world where everyone has a materialist, scientific mindset?" The latter world is far-fetched in the extreme, I agree, but the former might not be so outlandish. As an interconnected world culture evolves over the next few centuries, I think it's reasonably likely that something like a general consensus that the supernatural is bunk and that religion is a relic of the past could easily arise. That sort of general consensus already exists in the scientific community and other scholarly communities, as well as (to a lesser extent) among the educated youth and internet cultures. Not to mention the fact that many western European countries and Japan are nearly atheistic nations already. Despite that consensus, there will always be some kind of superstitious/supernatural thinking now and then, but the major world faiths could certainly go as extinct as all the other dead religions of history.

I think it could surprise us how quickly opinions could change under certain circumstances. I'm reading a book about Lincoln right now, and at the start of the Civil War, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation would have been political suicide even in the North. But as the issue was debated and the war dragged on, the mood of the people changed, and the Proclamation surprised everyone by garnering near-universal, enthusiastic support in the North. Thereafter slavery was seen as a great moral evil to be eradicated, instead of an unfortunate economic reality that ought to be confined to the Southern states.

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