The Ups and Downs of Religion and Nonreligion

[lpetrich]

Atheism, the Computer Model – Power – Medium

After noting the widespread lack of religion in several industrialized nations and how the United States is catching up with them in "Nones",

The rise of the nones presents a compelling backdrop to the Modeling Religion Project, led by Boston University philosopher and theologian Wesley Wildman, and his counterpart at Norway’s University of Agder, LeRon Shults. The project, begun in 2015, is unique in the breadth of its effort to simulate religious trends. It’s based on computer models that incorporate anthropological, archeological, psychological, and modern demographic data related to religion. Its goal is to draw conclusions about how and why religions have formed through history, what impact they have on individual and group behavior, and how they might develop in the future. Given the ascent of non-believers in the recent past, what might the Modern Religion Project say about the future of atheism? Will we one day live in a world of nones?

This got into some efforts by Wesley Wildman, LeRon Shults, and Saikou Y. Diallo to model the "Neolithic transition" from foraging to agriculture, and to ask why religion gets involved in it.

The VMASC computers ran the model hundreds of thousands of times with different variables for the various parameters. What typically happened was at a certain point in each simulated society, the town would either coalesce or fail. Those that succeeded almost always had reached the point where religious symbols and behaviors were competing with kin as the driver of social identity and cooperation. Religious beliefs about supernatural monitoring, probably by an all-seeing god or gods with the power to punish, and rituals that connect people with their god or gods, magnified cooperation. “In our model, the agricultural transition doesn’t happen without religion, or at least is a LOT more difficult and a LOT more chancy,” Wildman wrote in an email. With religion, the transition “is more likely to happen.”

So a function of religion is to posit cosmic bogeypeople to scare people into good behavior. This is Ara Norenzayan’s "Big Gods" theory, and it was a theory popular in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Another function is to provide shared activities and shared identities, something that goes beyond kin relations. Related to that may be ways of detecting cheaters and fakers who wish to freeload. In this connection, I'm reminded of Peter Turchin's arguing that war and conflict are a good way of creating common identities, by making people unite against some shared enemy. But when those people succeed, their union becomes a victim of their success, and they often become less united and less willing to cooperate.

 

[lpetrich]

One of these researchers' computer models is the Modernity Model, a model for describing the emergence of societies with less religion in modern times, starting in the 18th cy. Societies where "noticeable numbers of people begin to contest intuitive, teleological beliefs ascribing events to some higher cause or meaning."

To get beyond the supernatural state requires a combination of factors. Resources like food and energy must be plentiful through most or all levels of society. That eliminates the need for people to ask supernatural agents to help them. Societies have to be pluralistic and value diversity, with diverse opinions that show how people with differing religious beliefs share similar structures of thought. Education has to be scientific and humanistic, and widespread. And people must have freedom to exhibit non-religious behavior and beliefs without punishment, like loss of status.

There was a premodern society that was roughly in that state: the early Roman Empire. Some philosophers considered gods to be unnecessary hypotheses, or at least something less than Universe-controlling cosmic superbeings, even if they agreed with just about everybody else that they ought to be worshipped.

This happy state collapsed as a result of the strife and civil wars of the Crisis of the Third Century, and philosophies like Neoplatonism featuring mystical revelation became popular.

In modern times, some societies have been substantially secular or even outright atheist. Communists have officially proscribed religion as the Opium of the People, though some Communist leaders have been willing to let people have their opium.

Today’s thoroughly secular (though not majority atheist) nations of Western Europe, notably in Scandinavia, also seem to fit the part of Norenzayan’s Big Gods theory that holds strong state institutions and rule of law can replace the need for an all-seeing God to keep people in line.

Or more precisely, fear of imaginary cosmic bogeypeople.

But Wildman’s models suggest religion could even return to societies like these, though for Scandinavia it would probably take a culture shock, like climate change disrupting the food supply or war inhibiting pluralism. Religious practice in China has grown from as low as 100 million people during the 1960s, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, to by some estimates more than 700 million people today. Russia, post-Soviet Union, has seen atheists fall from about 40 percent of the population to 15 percent today.

One has to distinguish between officially-imposed atheism, like Communism, and lack of religion growing from below, like in many present-day industrialized societies. Post-Communist societies have had a mixed record, with some becoming more religious, like Poland and Romania, and some staying irreligious, like eastern Germany and Czechia.

The article notes a prediction that the fraction of "Nones" may go down because of the growth of population in the poorer nations. But I think that as the people of those nations get better off, they are likely to become less religious.

 

[repoman]

Putting numbers to all of this sounds more challenging than straightforward mechanics and physics.

For some religions the adherents are sort of kin, especially for ones that don't proselytize anymore.

For the agricultural revolution, there was the real beginning of surplus. How that was divided must have been a question. Also, IIRC, the early stages of agriculture required people to work harder and longer than hunter gathering.