Daily Mail: Is religion about to die out?...

The Daily Mail is not often right. So I am always interested when such headlines as this:

Is religion about to die out? Growing wealth is causing belief in moralising gods to decline - and it could make it vanish entirely

are offered. It states:

According to evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, affluence causes humans to switch to a slower lifestyle where they have babies later and fewer children.

Around 2,500 years ago it was just the elite members of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean who adopted this lifestyle.

The rest of the population, however, continued to live fast and die young, which left the wealthier people at a competitive disadvantage from an evolutionary perspective, explained Dr Baumard.

As a result the elite promoted moralising gods as a way to ensure the more sexually active and aggressive general populous did not usurp them.

But now, as affluence becomes more ubiquitous around the world, this could ultimately lead to the downfall of moralising religions too, Dr Baumard wrote in New Scientist.

He said: 'As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so.

'If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.'

Most anthropologists have suggested moralising religions emerged as a way to help groups of humans co-operate together on large scales by providing a set of rules they could abide by.

They argue this social glue helped to ensure everyone pulled their weight and did not cheat.

The academics quoted in the paper claims that the rise in moralising religion correlates with the amount of energy consumed. The more consumed, the different the psychological approach to life. This increase in consumption led to a more stable and predictable lifestyle led by the elite (consumers) where the poorer in such societies lived fast. Such fast living needed controlling, eventually successfully done by slow moralising that promised immense punishments and rewards (see today's post for the effects of such).

The summary of the paper is as follows:

Highlights•World religions can all trace their origins back to the Axial Age (500–300 BCE)•Historical data report an exceptional uptake in affluence during the Axial Age•Modeling shows that affluence can account for the emergence of axial religions•Several causal pathways are suggested (literacy, urban life, life history theory)

SummaryBackground  Between roughly 500 BCE and 300 BCE, three distinct regions, the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley, saw the emergence of highly similar religious traditions with an unprecedented emphasis on self-discipline and asceticism and with “otherworldly,” often moralizing, doctrines, including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism, with later offshoots, such as Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. This cultural convergence, often called the “Axial Age,” presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (a proxy for general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions.Results  Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.Conclusions  We discussed several possible causal pathways, including the development of literacy and urban life, and put forward the idea, inspired by life history theory, that absolute affluence would have impacted human motivation and reward systems, nudging people away from short-term strategies (resource acquisition and coercive interactions) and promoting long-term strategies (self-control techniques and cooperative interactions).

The conclusion that the Daily Mail seems to make is that as general levels of affluence increase more widely across societies, then the need to have moralising religions, when looking from a  macro-level point of view, is less pertinent. Thus, in the Western world, as described in terms of great affluence, religions are in decline.

However, of course, this is not necessarily the case for the world at large - the non-religious proportion of the world could be looking towards a decline,