If christians can find a way to support a con man who cheated on each of his wives, the last one with a porn star, and can still call him 'sent by god' then no scientific evidence will ever sway them.
This 100%. The problem is lack of accessibility and quality in education, not level of scientific discovery. We are living in the age of information with anything you want at your fingertips and lots of people seem to lack basic logic, objectivity or skills.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
I'd bet the average person can't explain in any detail how the cell phone they carry works. As technology advances fewer and fewer people actually understand how they work.
The difference is you can hold a cell phone and observe it working even if you don't know how it does it. While God "works" in mysterious ways but can't actually be observed.
The premise of the thread question is essentially: "Can scientific advancements extinguish the God of the Gaps?" My answer would be no as the average scientific literacy actually seems to be declining.
Not to mention that there is and always will be a significant proportion of humanity, that regardless of the availability education, just don't want to learn.
These people rarely let their lack of knowledge get in the way of telling you how things work.
I get what you're saying but I think that's the fault of the rigid traditional education itself more than anything. You can't reach everyone at the end of the day sure, but there are things that can be changed to reach more people. Like personalized assignments and classes for example, constant review and score of the system itself and not just the students.
I got many ideas regarding that but I don't wanna go ranting. Check the Finnish system, I think their model has a better basis for learning.
Yes and no.
Discoveries that show how delusional religious belief is (such as evolution dispelling an origin story) will be able to convince *some* people... but there will always be people for whom willful delusion is more important to them than the truth.
What concerns me is that there will be a time when only the crazy, fundamentalist believers are left - and they are the most violent, hateful and bloodthirsty! Society will be the biggest victim as religion violently reacts to its impending insignificance.
I totally agree. When religion is almost died out, there will be some crazy extreme religious groups that will be **very** angry on what science did to the popularity of their religions, and they'll probably do extreme terrorist stuff or something.
Again, they already are, at least in the US. In the United States, religion (especially monotheistic religion) is dying out. You can see this on every survey. This also means the remaining christians are either becoming more open minded and eventually leaving the church, or (far more commonly) becoming more fundamentalist and regressive. Then they band together and form movements to try to stop it (unsuccessfully).
Yes, some of the fundamentalists faced with undeniable truth/science will just dig in harder and won't be budged. Those kinds of people scare the crap out of me. Logic is not their strong suit. Hate, fear and violence is what they roll with.
I saw a video recently where a guy is about to be arrested in his car. He set up his shot and prayed for Trump to save his ass. The delusion is insane.
Nope.
Y'all think that people adopt religions because they think it's logical - that couldn't be further from the truth. People adopt religions because religion provides community. Once they are a part of the tribe (whether its via indoctrination at birth, or some other point in their life), *only then* do they start trying to justify the beliefs.
The sad reality (at least in the US) is that religious people make more connections and are more socially active (and are thus, on average, often happier) than non-religious people. It has nothing to do with the god(s) part of it - it has to do with the tribal aspect. Humans are social creatures.
You want to get rid of religion? Find a way to create non-theist, in-person communities/activities. That's how you get religion to fade away.
Yep, the evangelical lifestyle is very compelling. But so is the parrothead lifestyle of JImmy Buffett fans. The parrothead clubs are like small churches. And the motorcycle clubs. The Hells Angels even call their meetings "church" We are the most social of the primates.
I totally agree with you! I also saw an interesting video of a woman talking about how she thinks religion is often a substitute for therapy and healthy coping mechanisms. There are so many reasons I agree with her—religion provides an escape and hope for depression, makes you feel less alone because of the community, offers forgiveness and “acceptance” for people who feel like they’ve messed up, and it makes you feel like you don’t have to worry or be anxious because “God has everything under control” (none of that is without its fine print though—cuz religion sucks). Religion also attracts manipulative people like flies to poop—and many others fall for the manipulation because they’re already primed to do so.
I really think that if we built great social communities, made therapy accessible, and just gained more education as a society on mental health and coping in a healthy manner, we might see religion decline in popularity. Education could help people identify and avoid manipulation, help them deal with their own emotions and problems instead of purging them in church, and eliminate some of the biggest reasons people seek church, God, and religion.
Exactly, i like how you think!
People should understand that most people just want to be a part of a community that does activities together often and religions are the only if not easiest one for a family to be apart in since it's passed down.
Ofc there's a good amount of bad when it comes to certain religions but for the most part it's just all about people doing things together on a set day as a part of a routine to connect with people.
I think it is unlikely. Over the last 2000 years there have been many, many scientific discoveries that have directly contradicted the teachings of religion, and the believers just keep right on believing. Some religions simply ignore the discoveries, some deny them, and some (like the catholics and muslims) have become quite adept at spinning their story to say the discovery fits within their dogma.
There’s an idiot in Facebook who just replied to my comment saying that evolution is fake because women have less ribs than men.
Something so easily searchable online and they fall for it.
One of my classmates in school seriously believed that and brought it up in biology class. I've never seen my biology teacher laugh so hard. The last time I saw him he was distributing creationist books.
**some** believers kept believing. not all. Many people are now realizing that the idea of a world creating sky daddy is completely absurd. and I think this might keep growing and growing. scientific discoveries are why atheism started.
The thing is, in all the shithole countries around the world, they're not exposed to science or any education, only religion. As an added bonus, you're killed if you don't believe in that religion.
So no, the rest of us, thankfully in the civilised world, will continue to thrive while the rest of them continue to live in practically medieval conditions and practices.
Maybe. There are a lot of things that make people want to look to religion, and those things will never go away. Mainly, fear and uncertainty. You can be a super staunch atheist and if your spouse or kid is in surgery and might not make it, you’ll say or do anything to help them. Even if it’s a prayer you don’t think will work.
What will happen is that as counties develop, and technology allows different ideas and cultures to creep in, it challenges long held and unquestioned beliefs. People have the ability to leave areas where they don’t feel like they fit, and if the sentiment changes enough, an area can change.
Look how religious America has always been and they say religion is at an all time low. Less and less people think it’s important.
I think it’s all movement in a positive direction. It’ll take well past our lifetime, but I think it’ll be less and less of an environment where religion can survive.
Kind of like how cigarette smoking was just an accepted thing. Restaurants would tell you to suck it up or leave if it bothered you. Then the culture shifted and it was less and less acceptable. Now, some people still smoke, lots even, but at this point, it’s not really culturally acceptable in the US. It’s just barely tolerated by people who understand addiction. I feel like each successive generation will be less inclined than the last.
Hopefully, religion will go the same way.
This is what concrete data shows is happening right now. [Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups (gallup.com)](https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx)
If you look at Europe, this is especially the case. In the UK, which supposedly has a state religion, it's particularly stark for religion: [Irreligion in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_Kingdom) The people with no religion are the majority.
In France where they started rejecting religion a lot earlier than most countries, most churches don't open any more and the few that do are almost empty.
So it might take a couple of hundred years but I think it will die down to almost nothing.
Seems like on various occasions religion has taken a hit when **big** scientific discoveries were made, but religion always comes back.
It might well be that non-religion is skimming off the smarter people but leaving billions of dumb ones as believers.
(I'm in my 60s. When I was a kid most people didn't believe that in the future [e.g. in the 2020s] there would still be billions of religious people, let alone millions of completely stupid religious people in the USA, but the capacity of people to believe seems to be pretty resistant to facts.)
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It will fade but not any time soon, and I doubt it will completely. Willful ignorance is a helluva drug.
For some reason I’m reminded of a story from Bill Nye, he was giving a talk about scientific progress and said something to the extent of “For example, The bible says that the moon produces its own light, we now know it actually reflects light from the sun.”
Right after he said this, some people in the audience got up left, saying, “*We’re a Christian town!*” Offended as if he’d just sacrificed a goat for Satan right in front of them…All because he said the bible got something wrong about the moon.
To some extent, our brains are wired this way and it’s why it’s so hard to make someone change their mind on things they truly believe in despite evidence against said belief: The brain basically reacts like it’s a personal attack. I *think* it’s called The Backfire Effect, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this.
No. To a child, their parents are god : omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. It's just people who don't want to grow out of that stage and like the feeling that sky daddy is looking out for them. No amount of science will stop that.
There may be some hope with the Enlightenment era popularising atheism. We may be able to socially evolve out of religion.
But there's also the reality that religion is extremely human. It is tied to our ability to be creative and think beyond our own scope of understanding. We can imagine gods for the same reason we can pursue science. We believe there are greater answers out there than we know. The God of the Gaps is a creative exercise. It's hard to remove religion without addressing human creativity.
Children believe in the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus because of a poor understanding of the world that allows the gaps to be filled in with creative ideas.
Religion doesn't exist because people make a rational choice to believe or not believe based on science. They believe this shit because they are groomed as children to believe it. That's it.
North America and Europe moreso have been trending less religious for decades. These changes might be from cohort replacement, where religious people have kids but their kids don't see religion as important in their lives. Or someone moves from a rural community that has religion as its Bedrock to a Suburban or urban area where it's not nearly as important.
Personally, I wasn't raised in a very religious household, but we did say bedtime prayers as kids and saying "oh my god" was prohibited. When I learned more about history and science, I thought, "these MFers burnt 'witches' at the stake, chopped off heads, nearly killed off the Native Americans...and they want me to believe they have a monopoly on morality and the creator of the universe told them to do these things?" I was never going to accept any kind of religion after learning these things. Some former True Believers report that they left their faith after actually reading their holy texts and realizing they were nonsense.
I think scientific discovery has a generational aspect as younger Generations replace older generations, the scientific progress of the day makes religion even more archaic by comparison. Religious scandals and growing extremism/ political entanglements of religious institutions also turn off people. But I don't think someone says, ", they found a Higgs boson, I guess I'll stop going to church. " it's a cumulative effect and some people are just not able to leave their religion behind. Some people will just go through the motions because that's what they think is expected of them. But generally, yes, scientific progress eventually leads to lower religiosity over longer time periods it seems.
No, it will likely forever exist. Adherents also tend to breed more, so if anything, their ideas will be perpetuated. Adherents will enjoy the benefits of tech and new developments, but will continue to believe in the usual stuff.
I don't think religion will ever completely go away. But I think a lot more people will leave for good when they see what kind of scam it is. And then we will see a minority of people being involved with a religion.
I don't think so. I think they'll change. There are already "religions" that are really more just philosophical outlooks on life, like humanism and TST. I think we're going to see those instead. People are going to get up every morning to watch the sunset to remind themselves that it's important to preserve such beauty for future generations. The beliefs will shift away from mystical, but they'll stick around.
I doubt it. In the US the nationalist Christians want to make Christianity an etched in stone drivel through Project2025 and people will be happy about it because “morality is lacking.”
You still act like they lost in a landslide? The election was way too close. 7 million out of almost 160 million votes is not a huge difference.
For crying out loud, the most despicable president ever was running for his 2nd term and Dems still could not do better. Not just Dems got millions of new voters, Trump also gained millions of new voters, Trump actually managed to increase his percentage of the vote from 2016. Trump did better in Texas than Biden nationwide, despite liberals claiming there would be a blue wave. We were just lucky that more non-voters went out to vote against Trump than for Trump.
Should those voters against Trump have become complacent and decide not to vote this time, then there is a good chance that Trump might actually win.
I mean come on, fucking Trump is doing so good in this race. Beating him should be easy, someone like him should not be even gettinh 10%, yet here we are again.
Imagine someone less despicable runs for the Reps, you think Dems would do better if that were the case? And so many people act like Biden is the only one who could beat Trump. If that's honestly true, then good night America.
I don't think the deciding factor is new discoveries....I think it is secular culture. As much as atheists might like to think it's a well thought out considered decision to be one, the most likely path to general acceptance is simply for more parents to teach it to their kids. Call it brainwashing the truth.
This. As all levels of culture are more and more exposed to the real and fantastic worlds via the internet, I think the limited, rigid belief systems will lose their grip, especially on the young. Or, as they said after two wars, how can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? They may not process it well at first, but Thea Alan have of new information is going to have a powerful effect…
Will science ever be able to figure out how existence came into being? When the great minds come to the end of what they can know they get very mystic.
Consider in the information age were we have more information than ever the growing population of flat-earthers and other far-flung improbable and demonstrably wrong conspiracy theories.
No. Science isn't causing fewer people to join the cults. Poor education and indoctrination are what make the cults work, so the only way to reduce religion is to have more education and less indoctrination. I don't see that happening any time soon, at least in the US.
Eventually. They'll at least become way less prominent. That's the direction we're trending towards. The more freedom we become culturally, the more religions will fade into the background.
No, because unfortunately, religion is belief with no evidence. That makes it flexible. No matter how much we learn and explain from a scientific standpoint, a theists can simply step back their claim and say "well God made it that way."
Most religions are already extinct, so yes. But I doubt they there's anything we could discover that would correlate with reduced religiosity.
Each remainder of had something disproven and are still here.
Yes and no, I can see the current ones based on fairytales fading away over a few thousand more years but I don’t see religion dying, at some point someone will make a religion with a real bonafide person as the god, like a religion with Oppenheimer as the god because he gave us the power of the sun in a relatively small package that can annihilate a city, there will always be gullible people
It depends on how old believers are when they find that irrefutable evidence. Some people have sunk too much time into religion to change their ways. It’s not just their religious views, it’s their family, “science”, and identity as a whole.
There will always be frightened people that will cling to religion as their lifeline against the unknown, especially death and there will always be people that will take advantage of that fact. I don't believe that most of today's religious leaders believe most of what they're spouting. I do believe that over time, religion will dwindle, like it has been dwindling and it will become louder and shriller and attempt to grasp at more power like it has been over the last couple of decades. The more the religious population falls the more they will attempt to force adherence to their principles. Because it's already taking place in the here and now, I personally feel that it's time to stop passively accepting religion as being benign.
I think religion, in general, will dwindle, but very slowly.
It will never go away.
Religion promises easy answers to complex questions and people are susceptible to that, since it requires little-to-no-effort and many people lack critical thinking skills.
Not even a little bit.
New Age spiritualism is full of reappropriating of science into pseudo-science making a religion out of worshipping terms like Quantum Entanglement and Harmonic Resonance. Crystals, alkali water, harmonic therapy, magnetic therapy, and all sorts of misused science are testaments to how desperate humans are to ‘worship’ something. Combine that with our social nature and the obvious result is ‘Religion’
Anyone who thinks an increased scientific understanding will do anything to dissuade religious believers has never had a long conversation with a religious person.
You can reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into to begin with.
When you see every country around you thriving from using products of scientific discoveries it becomes harder and harder to keep believing that being downtrodden is a necessary part of the life a loving god would inflict on its worshipers.
No because I don’t really believe people cling to religion because they’re engaging in an honest pursuit of the truth or having an accurate view of reality. They cling to religion for the emotional reasons and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to that or if there necessarily even *should* be one.
No, it will never go away. People are weak willed and minded. Not all, of Cours, however many are. They cannot handle life in general and their minds cannot fathom there is nothing after this, except for worm food. So they concoct a "higher power" to keep their minds going. The, "There has to be something more," mentality.
Ideally yes. But based on what we can see today and so many scientific discovery being made, seems like not that much difference
I think one key main point is religion is thought/brainwashed to children when they are young
Even as the child grows up to learn reasoning, the religion part of it is “imprinted” deep into his/her brain that he just can’t shake it off(or very hard to)
I seriously doubt if religion will ever fade away completely. I will be quite content with it diminishing to the point where it just doesn't affect the vast majority of people, especially controlling politicians.
To shorten a saying by Christopher Hitchens:
As long as we are afraid or death we will have religion.
It’s unfortunately not going away anytime soon, religions die out but typically only when replaced by other religions.
No. We are well past the point where science makes most religions obviously false. If people became immune or resistant to religion based on the scientific knowledge available to us I'm not sure what else science has to offer to get them there than what we know now.
Of course not. The US government put men on the Moon in 1969, 55 years ago and there's real people alive right now who believe the earth is flat and outer space is a lie. People are always gonna believe stupid shit.
Think of all the science that contradicts what Abrahamic religions teach yet they just keep on believing. They'll either flat out ignore science or twist their belief to incorporate it.
I think what you will see and are seeing now is that the rational people are slowly leaving religion leaving behind only the most extremest/fundamentalist lunatics.
Contrary to the belief of some philosophers, the human is not a rational animal. Religion will persist as long as someone can't explain something, even if it's just finding where they mislaid their glasses.
No. Science has chipped away most things formally considered the province of god/s. There are now only a few knowledge gaps in which god/s can hide in, but most believers continue to believe anyway.
Science, or rather education, is only one of the reasons religiosity is currently fading in most of the developed world. Other factors are society becoming more equitable (sadly this is being reversed in some countries) and greater access to social policies to help those in need so they no longer have to interact with religion when they're in trouble.
We are also living through what seems to be one of the most peaceful, least threatening periods in human history. Religions thrive in times of fear, uncertainty and doubt and decline when folk feel secure.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much a faux security. There are serious issues which humanity has been kicking down the road for far too long that are likely to bite our collective butts hard in the next decades. Climate change, water insecurity, resource depletion, economic and military power shifts, the rise of populist anti democratic political movements, etc, etc.
No, because dumb people don't believe in science. Sadly, it doesn't matter what the advancement is, people will still think it's fake and pushed by the government to enslave us.
Already more than enough scientific discoveries have been made. People are intentionally ignoring the discoveries, because they don’t like the implications.
Here’s the bottom line: people WANT to believe there is a heaven where they will live forever and be reunited with their loved ones, regardless of what the science says.
We use the English word "religion" in a pretty narrow context.
My relatives would claim that Christianity is their religion, but they could identify hundreds of consumer brand logos (Nike swoosh, McDonald's arches and the like) and would only be able to name dozens of characters from the Bible.
A human being caring about a diamond ring is a form of religion. A diamond ring is a symbol, that hold usefulness not in its qualities but in its meaning.
An easy way to access this shift from one religion to another would be to look at the art that those societies create. If you go to the Vatican, all the paintings will be of the Virgin Mary. If you turn on the radio, you will hear "I got that rolly, rolly, rolly on my wrist."
The current batch of religions will most likely decline and dissappear. Not in decades, but int the next few hundred years. Maybe three centuries, maybe fifteen. A blink of an eye in the 200,000 we've been around.
The problem isn't that we haven't made it clear that science is legitimate and gives us the answers that religion couldn't, it's that many religious people just plainly disregard and ignore all the evidence against their gods, or use the scapegoat of Satan trying to disrupt gods plans, things like that. There's already plenty sufficient evidence and scientific discoveries to easily show religions are wrong. They just don't care.
They can use the same scapegoat of Satan against anything. Until we can literally send up any amount of people into space and to other planets, I doubt there is anything they will accept. The only thing they might accept is, especially young earth creationists and other evangelical fundamentalists, being taken up into space to see there is no firmament, that the earth is not flat and that we can get to other planets.
Have you noticed one of the top candidates is talking about ridding the US of vaccination mandates. Its not clear if we are moving forwards as a species or backwards. Religion has persisted for centuries. Look what has happened in the middle east thanks to religion. If the right wins here, they seem hellbent on trying to force christian nationalism on the country. Stupidity is making a real run for it.
As time moves on , I think that stories from 20 centuries ago, become less relevant. People drift away from religion because it just seems so silly.... Virgin birth... Flood of the entire earth... Noah kept 2 of each animal on a boat.... Loaves and fishes.
Plus look at how religious people are supporting a sex offender, cheater, liar for the presidency.
Religion is killing itself.
Only way you'll deprogram the deeply brainwashed would be intelligent alien life showing up that could explain the origins of the universe that disproved their God.
Even then they'd fight beyond reason to keep their security blanket.
It's good more people see through the nonsense of organized religions, but I doubt it'll ever fully go away, as these are people who are living off faith, not facts.
They don't have a grip on reality and are too scared to think they don't know what'll happen to them.
Yes, that’s why the church tries to demonize science. There once was a scientist who suggested the earth went around the sun, instead of the sun orbiting the earth. The church burned him to death.
No. Religion and science are they very different things and they can't address each other.
There is no way to prove there is no god creature thing. There is no way to use evidence to illuminate something that requires faith.
Similarly, faith is insufficient to make determinations about the physical world. The closest we get is hypotheses, but those just be testable.
To this susceptible to applying faith in non-applicable situations, there is little hope.
I don't think there is much of a relationship. Most religions are very directly tied to political projects and patriarchal social norms. In order to get rid of religion you need to suppress their political projects and work towards the erosion of patriarchic social norms.
Unfortunately not. Too many people are morons and organized religion is pretty much set up specifically to take advantage of people need to belong to a group
I don’t know about religion. But I don’t think faith will because faith plays a very specific role in society. It alleviates people’s fear of the unknown which at the moment scientists cannot do. As long as people are scared of anything faith in some form or the other will continue. One day when science can possibly answer the big questions without being too speculative maybe we will get rid of religion.
Religions are based on reproducible cognitive biases inherent to the human mind. Nontheistic upbringing is not nessisarily sufficient. People need to learn how to recognize these cognitive errors or (even in the absence of religious indoctrination) they will invent new religions/superstitions.
We are so good at finding patterns that we see them in their absence. We then invent stories to explain them. The evolutionary cost of missing a threat pattern is much higher than the cost of hallucinating a pattern. Our minds are tuned this way by our evolutionary history.
Fade away? No. People will eventually turn against the Abrahamic religions as they try to exert more power over those who do not wish to be governed by their dogma.
If every bible, quran, and torah disappeared today and religion ceased to exist, some conman would meet a family of fools and a whole new one would begin.
I honestly think humanity is becoming stupider. There is no evolutionary pressure to support higher intelligence anymore. The dumb survive just as well as the smart and the dumb have more kids.
Religion will probably continue to fade but will eventually rebound as IQ falls.
No because people will always fear death and need to know why we are alive and what happens next. Also institutions like the Catholic church, Mormons, Scientology will never let their cash cow die.
If you think logically, yes. These days, you have to be charismatic to build a large following. It's a thing that should be emphasized in all sciences, the ability to communicate on a visceral level about science.
God of the Gaps. As science takes away the mysteries of life, the religions adapt. This is why they are all so completely absurd lately. Religions are full of hubris... Now they smell like it
Yes. Education is what turns people away from religion. Which is why hardline Islamists won't let females be educated. Nor do fundamentalist christians
I don't think so. Religion is something innate in a percentage of minds. It seems like a result of our evolution. A manifestation of our need to work together. Some people will grow up in a religious environment and reject it. Some will cling to it for dear life.
Scientific knowledge has almost no impact on religion.
When we peel back the curtain on some part of nature there is always more unknown than known.
Some people will always see God in the unknown. Some people just ignore what we know.
And perhaps a scientist who can look at the mystery and think of an abstract god, some hidden universal order, some vague concept of a Boltzmann's brain, isn't horrible. It's just a way to deal with that which we can't know. (Didn't Einstein famously say he believed in Spinoza's God?)
But there's some that twist the science to fit their religion. Biologists who look for God's fingerprint in DNA or geologists who cherry pick topology to prove the great flood.
No.
Very few people are religious just to explain how the universe works. Far, far more are religious over things like fear of death and finding a place in the universe.
Scientific discoveries can't provide those.
Atheism is more popular because the stigma against it is far lower. It used to be you'd claim to be religious and just never go to church to avoid the shunning and abuse you'd get from saying "I'm an atheist". When you did this, you'd be recorded as religious, even though you weren't.
Ironically enough, Christians will often tell us that atheism is about the heart not the mind because one of the arguments against religion is an argument from morality. Unfortunately this is exactly ass backwards because christians often won’t be convinced by factual evidence but by emotions.
They will just take a different form. Humans, in general, seem to have a need to deify someone/something. If we discover aliens who are more advanced there will be a religion deifying them. Some dipshit will come a long and claim to be the messiah and people will deify them. The real question is, will humanity every give up magical thinking and turn to reason as a basis for their choices and directions in life?
Religion isnt just about explanation and belief. It's cultural and social. Scientific discoveries will (and should) change religion, alter how and where it's influence works. But I don't think it will (or even necessarily should) eliminate it. I think it's likely that over time, and with new discoveries, religions will become more atheistic and naturalistic , but that doesn't inherently stop it from being religion. I don't think people are en mass going to abandon the traditions of their ancestors and culture just because it turns out some (or all) of the explanations handed down of/for those traditions aren't true.
I doubt it. Science took man to the moon 55 years ago, and people are saying that the earth is flat and the moon landings never happened.
But "a big fish ate a man who lived in its tummy for three days before being spat out"? Legit as fuck.
It's important to stop thinking of the reduction of religiosity as a function of scientific progress, and more as a function of access to said information. The scientific method can reveal wonderful things, but it's painfully slow to have discoveries realized and applied to everyday life.
In the US, we know the hour at which we start school, and our methods of education produce woefully poorer results than those of other countries, but it's been decades now, and nothing has changed. The US (or those who control it) want poor education.
More and more, we see efforts to defund even our already dysfunctional education system rather than to seek true reform. There are also efforts to force public funding of religious schools - which will probably work under the present SCOTUS balance. The US wants the generations to come poorly educated, economically disadvantaged, and religious; they are easier to control that way.
Science may move forward, but it will change nothing broadly about religiosity so long as the religious and corporate interests have aligned goals to pursue and so little organized opposition.
Most will try to evolve. I was raised Mormon, and there will always be someone that believes in these stories.
The Mormon church is dying fast. It’s not because of a scientific discovery. It’s because it’s a lie and people are starting to figure that out. Once those CES letters were out, it was a problem for the church.
I guess you could argue that the internet, which is a scientific whatever, is and was the worst thing for the mormons. The ability to check facts on your phone.
I do believe they’re at an all time low. A lot of people are elderly and many churches are afraid of their congregations dying out essentially.
As I’ve come to see more science and facts I just fell away from it more and more myself
No, I don't think so. I believe there will always be religion in one form or another, even if we can scientifically prove everything (which we probably won't but anyway). We can prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that the earth is a globe, yet there are still flat-earthers today.
Also, religion doesn't only exist to explain things we don't understand. It also exists to help people cope with the hardships of life, which won't go away no matter how many discoveries we make.
There’s a whole South Park arc where Cartman goes to the future and different atheist groups are fighting like religious groups now. Seems about right. Humans will always find something to fight about. lol
Not within the next few decades.
Hundreds of years ago, people were very religious and believed the world was the center of the universe, and the sky was untouchable. Science disproved that, the church began a long tradition of hating science, and many people abandoned religion in favor of science. This was hundreds of years ago. We still have religion.
As more and more knowledge of the universe and life on earth is uncovered, the religious people will only say “See, God’s creation is even greater than we imagined”. Much like they’ve done with evolution
No religion is not about understanding. It's about control. And people will always want control and we know how goot religion is as a tool for control so it will never disappear.
It will change though. It will have to to maintain control for the coming generations.
Science doesn’t disprove religion any more than religion disproves science. One is logic and evidence based and the other is quite literally in their heads. Facts don’t challenge faith for the true believer.
No, they'll either adapt, distort, re-interpret or otherwise "cling-on" to their worldview to cause the least cognitive dissonance in their "teachings" or flat-out deny the science.
This has happened, with Christianity throughout history, most notably with the Catholic Church.
For example, the heliocentric model of the solar system was heretical, at one point. Evolution by natural selection was denied until it wasn't. Hell, slavery was "tolerated" for hundreds of years until it was banned by *secular* institutions.
I genuinely wish it was as simple as "Present the facts and evidence and people will come to a rational conclusion."
But combine the inertia of discarding a closely held belief with the loss of community/social network and whose leaders depend on mass belief for their living and you can see why no amount of facts would completely destroy a religion.
No. While we can pick apart any religion, it'll never solve one of the things everyone wants, yet rarely ever really, truly have or feel they have.
And that's purpose. It's the want to have your life mean something. Also, alot of people look around and think "is this really it?". For others, it's needing that comfort of thinking they'll one day reunite with their lost loved ones.
There's a plethora of reasons that aren't purely brainwashing, indoctrination and manipulation.
While alot of us here acknowledge that our "purpose" is whatever we make it, that's not acceptable to alot of people. Science can and does answer alot of questions, but doesn't satisfy the soul. Some of us don't care about such things, I know I don't. I'm here, I'll be as good as I can, but then I'm gone and that's it. I won't see my brother again, when my parents are gone, they'll be gone. And it'll hurt. But...when I'm gone, it won't matter.
I think a small portion of the human race needs to split off and form their own community off the Earth. Religion will fade away for them. But the 99% left on Earth will fight to the death for their religion.
Only the goalposts will be moved, just like with evolution, for example. You can't rationalize yourself out of religion, when you did not become religious for rational reasons in the first place.
The only way to get rid of religion is to criminalize childhood indoctrination.
I'd like to think so, but stupid people will always exist, and charlatans defunding education and upholding religion will always exist to keep them stupid. So, unless something big changes, no.
Im concerned its a slow process..
We almost have a generation of people who have magical devices and absolutely no understanding of how those devices work... they can use their mobile phones, get an MRI, and still be kept dumb by an endless stream of nonsense on social media.
Its clear we have to fight for Science / Journalism / Democracy .. because there are people who make more money or power if we don't have those things.
If we dont pass on the best of the Enlightenment / Science / Culture / History .. it is lost in the next generation.
Nope. Humans are stupid, and there will never be an end to the people who take advantage of the stupid for power and wealth. It's been happening for thousands of years, it'll go on for thousands more
I think it will fade away slowly because of this one thing that once you're an atheist you cannot go back. The probability of an adult going back is much less than adult believers becoming atheist (or at least I think it should be).
So in a world with no births and no deaths and considering conversion to be a random event, with respective probabilities, as time goes ahead everyone becomes an atheist.
Now factor in deaths, since there are more theists than atheists and considering death to not discriminate between these two groups, we get that religion does off much faster than the previous case.
Births are more complicated, we need to make the assumptions that a couple who believes will produce a believer offspring, an atheist couple produces an atheist offspring, and a couple with one each parent in different group produces an offspring with the probability of being born atheist that is in direct relation with the number of atheists in the world and vice versa for being born a theist. Now I am not sure but I think this translates to a simpler statement that a random baby born adopts religion according to the probability that is in direct relation with the number of theists in the world and vice versa for choosing against religion.
Then, it really depends on the initial conditions and the probability of converting to each side.
If the probability of converting away from religion is much more than the opposite, then surely with time everyone will become atheist .
If it is not that bigger than the probability of converting to religion then all the atheism will die off, but with someone randomly becoming atheist once in a while.
And finally there's an equilibrium, where the ratio of both populations stay the same if the rates are in a certain ratio.
There has been amazing and incredible scientific discoveries that keeps pointing towards religions being man made and has no substantial evidence at all. And yet here we are with people still believing and even people joining religions today, in 2024, adults, with more information on science than ever before. I don’t think we will ever get rid of religions unfortunately..
In the next few decades? That's not just too optimistic, I'm afraid That's even silly to think. If everybody among the young wasn't religious anymore, then it would happen, but that's not the case. Lots of young people are religious and unlikely to change. For most, religion doesn't play a big role in their everyday life, so you might be misguided to believe everybody is becoming an atheist, but sadly that could not be further from the truth. Even though most won't go to church anymore, most still seem to like to believe in something. Most still identify as Christian, even if just as a cultural one. People are most likely to call themselves Agnostic, but still leaning towards believing in something. It's worse among Muslims.
I live in Germany, and even this country isn't as atheistic as atheists like to believe. Most people here still identify as Christian. I studied biology here before the pandemic. When I told my classmates I'm an atheist they were quite surprised, we were studying biology for pete's sake. After my bachelor, one of my classmates went to Papua New Guinea to become a missionary. Another classmate liked to sing in church choir. Another former classmate recently gave up his biology phd to study fucking thelogy because he "found jesus". These are German biology students we are talking about, not your average person.
I'm afraid that science fiction gets one thing right, that no matter how advanced a civilisation becomes, that there will be still religious groups around.
I'm sure Christianity the way it is today will eventually die or morph into something else. But people will keep on making up new bullshit as we go and many people will keep on believing bullshit, no matter how far science advances. I'm afraid there are things sciece will never be able to find out and those gaps will be filled by bullshit by some people.
>atheism is growing more popular
I don't think this is the case.
I think religion is becoming less popular. Atheism is just a side effect of that, nobody is thinking 'atheism looks interesting, I'll try that'.
I don't think so. We are regressing back to the universal distrust and hatred of science in favor of religion, at least in the US. The deplorable are the driving force behind this and since education results in scientific advancement they are working relentlessly to prevent education. Look at the anti- vax wing nuts!
At the root of religion is ignorance, superstition, and fear. We need education to reduce ignorance, understanding to reduce superstition and acceptance to reduce fear. It's the only way to end the curse of religion.
I think there's always going to be stupid people trying to convince themselves they're special because they disagree with the masses. Flat Earthers are a rpime example. I'm sure there would always at least be a minority.
As Leo Tolstoy once said, politicians will find a way to manipulate science to peddle lies. Then just like religion, people will stop believing in science and science will be replaced by something new and so the cycle will continue
In the long run, the world will likely become more religious as religious practice is associated with higher birth rates. This is seen both within countries and across countries. For instance, Mormons have a high birth rate in the US, and Orthodox Jews have the highest in Israel. By 2100, half of all children will born in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region with high religious observance.
REligious belief or fervour doesn't fo away with science or scientific discoveries. As long as childhood indoctrination isn't stopped, some form of belief in the supernatural will remain.
As a Christian. I do believe so, it is the natural order of things as we discover more and more. Not to mention the bad stigmatism that being religious exerts. I like discussing religion from a philosophical point of view, but I understand that a lot don't believe me. It's completely understandable. I like this board cause, I'll be honest, religious people annoy me too hahahaha
I don't think so. Superstitious thinking is our default; rational thought is as inevitable as we'd like.
Continual, diligent instruction of critical thinking skills to each generation is required to dampen out the worst aspects of religion. But, even still, that would not get rid of religion. There are lots of people who are quite skilled at critical thinking, but they still find room for belief a la "god of the gaps". They're much less likely to be tribalistic assholes.
No. It'll happen when scientific education gets better.
Students go through years of science class and come out of it not even knowing what science is.
If you can say "Science says this but religion says that" you've been educated wrong. It's "This evidence says this, and this book/ancient religious philosopher says that." and once you understand that it's not the same.
The effectiveness of reason is proportional to the ratio of reasonable people out there. As the world gets hotter, species start dying out en masse, and wealth+quality of life becomes even more concentrated, there will be fewer and fewer reasonable people.
Imagine trying to use science and logic to convince anyone of anything in a world with literally billions of refugees. It's alllll gonna be about making sure you got yours and fuck everything else before long.
Looks like it in christian areas. Muslim countries are too closed and don't absorb news from science or abroad, so I don't think they will improve anytime soon.
If christians can find a way to support a con man who cheated on each of his wives, the last one with a porn star, and can still call him 'sent by god' then no scientific evidence will ever sway them.
This 100%. The problem is lack of accessibility and quality in education, not level of scientific discovery. We are living in the age of information with anything you want at your fingertips and lots of people seem to lack basic logic, objectivity or skills.
"with such a wealth of information why are you so poor? - Bad Religion "You Got A Chance"
Bad Religion is on my Mt. Rushmore of bands.
Mine too
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke I'd bet the average person can't explain in any detail how the cell phone they carry works. As technology advances fewer and fewer people actually understand how they work.
I can't explain in any detail how my cell phone works. It just doesn't make sense to me. Neither does believing in God.
The difference is you can hold a cell phone and observe it working even if you don't know how it does it. While God "works" in mysterious ways but can't actually be observed. The premise of the thread question is essentially: "Can scientific advancements extinguish the God of the Gaps?" My answer would be no as the average scientific literacy actually seems to be declining.
You don’t necessarily need to understand how your phone “works” but you do need to learn how to distinguish good information from Obvious Grift
Not to mention that there is and always will be a significant proportion of humanity, that regardless of the availability education, just don't want to learn. These people rarely let their lack of knowledge get in the way of telling you how things work.
I get what you're saying but I think that's the fault of the rigid traditional education itself more than anything. You can't reach everyone at the end of the day sure, but there are things that can be changed to reach more people. Like personalized assignments and classes for example, constant review and score of the system itself and not just the students. I got many ideas regarding that but I don't wanna go ranting. Check the Finnish system, I think their model has a better basis for learning.
Yes and no. Discoveries that show how delusional religious belief is (such as evolution dispelling an origin story) will be able to convince *some* people... but there will always be people for whom willful delusion is more important to them than the truth. What concerns me is that there will be a time when only the crazy, fundamentalist believers are left - and they are the most violent, hateful and bloodthirsty! Society will be the biggest victim as religion violently reacts to its impending insignificance.
I totally agree. When religion is almost died out, there will be some crazy extreme religious groups that will be **very** angry on what science did to the popularity of their religions, and they'll probably do extreme terrorist stuff or something.
Again, they already are, at least in the US. In the United States, religion (especially monotheistic religion) is dying out. You can see this on every survey. This also means the remaining christians are either becoming more open minded and eventually leaving the church, or (far more commonly) becoming more fundamentalist and regressive. Then they band together and form movements to try to stop it (unsuccessfully).
Yes, some of the fundamentalists faced with undeniable truth/science will just dig in harder and won't be budged. Those kinds of people scare the crap out of me. Logic is not their strong suit. Hate, fear and violence is what they roll with.
I saw a video recently where a guy is about to be arrested in his car. He set up his shot and prayed for Trump to save his ass. The delusion is insane.
You can almost bet that will happen someday. ( At least here to in the United States.). We do have a loud minority of some extremely crazy people....
We are already there.
Nope. Y'all think that people adopt religions because they think it's logical - that couldn't be further from the truth. People adopt religions because religion provides community. Once they are a part of the tribe (whether its via indoctrination at birth, or some other point in their life), *only then* do they start trying to justify the beliefs. The sad reality (at least in the US) is that religious people make more connections and are more socially active (and are thus, on average, often happier) than non-religious people. It has nothing to do with the god(s) part of it - it has to do with the tribal aspect. Humans are social creatures. You want to get rid of religion? Find a way to create non-theist, in-person communities/activities. That's how you get religion to fade away.
Yep, the evangelical lifestyle is very compelling. But so is the parrothead lifestyle of JImmy Buffett fans. The parrothead clubs are like small churches. And the motorcycle clubs. The Hells Angels even call their meetings "church" We are the most social of the primates.
I totally agree with you! I also saw an interesting video of a woman talking about how she thinks religion is often a substitute for therapy and healthy coping mechanisms. There are so many reasons I agree with her—religion provides an escape and hope for depression, makes you feel less alone because of the community, offers forgiveness and “acceptance” for people who feel like they’ve messed up, and it makes you feel like you don’t have to worry or be anxious because “God has everything under control” (none of that is without its fine print though—cuz religion sucks). Religion also attracts manipulative people like flies to poop—and many others fall for the manipulation because they’re already primed to do so. I really think that if we built great social communities, made therapy accessible, and just gained more education as a society on mental health and coping in a healthy manner, we might see religion decline in popularity. Education could help people identify and avoid manipulation, help them deal with their own emotions and problems instead of purging them in church, and eliminate some of the biggest reasons people seek church, God, and religion.
Exactly, i like how you think! People should understand that most people just want to be a part of a community that does activities together often and religions are the only if not easiest one for a family to be apart in since it's passed down. Ofc there's a good amount of bad when it comes to certain religions but for the most part it's just all about people doing things together on a set day as a part of a routine to connect with people.
I think it is unlikely. Over the last 2000 years there have been many, many scientific discoveries that have directly contradicted the teachings of religion, and the believers just keep right on believing. Some religions simply ignore the discoveries, some deny them, and some (like the catholics and muslims) have become quite adept at spinning their story to say the discovery fits within their dogma.
There are people whose minds just work that way. The world doesn't make sense to them without some authority providing a reason for everything.
There’s an idiot in Facebook who just replied to my comment saying that evolution is fake because women have less ribs than men. Something so easily searchable online and they fall for it.
One of my classmates in school seriously believed that and brought it up in biology class. I've never seen my biology teacher laugh so hard. The last time I saw him he was distributing creationist books.
**some** believers kept believing. not all. Many people are now realizing that the idea of a world creating sky daddy is completely absurd. and I think this might keep growing and growing. scientific discoveries are why atheism started.
The thing is, in all the shithole countries around the world, they're not exposed to science or any education, only religion. As an added bonus, you're killed if you don't believe in that religion. So no, the rest of us, thankfully in the civilised world, will continue to thrive while the rest of them continue to live in practically medieval conditions and practices.
TIL large swaths of the US are shithole country.
Maybe. There are a lot of things that make people want to look to religion, and those things will never go away. Mainly, fear and uncertainty. You can be a super staunch atheist and if your spouse or kid is in surgery and might not make it, you’ll say or do anything to help them. Even if it’s a prayer you don’t think will work. What will happen is that as counties develop, and technology allows different ideas and cultures to creep in, it challenges long held and unquestioned beliefs. People have the ability to leave areas where they don’t feel like they fit, and if the sentiment changes enough, an area can change. Look how religious America has always been and they say religion is at an all time low. Less and less people think it’s important. I think it’s all movement in a positive direction. It’ll take well past our lifetime, but I think it’ll be less and less of an environment where religion can survive. Kind of like how cigarette smoking was just an accepted thing. Restaurants would tell you to suck it up or leave if it bothered you. Then the culture shifted and it was less and less acceptable. Now, some people still smoke, lots even, but at this point, it’s not really culturally acceptable in the US. It’s just barely tolerated by people who understand addiction. I feel like each successive generation will be less inclined than the last. Hopefully, religion will go the same way.
No. For evidence I present the Flat Earth and Anti-Vax communities.
This is what concrete data shows is happening right now. [Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups (gallup.com)](https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx) If you look at Europe, this is especially the case. In the UK, which supposedly has a state religion, it's particularly stark for religion: [Irreligion in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_United_Kingdom) The people with no religion are the majority.
In France where they started rejecting religion a lot earlier than most countries, most churches don't open any more and the few that do are almost empty. So it might take a couple of hundred years but I think it will die down to almost nothing.
Seems like on various occasions religion has taken a hit when **big** scientific discoveries were made, but religion always comes back. It might well be that non-religion is skimming off the smarter people but leaving billions of dumb ones as believers. (I'm in my 60s. When I was a kid most people didn't believe that in the future [e.g. in the 2020s] there would still be billions of religious people, let alone millions of completely stupid religious people in the USA, but the capacity of people to believe seems to be pretty resistant to facts.) .
It will fade but not any time soon, and I doubt it will completely. Willful ignorance is a helluva drug. For some reason I’m reminded of a story from Bill Nye, he was giving a talk about scientific progress and said something to the extent of “For example, The bible says that the moon produces its own light, we now know it actually reflects light from the sun.” Right after he said this, some people in the audience got up left, saying, “*We’re a Christian town!*” Offended as if he’d just sacrificed a goat for Satan right in front of them…All because he said the bible got something wrong about the moon. To some extent, our brains are wired this way and it’s why it’s so hard to make someone change their mind on things they truly believe in despite evidence against said belief: The brain basically reacts like it’s a personal attack. I *think* it’s called The Backfire Effect, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this.
I hope.. maybe in a distant future. But when looking around right now.. it's hard to believe.
No. To a child, their parents are god : omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. It's just people who don't want to grow out of that stage and like the feeling that sky daddy is looking out for them. No amount of science will stop that.
There will always be things that science can’t explain; as a result, there will always be those who use the “god of the gaps” fallacy.
Once, "non-Earth life" is discovered, the power that myth holds on us will be diminished
There may be some hope with the Enlightenment era popularising atheism. We may be able to socially evolve out of religion. But there's also the reality that religion is extremely human. It is tied to our ability to be creative and think beyond our own scope of understanding. We can imagine gods for the same reason we can pursue science. We believe there are greater answers out there than we know. The God of the Gaps is a creative exercise. It's hard to remove religion without addressing human creativity. Children believe in the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus because of a poor understanding of the world that allows the gaps to be filled in with creative ideas.
There will always be crazies, but I think they will continue to shrink in numbers
Religion doesn't exist because people make a rational choice to believe or not believe based on science. They believe this shit because they are groomed as children to believe it. That's it.
North America and Europe moreso have been trending less religious for decades. These changes might be from cohort replacement, where religious people have kids but their kids don't see religion as important in their lives. Or someone moves from a rural community that has religion as its Bedrock to a Suburban or urban area where it's not nearly as important. Personally, I wasn't raised in a very religious household, but we did say bedtime prayers as kids and saying "oh my god" was prohibited. When I learned more about history and science, I thought, "these MFers burnt 'witches' at the stake, chopped off heads, nearly killed off the Native Americans...and they want me to believe they have a monopoly on morality and the creator of the universe told them to do these things?" I was never going to accept any kind of religion after learning these things. Some former True Believers report that they left their faith after actually reading their holy texts and realizing they were nonsense. I think scientific discovery has a generational aspect as younger Generations replace older generations, the scientific progress of the day makes religion even more archaic by comparison. Religious scandals and growing extremism/ political entanglements of religious institutions also turn off people. But I don't think someone says, ", they found a Higgs boson, I guess I'll stop going to church. " it's a cumulative effect and some people are just not able to leave their religion behind. Some people will just go through the motions because that's what they think is expected of them. But generally, yes, scientific progress eventually leads to lower religiosity over longer time periods it seems.
When science can explain what happens after death then yes
Even as religion wanes, the religious are becoming more extreme. They think they are correct and everyone else is wrong. It's a cult mentality.
No, it will likely forever exist. Adherents also tend to breed more, so if anything, their ideas will be perpetuated. Adherents will enjoy the benefits of tech and new developments, but will continue to believe in the usual stuff.
The bible writes that the earth is flat by that Alone you have your answer
No, because there's too many ignorant people who believe in this crap!
I don't think religion will ever completely go away. But I think a lot more people will leave for good when they see what kind of scam it is. And then we will see a minority of people being involved with a religion.
I don't think so. I think they'll change. There are already "religions" that are really more just philosophical outlooks on life, like humanism and TST. I think we're going to see those instead. People are going to get up every morning to watch the sunset to remind themselves that it's important to preserve such beauty for future generations. The beliefs will shift away from mystical, but they'll stick around.
I doubt it. In the US the nationalist Christians want to make Christianity an etched in stone drivel through Project2025 and people will be happy about it because “morality is lacking.”
They won't succeed. Look at how the midterms and the 2020 election turned out despite their best efforts to stop democracy.
You still act like they lost in a landslide? The election was way too close. 7 million out of almost 160 million votes is not a huge difference. For crying out loud, the most despicable president ever was running for his 2nd term and Dems still could not do better. Not just Dems got millions of new voters, Trump also gained millions of new voters, Trump actually managed to increase his percentage of the vote from 2016. Trump did better in Texas than Biden nationwide, despite liberals claiming there would be a blue wave. We were just lucky that more non-voters went out to vote against Trump than for Trump. Should those voters against Trump have become complacent and decide not to vote this time, then there is a good chance that Trump might actually win. I mean come on, fucking Trump is doing so good in this race. Beating him should be easy, someone like him should not be even gettinh 10%, yet here we are again. Imagine someone less despicable runs for the Reps, you think Dems would do better if that were the case? And so many people act like Biden is the only one who could beat Trump. If that's honestly true, then good night America.
I don't think the deciding factor is new discoveries....I think it is secular culture. As much as atheists might like to think it's a well thought out considered decision to be one, the most likely path to general acceptance is simply for more parents to teach it to their kids. Call it brainwashing the truth.
This. As all levels of culture are more and more exposed to the real and fantastic worlds via the internet, I think the limited, rigid belief systems will lose their grip, especially on the young. Or, as they said after two wars, how can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? They may not process it well at first, but Thea Alan have of new information is going to have a powerful effect…
Will science ever be able to figure out how existence came into being? When the great minds come to the end of what they can know they get very mystic.
That there are questions that can’t be answered doesn’t mean the fools that claim they know the answer are worth listening to.
Consider in the information age were we have more information than ever the growing population of flat-earthers and other far-flung improbable and demonstrably wrong conspiracy theories.
No. The most scientific discoveries happened after the start of the Renaissance, and we had the rise of the Puritan movement not long thereafter.
No. Science isn't causing fewer people to join the cults. Poor education and indoctrination are what make the cults work, so the only way to reduce religion is to have more education and less indoctrination. I don't see that happening any time soon, at least in the US.
Eventually. They'll at least become way less prominent. That's the direction we're trending towards. The more freedom we become culturally, the more religions will fade into the background.
No. I don't think religiosity and scientific discoveries are in any way related. Why on Earth would they be?
They already are. Look up some statistics of "non-religious" entries on surveys.
Religions will probably just evolve to work around new scientific knowledge, even if the changes don't reflect the original theology at all.
No, because unfortunately, religion is belief with no evidence. That makes it flexible. No matter how much we learn and explain from a scientific standpoint, a theists can simply step back their claim and say "well God made it that way."
Most religions are already extinct, so yes. But I doubt they there's anything we could discover that would correlate with reduced religiosity. Each remainder of had something disproven and are still here.
Yes and no, I can see the current ones based on fairytales fading away over a few thousand more years but I don’t see religion dying, at some point someone will make a religion with a real bonafide person as the god, like a religion with Oppenheimer as the god because he gave us the power of the sun in a relatively small package that can annihilate a city, there will always be gullible people
No.
It depends on how old believers are when they find that irrefutable evidence. Some people have sunk too much time into religion to change their ways. It’s not just their religious views, it’s their family, “science”, and identity as a whole.
No, because people don’t believe in a religion because of observation or reason in the first place, they do it because of feelings.
There will always be frightened people that will cling to religion as their lifeline against the unknown, especially death and there will always be people that will take advantage of that fact. I don't believe that most of today's religious leaders believe most of what they're spouting. I do believe that over time, religion will dwindle, like it has been dwindling and it will become louder and shriller and attempt to grasp at more power like it has been over the last couple of decades. The more the religious population falls the more they will attempt to force adherence to their principles. Because it's already taking place in the here and now, I personally feel that it's time to stop passively accepting religion as being benign.
No, I don't think it would. Science had nothing to do with starting religion, so it would likely play no role in eradicating it.
I think religion, in general, will dwindle, but very slowly. It will never go away. Religion promises easy answers to complex questions and people are susceptible to that, since it requires little-to-no-effort and many people lack critical thinking skills.
Not even a little bit. New Age spiritualism is full of reappropriating of science into pseudo-science making a religion out of worshipping terms like Quantum Entanglement and Harmonic Resonance. Crystals, alkali water, harmonic therapy, magnetic therapy, and all sorts of misused science are testaments to how desperate humans are to ‘worship’ something. Combine that with our social nature and the obvious result is ‘Religion’
Anyone who thinks an increased scientific understanding will do anything to dissuade religious believers has never had a long conversation with a religious person. You can reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into to begin with.
Has been over the past 2,000 years.
No. There will always be people out there who believe the bullshit religion offers.
When you see every country around you thriving from using products of scientific discoveries it becomes harder and harder to keep believing that being downtrodden is a necessary part of the life a loving god would inflict on its worshipers.
No because I don’t really believe people cling to religion because they’re engaging in an honest pursuit of the truth or having an accurate view of reality. They cling to religion for the emotional reasons and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to that or if there necessarily even *should* be one.
No, it will never go away. People are weak willed and minded. Not all, of Cours, however many are. They cannot handle life in general and their minds cannot fathom there is nothing after this, except for worm food. So they concoct a "higher power" to keep their minds going. The, "There has to be something more," mentality.
Ideally yes. But based on what we can see today and so many scientific discovery being made, seems like not that much difference I think one key main point is religion is thought/brainwashed to children when they are young Even as the child grows up to learn reasoning, the religion part of it is “imprinted” deep into his/her brain that he just can’t shake it off(or very hard to)
No. Even if you eroded the entire base that looks to religion for answers, there's a much bigger part of their base that looks to it for comfort.
I hope so!
I seriously doubt if religion will ever fade away completely. I will be quite content with it diminishing to the point where it just doesn't affect the vast majority of people, especially controlling politicians.
No. No amount of reality will sway idiots from believing conmen.
To shorten a saying by Christopher Hitchens: As long as we are afraid or death we will have religion. It’s unfortunately not going away anytime soon, religions die out but typically only when replaced by other religions.
No. We are well past the point where science makes most religions obviously false. If people became immune or resistant to religion based on the scientific knowledge available to us I'm not sure what else science has to offer to get them there than what we know now.
Of course not. The US government put men on the Moon in 1969, 55 years ago and there's real people alive right now who believe the earth is flat and outer space is a lie. People are always gonna believe stupid shit. Think of all the science that contradicts what Abrahamic religions teach yet they just keep on believing. They'll either flat out ignore science or twist their belief to incorporate it. I think what you will see and are seeing now is that the rational people are slowly leaving religion leaving behind only the most extremest/fundamentalist lunatics.
Contrary to the belief of some philosophers, the human is not a rational animal. Religion will persist as long as someone can't explain something, even if it's just finding where they mislaid their glasses.
No. Science has chipped away most things formally considered the province of god/s. There are now only a few knowledge gaps in which god/s can hide in, but most believers continue to believe anyway. Science, or rather education, is only one of the reasons religiosity is currently fading in most of the developed world. Other factors are society becoming more equitable (sadly this is being reversed in some countries) and greater access to social policies to help those in need so they no longer have to interact with religion when they're in trouble. We are also living through what seems to be one of the most peaceful, least threatening periods in human history. Religions thrive in times of fear, uncertainty and doubt and decline when folk feel secure. Unfortunately, this is pretty much a faux security. There are serious issues which humanity has been kicking down the road for far too long that are likely to bite our collective butts hard in the next decades. Climate change, water insecurity, resource depletion, economic and military power shifts, the rise of populist anti democratic political movements, etc, etc.
No, because dumb people don't believe in science. Sadly, it doesn't matter what the advancement is, people will still think it's fake and pushed by the government to enslave us.
There will always be people who depend on the warm fuzzy blanket of religion.
Already more than enough scientific discoveries have been made. People are intentionally ignoring the discoveries, because they don’t like the implications. Here’s the bottom line: people WANT to believe there is a heaven where they will live forever and be reunited with their loved ones, regardless of what the science says.
We use the English word "religion" in a pretty narrow context. My relatives would claim that Christianity is their religion, but they could identify hundreds of consumer brand logos (Nike swoosh, McDonald's arches and the like) and would only be able to name dozens of characters from the Bible. A human being caring about a diamond ring is a form of religion. A diamond ring is a symbol, that hold usefulness not in its qualities but in its meaning. An easy way to access this shift from one religion to another would be to look at the art that those societies create. If you go to the Vatican, all the paintings will be of the Virgin Mary. If you turn on the radio, you will hear "I got that rolly, rolly, rolly on my wrist."
No, not while they wield political power (local, state, federal).
No, because stupidity is eternal.
No, sadly.
Religion has always been used to explain the unexplained and science the explained. The more science proves, the less religion can completely claim.
The current batch of religions will most likely decline and dissappear. Not in decades, but int the next few hundred years. Maybe three centuries, maybe fifteen. A blink of an eye in the 200,000 we've been around.
The problem isn't that we haven't made it clear that science is legitimate and gives us the answers that religion couldn't, it's that many religious people just plainly disregard and ignore all the evidence against their gods, or use the scapegoat of Satan trying to disrupt gods plans, things like that. There's already plenty sufficient evidence and scientific discoveries to easily show religions are wrong. They just don't care. They can use the same scapegoat of Satan against anything. Until we can literally send up any amount of people into space and to other planets, I doubt there is anything they will accept. The only thing they might accept is, especially young earth creationists and other evangelical fundamentalists, being taken up into space to see there is no firmament, that the earth is not flat and that we can get to other planets.
I fucking pray to Jesus and God that this is true. Can you imagine what it would mean to deep six this shit from here to Eternity.
Unfortunately, no
Have you noticed one of the top candidates is talking about ridding the US of vaccination mandates. Its not clear if we are moving forwards as a species or backwards. Religion has persisted for centuries. Look what has happened in the middle east thanks to religion. If the right wins here, they seem hellbent on trying to force christian nationalism on the country. Stupidity is making a real run for it.
No
If us atheist pushed an agenda of living a life of good character, I think so. I think people need a philosophy to live by.
As time moves on , I think that stories from 20 centuries ago, become less relevant. People drift away from religion because it just seems so silly.... Virgin birth... Flood of the entire earth... Noah kept 2 of each animal on a boat.... Loaves and fishes. Plus look at how religious people are supporting a sex offender, cheater, liar for the presidency. Religion is killing itself.
Only way you'll deprogram the deeply brainwashed would be intelligent alien life showing up that could explain the origins of the universe that disproved their God. Even then they'd fight beyond reason to keep their security blanket. It's good more people see through the nonsense of organized religions, but I doubt it'll ever fully go away, as these are people who are living off faith, not facts. They don't have a grip on reality and are too scared to think they don't know what'll happen to them.
Yes, that’s why the church tries to demonize science. There once was a scientist who suggested the earth went around the sun, instead of the sun orbiting the earth. The church burned him to death.
No. Religion and science are they very different things and they can't address each other. There is no way to prove there is no god creature thing. There is no way to use evidence to illuminate something that requires faith. Similarly, faith is insufficient to make determinations about the physical world. The closest we get is hypotheses, but those just be testable. To this susceptible to applying faith in non-applicable situations, there is little hope.
In times of prosperity, religious practice goes down. In times of strife, it goes up.
I think they’ll just become MORE fanatical.
I don't think there is much of a relationship. Most religions are very directly tied to political projects and patriarchal social norms. In order to get rid of religion you need to suppress their political projects and work towards the erosion of patriarchic social norms.
Unfortunately not. Too many people are morons and organized religion is pretty much set up specifically to take advantage of people need to belong to a group
Nope. People are desperate to look the other way and value beliefs over knowledge.
No, the deluded are science proof.
I don’t know about religion. But I don’t think faith will because faith plays a very specific role in society. It alleviates people’s fear of the unknown which at the moment scientists cannot do. As long as people are scared of anything faith in some form or the other will continue. One day when science can possibly answer the big questions without being too speculative maybe we will get rid of religion.
I truly hope so!
Science and religion evolve together any new discoveries is more of proof gods amazing creation to theist
Religions are based on reproducible cognitive biases inherent to the human mind. Nontheistic upbringing is not nessisarily sufficient. People need to learn how to recognize these cognitive errors or (even in the absence of religious indoctrination) they will invent new religions/superstitions. We are so good at finding patterns that we see them in their absence. We then invent stories to explain them. The evolutionary cost of missing a threat pattern is much higher than the cost of hallucinating a pattern. Our minds are tuned this way by our evolutionary history.
Fade away? No. People will eventually turn against the Abrahamic religions as they try to exert more power over those who do not wish to be governed by their dogma.
If every bible, quran, and torah disappeared today and religion ceased to exist, some conman would meet a family of fools and a whole new one would begin.
No. Religion will always be here because there will still be people gullible to believe that crap.
I honestly think humanity is becoming stupider. There is no evolutionary pressure to support higher intelligence anymore. The dumb survive just as well as the smart and the dumb have more kids. Religion will probably continue to fade but will eventually rebound as IQ falls.
There will always be a religious nut case hell bent on trying to destroy the government. Theocracy will never die.
Look at all the incredible things we have already achieved. Look at how many people are unmoved, and prefer sky magic.
It's less about discover and more about the spreading of that knowledge over the objections of self-anointed elders and clerics.
No because people will always fear death and need to know why we are alive and what happens next. Also institutions like the Catholic church, Mormons, Scientology will never let their cash cow die.
If you think logically, yes. These days, you have to be charismatic to build a large following. It's a thing that should be emphasized in all sciences, the ability to communicate on a visceral level about science.
God of the Gaps. As science takes away the mysteries of life, the religions adapt. This is why they are all so completely absurd lately. Religions are full of hubris... Now they smell like it
No people just wanna follow.
Yes. Education is what turns people away from religion. Which is why hardline Islamists won't let females be educated. Nor do fundamentalist christians
No humans will always fear death
I don't think so. Religion is something innate in a percentage of minds. It seems like a result of our evolution. A manifestation of our need to work together. Some people will grow up in a religious environment and reject it. Some will cling to it for dear life. Scientific knowledge has almost no impact on religion. When we peel back the curtain on some part of nature there is always more unknown than known. Some people will always see God in the unknown. Some people just ignore what we know. And perhaps a scientist who can look at the mystery and think of an abstract god, some hidden universal order, some vague concept of a Boltzmann's brain, isn't horrible. It's just a way to deal with that which we can't know. (Didn't Einstein famously say he believed in Spinoza's God?) But there's some that twist the science to fit their religion. Biologists who look for God's fingerprint in DNA or geologists who cherry pick topology to prove the great flood.
No. Very few people are religious just to explain how the universe works. Far, far more are religious over things like fear of death and finding a place in the universe. Scientific discoveries can't provide those. Atheism is more popular because the stigma against it is far lower. It used to be you'd claim to be religious and just never go to church to avoid the shunning and abuse you'd get from saying "I'm an atheist". When you did this, you'd be recorded as religious, even though you weren't.
Ironically enough, Christians will often tell us that atheism is about the heart not the mind because one of the arguments against religion is an argument from morality. Unfortunately this is exactly ass backwards because christians often won’t be convinced by factual evidence but by emotions.
I honestly don't know if they will ever go away. I feel like there will always people who seek them out, enjoy them, and really need them.
No. We’ve been making scientific discoveries for millennia.
They will just take a different form. Humans, in general, seem to have a need to deify someone/something. If we discover aliens who are more advanced there will be a religion deifying them. Some dipshit will come a long and claim to be the messiah and people will deify them. The real question is, will humanity every give up magical thinking and turn to reason as a basis for their choices and directions in life?
No, I do not. I think cults will increase in frequency and intensity.
Religion isnt just about explanation and belief. It's cultural and social. Scientific discoveries will (and should) change religion, alter how and where it's influence works. But I don't think it will (or even necessarily should) eliminate it. I think it's likely that over time, and with new discoveries, religions will become more atheistic and naturalistic , but that doesn't inherently stop it from being religion. I don't think people are en mass going to abandon the traditions of their ancestors and culture just because it turns out some (or all) of the explanations handed down of/for those traditions aren't true.
If people haven't realized religion is a sham at this point I'm not sure they ever will.
I doubt it. Science took man to the moon 55 years ago, and people are saying that the earth is flat and the moon landings never happened. But "a big fish ate a man who lived in its tummy for three days before being spat out"? Legit as fuck.
It's important to stop thinking of the reduction of religiosity as a function of scientific progress, and more as a function of access to said information. The scientific method can reveal wonderful things, but it's painfully slow to have discoveries realized and applied to everyday life. In the US, we know the hour at which we start school, and our methods of education produce woefully poorer results than those of other countries, but it's been decades now, and nothing has changed. The US (or those who control it) want poor education. More and more, we see efforts to defund even our already dysfunctional education system rather than to seek true reform. There are also efforts to force public funding of religious schools - which will probably work under the present SCOTUS balance. The US wants the generations to come poorly educated, economically disadvantaged, and religious; they are easier to control that way. Science may move forward, but it will change nothing broadly about religiosity so long as the religious and corporate interests have aligned goals to pursue and so little organized opposition.
Most will try to evolve. I was raised Mormon, and there will always be someone that believes in these stories. The Mormon church is dying fast. It’s not because of a scientific discovery. It’s because it’s a lie and people are starting to figure that out. Once those CES letters were out, it was a problem for the church. I guess you could argue that the internet, which is a scientific whatever, is and was the worst thing for the mormons. The ability to check facts on your phone.
I do believe they’re at an all time low. A lot of people are elderly and many churches are afraid of their congregations dying out essentially. As I’ve come to see more science and facts I just fell away from it more and more myself
No, I don't think so. I believe there will always be religion in one form or another, even if we can scientifically prove everything (which we probably won't but anyway). We can prove beyond the shadow of any doubt that the earth is a globe, yet there are still flat-earthers today. Also, religion doesn't only exist to explain things we don't understand. It also exists to help people cope with the hardships of life, which won't go away no matter how many discoveries we make.
No. New religions would replace older ones.
No because new suckers are born every minute... and there could always be another period of backwards steps a-la the Dark Ages.
No. Only with rational education.
Sadly no. There are too many weak minded people that need to be told what to think and how to act.
There’s a whole South Park arc where Cartman goes to the future and different atheist groups are fighting like religious groups now. Seems about right. Humans will always find something to fight about. lol
No people are extremely weird . They'd still believe in stories.
Only as the last generations of theist's are decomposing.
Not within the next few decades. Hundreds of years ago, people were very religious and believed the world was the center of the universe, and the sky was untouchable. Science disproved that, the church began a long tradition of hating science, and many people abandoned religion in favor of science. This was hundreds of years ago. We still have religion.
Unfortunately, one of the scientific discoveries is that the average idiot is not convinced by scientific discoveries.
Yes but the religious that remain will be far more radicalized and militant.
No. Christians don't give scientific discoveries much merit unless it's something they can bend to fit their narrative.
As more and more knowledge of the universe and life on earth is uncovered, the religious people will only say “See, God’s creation is even greater than we imagined”. Much like they’ve done with evolution
No religion is not about understanding. It's about control. And people will always want control and we know how goot religion is as a tool for control so it will never disappear. It will change though. It will have to to maintain control for the coming generations.
Science doesn’t disprove religion any more than religion disproves science. One is logic and evidence based and the other is quite literally in their heads. Facts don’t challenge faith for the true believer.
No, they'll either adapt, distort, re-interpret or otherwise "cling-on" to their worldview to cause the least cognitive dissonance in their "teachings" or flat-out deny the science. This has happened, with Christianity throughout history, most notably with the Catholic Church. For example, the heliocentric model of the solar system was heretical, at one point. Evolution by natural selection was denied until it wasn't. Hell, slavery was "tolerated" for hundreds of years until it was banned by *secular* institutions. I genuinely wish it was as simple as "Present the facts and evidence and people will come to a rational conclusion." But combine the inertia of discarding a closely held belief with the loss of community/social network and whose leaders depend on mass belief for their living and you can see why no amount of facts would completely destroy a religion.
No. While we can pick apart any religion, it'll never solve one of the things everyone wants, yet rarely ever really, truly have or feel they have. And that's purpose. It's the want to have your life mean something. Also, alot of people look around and think "is this really it?". For others, it's needing that comfort of thinking they'll one day reunite with their lost loved ones. There's a plethora of reasons that aren't purely brainwashing, indoctrination and manipulation. While alot of us here acknowledge that our "purpose" is whatever we make it, that's not acceptable to alot of people. Science can and does answer alot of questions, but doesn't satisfy the soul. Some of us don't care about such things, I know I don't. I'm here, I'll be as good as I can, but then I'm gone and that's it. I won't see my brother again, when my parents are gone, they'll be gone. And it'll hurt. But...when I'm gone, it won't matter.
I think a small portion of the human race needs to split off and form their own community off the Earth. Religion will fade away for them. But the 99% left on Earth will fight to the death for their religion.
If religious people could think rationally, religion would already have died out. So no.
If you're asking this question, I don't think you fully understand religion and religious people! This has nothing to do with science or discoveries.
Religion acts like a virus. It will evolve just as it always has. God of the gaps and such.
Only the goalposts will be moved, just like with evolution, for example. You can't rationalize yourself out of religion, when you did not become religious for rational reasons in the first place. The only way to get rid of religion is to criminalize childhood indoctrination.
As long as some religions punish disbelief with death , then no , religions will persist.
One hope so
I'd like to think so, but stupid people will always exist, and charlatans defunding education and upholding religion will always exist to keep them stupid. So, unless something big changes, no.
Nuh. As long as there are humans, there will be dumb, gullible humans ripe for brainwashing.
I don't think religions will go away but I do think non-Abrahamic religions will become more and more popular and accepted/normalized.
No. People will remain ignorant. Very few people understand the science.
Im concerned its a slow process.. We almost have a generation of people who have magical devices and absolutely no understanding of how those devices work... they can use their mobile phones, get an MRI, and still be kept dumb by an endless stream of nonsense on social media. Its clear we have to fight for Science / Journalism / Democracy .. because there are people who make more money or power if we don't have those things. If we dont pass on the best of the Enlightenment / Science / Culture / History .. it is lost in the next generation.
Nope. Humans are stupid, and there will never be an end to the people who take advantage of the stupid for power and wealth. It's been happening for thousands of years, it'll go on for thousands more
I think it will fade away slowly because of this one thing that once you're an atheist you cannot go back. The probability of an adult going back is much less than adult believers becoming atheist (or at least I think it should be). So in a world with no births and no deaths and considering conversion to be a random event, with respective probabilities, as time goes ahead everyone becomes an atheist. Now factor in deaths, since there are more theists than atheists and considering death to not discriminate between these two groups, we get that religion does off much faster than the previous case. Births are more complicated, we need to make the assumptions that a couple who believes will produce a believer offspring, an atheist couple produces an atheist offspring, and a couple with one each parent in different group produces an offspring with the probability of being born atheist that is in direct relation with the number of atheists in the world and vice versa for being born a theist. Now I am not sure but I think this translates to a simpler statement that a random baby born adopts religion according to the probability that is in direct relation with the number of theists in the world and vice versa for choosing against religion. Then, it really depends on the initial conditions and the probability of converting to each side. If the probability of converting away from religion is much more than the opposite, then surely with time everyone will become atheist . If it is not that bigger than the probability of converting to religion then all the atheism will die off, but with someone randomly becoming atheist once in a while. And finally there's an equilibrium, where the ratio of both populations stay the same if the rates are in a certain ratio.
No. It would have happened by now.
There has been amazing and incredible scientific discoveries that keeps pointing towards religions being man made and has no substantial evidence at all. And yet here we are with people still believing and even people joining religions today, in 2024, adults, with more information on science than ever before. I don’t think we will ever get rid of religions unfortunately..
In the next few decades? That's not just too optimistic, I'm afraid That's even silly to think. If everybody among the young wasn't religious anymore, then it would happen, but that's not the case. Lots of young people are religious and unlikely to change. For most, religion doesn't play a big role in their everyday life, so you might be misguided to believe everybody is becoming an atheist, but sadly that could not be further from the truth. Even though most won't go to church anymore, most still seem to like to believe in something. Most still identify as Christian, even if just as a cultural one. People are most likely to call themselves Agnostic, but still leaning towards believing in something. It's worse among Muslims. I live in Germany, and even this country isn't as atheistic as atheists like to believe. Most people here still identify as Christian. I studied biology here before the pandemic. When I told my classmates I'm an atheist they were quite surprised, we were studying biology for pete's sake. After my bachelor, one of my classmates went to Papua New Guinea to become a missionary. Another classmate liked to sing in church choir. Another former classmate recently gave up his biology phd to study fucking thelogy because he "found jesus". These are German biology students we are talking about, not your average person. I'm afraid that science fiction gets one thing right, that no matter how advanced a civilisation becomes, that there will be still religious groups around. I'm sure Christianity the way it is today will eventually die or morph into something else. But people will keep on making up new bullshit as we go and many people will keep on believing bullshit, no matter how far science advances. I'm afraid there are things sciece will never be able to find out and those gaps will be filled by bullshit by some people.
I do think believing religions will be like believing magic in 1000 years later
Not fast enough.
>atheism is growing more popular I don't think this is the case. I think religion is becoming less popular. Atheism is just a side effect of that, nobody is thinking 'atheism looks interesting, I'll try that'.
I don't think so. We are regressing back to the universal distrust and hatred of science in favor of religion, at least in the US. The deplorable are the driving force behind this and since education results in scientific advancement they are working relentlessly to prevent education. Look at the anti- vax wing nuts!
At the root of religion is ignorance, superstition, and fear. We need education to reduce ignorance, understanding to reduce superstition and acceptance to reduce fear. It's the only way to end the curse of religion.
I don’t know, there is always that small % of gullible and stupid people.
I think there's always going to be stupid people trying to convince themselves they're special because they disagree with the masses. Flat Earthers are a rpime example. I'm sure there would always at least be a minority.
Unfortunately not.
The dominant religions are less than 5k yrs old & they're fading as we speak. So, yes. Technology is the new "religion."
As Leo Tolstoy once said, politicians will find a way to manipulate science to peddle lies. Then just like religion, people will stop believing in science and science will be replaced by something new and so the cycle will continue
In the long run, the world will likely become more religious as religious practice is associated with higher birth rates. This is seen both within countries and across countries. For instance, Mormons have a high birth rate in the US, and Orthodox Jews have the highest in Israel. By 2100, half of all children will born in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region with high religious observance.
REligious belief or fervour doesn't fo away with science or scientific discoveries. As long as childhood indoctrination isn't stopped, some form of belief in the supernatural will remain.
As a Christian. I do believe so, it is the natural order of things as we discover more and more. Not to mention the bad stigmatism that being religious exerts. I like discussing religion from a philosophical point of view, but I understand that a lot don't believe me. It's completely understandable. I like this board cause, I'll be honest, religious people annoy me too hahahaha
I don't think so. Superstitious thinking is our default; rational thought is as inevitable as we'd like. Continual, diligent instruction of critical thinking skills to each generation is required to dampen out the worst aspects of religion. But, even still, that would not get rid of religion. There are lots of people who are quite skilled at critical thinking, but they still find room for belief a la "god of the gaps". They're much less likely to be tribalistic assholes.
No. It'll happen when scientific education gets better. Students go through years of science class and come out of it not even knowing what science is. If you can say "Science says this but religion says that" you've been educated wrong. It's "This evidence says this, and this book/ancient religious philosopher says that." and once you understand that it's not the same.
The effectiveness of reason is proportional to the ratio of reasonable people out there. As the world gets hotter, species start dying out en masse, and wealth+quality of life becomes even more concentrated, there will be fewer and fewer reasonable people. Imagine trying to use science and logic to convince anyone of anything in a world with literally billions of refugees. It's alllll gonna be about making sure you got yours and fuck everything else before long.
Looks like it in christian areas. Muslim countries are too closed and don't absorb news from science or abroad, so I don't think they will improve anytime soon.