Declining Religion?

We’ve posted on this before I know, and a general election has just been called (no doubt more on that later), but this week’s Thinking Allowed has some provocative stuff on secularisation, so I’ll give it a plug here.

Here’s the programme blurb - below. I particularly like the idea that it isn’t just that religion persists alongside science, but the acute observation that some religious thinkers actively seek to ‘impinge’ on science. Hmm, now that really is food for thought.

“The idea that modernity leads to a lessening religious belief is being abandoned by theorists in American and Europe. Figures like Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling argue that increasingly religion seeks to impinge on science, and now the first systematic study of European cultural groups predicts that fundamentalists of all religions are out-breeding moderates and atheists, and will eclipse them quite soon. In Israel the Ultra Orthodox will form the majority as soon as 2050. Since the birth rate of secular people in the West is way below replacement level (2.1), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists of practically any stripe is far above (roughly between 5 and 7.7 children per mother), through the sheer force of demography, academic Eric Kauffman claims they will become a much bigger force in the Western World. Is that inevitable? Should people be worried? Discussants include: The Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, Tariq Ramadan; Eric Kauffman, Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? And Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher and author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God; A Work of Fiction.”