DALLAS, USA, March 23, 2011: Organized religion would all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies if current social trends continued, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.The prediction was made based on mathematical modeling using census data of countries.
The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. Dr Wiener said: ‘In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.’