Of God and global warming: The future of faith and atheism

Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Jefferson, Voltaire. For centuries, a steady stream of heavyweight intellectuals predicted the imminent demise of religion in the face of modernity and scientific progress.[i] Keen cultural observers may note that, here in the second decade of the 21st century, religion persists. What did these thinkers miss?

Those predicting that religion would soon collapse tended to share the view that scientific and intellectual progress would prove incompatible with widespread religious faith. Alas, our best scientific evidence tells us that this simply isn’t how religion or science or atheism work.

How societies secularize

In my recent book Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species (Prometheus Press, 2024), I outline evidence from cognitive science, cultural evolution, developmental psychology, and allied disciplines regarding questions of how religion works and where atheism comes from. The answer to both these puzzles comes down to our species’s most remarkable evolutionary adaptation: culture. How we learn from others, make our own innovations, and then pass that hard-won knowledge on. But we aren’t cultural sponges, absorbing any old information. Instead, we rely on specific learning strategies. These strategies – outlined in more detail in the book – can help explain why humans are the only religious species, and why some religions have colonized the globe. This same theory can tell us how atheism arose and is sustained, and why secularism has been the trend in some – but certainly not all – parts of the globe.

Secularism: Where and why?

Chapter 13 in Disbelief deals with the question of why some societies rapidly secularized over the last 75 years, while most remain strongly religious. Briefly, it’s a two-step process.

First, material changes breed religious complacency[ii]. As countries gain wealth, some chose to invest it in equitable development:  life gets more comfortable and stable, for most folks. One outcome of this is that fervent and public religiosity tends to fade (although plenty of folks retain belief privately). Because humans aren’t innately religious believers, faith is learned from those around us. In a religiously complacent society where public faith fades, cultural learners have fewer and fewer cues that one ought believe in this or that god. Without these clear and consistent cultural cues, the religious signal is less obvious, and atheism naturally emerges across the generations. Via these cultural evolutionary processes (outlined in much greater detail in the book), widespread faith can be replaced by normative atheism in just a few generations, under the right societal conditions.

Central to this theoretical story is the notion that over time, religious beliefs culturally track material conditions.

Secularism throughout the 20th century occurred in most of the wealthiest countries on the planet. Western Europe, populated as it is with former colonial powers that had amassed incredible wealth over the centuries, was well-poised for the material shifts that are the first domino to fall in the cascade of secularism outlined above.

Where did these societies obtain the wealth that fueled their secular shifts? To a first approximation, the wealth of the West (and the Global North, by extension today) was extracted from the rest of the globe, to Western benefit and everyone else’s loss. Widespread adoption of fossil fuels throughout the 19th and 20th centuries only exacerbated these global inequities. In transferring carbon from the ground to the atmosphere, and wealth from Global South to Global North, people created pockets of immense wealth, which not coincidentally became pockets of secular stability[iii]. A map of religion and secularism today is therefore largely a map of colonial and neocolonial wealth transfer over the centuries.

If we want to make solid predictions about the future of religion and atheism over the next couple of centuries, we first need to recognize a very important fact: Secularism doesn’t stem from the scientific and technological advances developed by people with opportunities afforded to few, it stems from the living conditions of the many.

With that in mind, what can we expect from religion and atheism in the century to come?

The status quo possibility: Global chaos and instability, widespread faith, enclaves of affluent atheism

My first prediction. Buckle up, it gets dark.

Over the past century, wealth has been tremendously condensed, to the point that much of global wealth is held by a small number of people, corporations, and countries. One key to unlocking this wealth has been an unprecedented shift of carbon from the earth to the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, keys to global prosperity for a time, have brought us to the brink of climate collapse.

As the warnings our climate sends us become increasingly dire, these warnings go largely unnoticed. A few headlines, from recent years in which we’re stumbling over climate tipping point after climate tipping point: 

-     Texas Paid Bitcoin Miner More Than $31 Million To Cut Energy Usage During Heat Wave

-     Thirsty Data Centers Are Making Hot Summers Even Scarier

These are the headlines of a society deeply and fundamentally unprepared to reap what it’s sown.

Although the wealth made possible by fossil fuels tends to be condensed in the wealthiest countries of the Global North, the dire consequences of climate change will be disproportionately felt in the Global South[iv]. In the words of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò,[v] “As climate impacts accelerate, we can expect them to perversely distribute the costs and burdens of climate change, disproportionately impacting those who have been rendered most vulnerable given the accumulated weight of history.” This is among the sickest ironies imaginable, the coup de merde on several centuries of injustice.

Shit’s going to get very bad, very rapidly, for most humans on the planet. But I expect that pockets of the Global North will remain prosperous and stable, for as long as possible. As the rise of far-right ethnonationalist movements throughout Europe and North America attest, there will be popular political opposition to immigration – wealthy countries will double down, focusing on keeping what’s theirs.

For those of us generationally lucky enough to be housed in areas of close proximity to global wealth, we can expect a degree of stability and security. And in these bubbles, I predict that we’ll see a continuation of decades-old trends towards secularism. Outside these enclaves? Religion will positively thrive. Let down by secular institutions and forced into an increasingly precarious existence, most people on earth will find much appeal in their religions.

So, this possible future is basically the world we see now…only more so. Pockets of wealthy and stable secularism, against a backdrop of global instability and upheaval, and consequentially of religious fervor.

The radical alternative: Equity, climate reprieve, and a future still unwritten

It is hard not to despair about the future of our planet. I do not have a clue what the solution may be – what it would even look like. The more radical shifts that could bring reprieve will likely be social rather than technological. Individual choices add up, especially if they are directed at those powerful enough to force the required policy changes.

On both technological and social fronts, I know what won’t bring the solution: hopelessness.

So, what cause is there for hope?

Our species has shown a remarkable knack for problem solving over the millennia. And the key to our remarkable collective intelligence, our adaptability, lies in our capacity for cumulative culture[vi]. We learn together, innovate together[vii], live or die together. We can culturally evolve solutions to complex problems when we allow different opinions to mingle. Diversity drives innovation[viii]. Solving collective problems means harnessing collective intelligence; it involves bringing people together[ix], to share their different views[x].

Innovation doesn’t come from sole geniuses working in well-funded isolation – that’s a myth sold by self-decreed geniuses. It comes from the serendipitous intermingling of people and ideas, in the synergies produced by them. Because we need all hands on deck, a huge priority needs to be expanding the size and accessibility of that deck. We need to rapidly remove global barriers to participation in science. We need to hugely diversify our talent pools. We simply cannot afford to project an image of science as closed to religious believers – or to women, non-white people, those with less wealth, or the various demographics that have immediately disqualified most humans from scientific pursuits for most of our species’ history.

Each young person on earth today may play a crucial role in averting collapse. Nobody – not a government official, not some tech startup billionaire, not a preacher or teacher or science proselytizer – knows who may have the idea that spurs us collectively towards a much-needed solution. If each mind working towards our future is a ticket in a lottery, with the jackpot being global livability, then we really need to be buying as many tickets as possible. Broadening educational opportunity, leveling inequities, promoting the intermingling of people from more diverse backgrounds – especially those backgrounds historically excluded from the game of science – this is our best chance at finding much-needed solutions. In The Panda’s Thumb,[xi] Steven Jay Gould wrote “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” This is fundamentally the right approach to intellect and innovation, not focusing on individual successes so much as on cultivating conditions conducive to our collective success, across all humanity.

Even if the worst disasters are averted, the future of faith and atheism remains uncertain. Humanity may, with some new technological doodad or geegaw, fix our climate, but in doing so engage in little reflection on how we’ve chosen inequitable systems of wealth and power. This outcome is simply a less violently awful version of my first prediction. Don’t get me wrong…I greatly prefer this version, due to its drastically lower levels of overall suffering. We might still have penguins and polar bears on the other side, and avert billions of human deaths and displacements.

But a true shift towards global secularism will only come with globally equitable reallocation of safety, stability, and security. One would hope that narrowly averting climate-induced societal collapse would spur the type of collective introspection that might lead to an equitable future. But only time will tell. Assuming, that is, we make choices in the coming years to open a future where even mildly good outcomes remain globally possible.

My verdict

Will religion fade away, as learned men over the centuries have predicted? Almost certainly not. Our species simply hasn’t put in the work to create the type of world where religion fades. Instead, we’ve chosen to have pockets of unimaginable wealth (which correspondingly secularize) set against a backdrop of global insecurity, and thus faith.

Religion will never fade from humanity – it’s too ingrained a part of human nature to disappear entirely. But, as outlined in my book, atheism can come quite easily. The future of faith and atheism remain very much unwritten, awaiting societal choices made in the next handful of years.

(Excerpted from Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species, from Prometheus Press. Edited for stand-alone clarity)