On paper, religion faces a decline never before documented around the world; However, the faith and circumstances that lead millions to believe in a divinity go far beyond surveys and statistical data.
Few thoughts are more powerful than religion. The multitudinous manifestations of faith-based beliefs not only account for the devotion of whole nations to what they consider sacred and that goes through their existence: it also demonstrates the need to believe for millions of people seeking balance, strength or simply a figure to which to entrust oneself in difficult times.
Some more take faith as an even more transcendental issue, which becomes the engine to get up every day and a powerful reason to keep living. Nevertheless and in spite of these manifestations, the statistics affirm that this is the moment of history in which there are fewer people who believe in any God in the whole world.
Since 2005, countries such as Switzerland (21%), France (21%) and the United States (13%) have shown a drastic reduction in the percentage of people considered religious, corresponding to the general tendency of a large-scale survey applied by Gallup in 57 countries around the globe.
"In the last twelve years, religiosity around the world has decreased by 9%, while atheism has increased by 3%."
If this trend is maintained for at least five decades, non-religious people will be the majority and extrapolating such figures for a hundred years, mathematically there would be no more religious people by the beginning of the XXII century. However, the factors that lead people to believe (or not believe) in a divinity are much more complex than the simple interpretation of statistical surveys and numerical trends.
Religion: much more than faith
From its most remote origins, the belief in a supreme order product of a divine will has worked to give certainty to humans in a changing and hostile environment, traits still present but in conditions diametrically opposed to those of a member of a clan that did not understand why it was raining, why its close neighbors became inert at a certain age or how agriculture worked.
In the first place, it is highly probable that religion has functioned as a yardstick that guided human behavior at the dawn of the species and that, at the same time, it managed to maintain a certain social order (through coercion) or, to encourage cooperation between different groups. For some anthropologists like Richard Sosis, the theory of religion as an adaptive feature of humanity can give some clues as to why it is necessary for human coexistence.
The future of religions
Another phenomenon to take into account are wars, catastrophes and other issues on a personal scale that often increase the faith of a given population. Such is the argument of Ara Norenzatán of the University of British Columbia in an interview for BBC Future, author of "Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict" (2013), an analysis similar to that of Sosis that restates the religious question as a necessity inherent to the primal development of society.
Yuval Harari, author of "Sapiens" (2011) and "Homo Deus" (2015), assures that all current religions will disappear and will open the way to a monotheistic and unifying cult as there has never been another in history, dating. Harari believes that the explosion of Big Data will feed the idea that the only certainty is in the algorithms, which will then dominate our lives. However, neither the statistical predictions nor the different theories can be imposed with certainty on the most important factor in any belief: fear, hope and other feelings as human as uncertainty and smallness before the immensity of the Universe.
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