Final answer:
The provided question deals with sociology and how the absence of religion in society impacts societal views. It discusses secularization and its significance in the study of societal structures, incorporating thoughts from famous sociologists and philosophers.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question pertains to the subject of Social Studies, more specifically to the field of sociology, as it addresses the impact of secularization and the decline of religion's influence on societal views and the study of society as a whole.
Historical sociologists like Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, as well as Sigmund Freud, discussed secularization extensively.
.Max Weber particularly noted the shift in societal structures where distinguished clubs could replace Protestant sects as sources of authority or respect, indicating a move away from religious affiliations. This notion aligns with the intellectual movement of positivism, which August Comte proposed to encourage a focus on facts and phenomena that can be empirically proven.
The decline of religiosity in technologically advanced societies relates to the idea that without a prevalent belief in the divine, society would adopt an optimistic, perhaps more permissive outlook, which is a concept examined by philosophers like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as well as being a topic in sociology.