Optimism
Dennett is optimistic that the powerful mystique of religion is going to fade out – though he also has pessimistic moods when he thinks Martin Rees is right that some whack-job group will do a mass kill with a nuke or a biological weapon. But he says he’s confident that the better thing will happen. I’m not, but I hope I’m wrong.
Why am I confident that this will happen? Mainly because of the asymmetry in the information explosion. With the worldwide spread of information technology…it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working. For every well-publicized victory…there are many less dramatic defeats, as young people quietly walk away from the faith of their parents and grandparents.
Let’s hope so! Bless their electronic little hearts.
Michael Shermer is optimistic that science is winning out over magic and superstition. Well, not at the Grand Canyon, but again, let’s hope he’s right.
Rebecca Goldstein finds it hopeful that novelists are exploring the propositional attitudes of other people.
In one early important experiment (Heider & Simmel 1944), almost every single subject, when shown a short movie consisting of geometrical shapes moving on a screen, attributed propositional attitudes to the shapes. Subsequent research has strengthened the view that our capacity for mental attribution is universal and nearly reflexive—in short, an aspect of human nature.
So we think geometric shapes have minds (of a sort) – that’s interesting. Similar to and no doubt connected with our pattern-seeking habit, and our meaning-imposing tendency, and our anthropomorphic bias, and our need to see causality everywhere. Mind you…I would think that would lead to hostility just as easily as it would lead to harmony – but never mind; I’ll be optimistic for today. Happy new year.
“So we think geometric shapes have minds (of a sort) – that’s interesting. Similar to and no doubt connected with our pattern-seeking habit, and our meaning-imposing tendency, and our anthropomorphic bias, and our need to see causality everywhere.”
More like our need to see intention in causality. (Just a little happy new year nit-pick…)
Oops. Yeah, that’s what I meant. Thanks for the nitpick! More than a nitpick, really – that was a schewpid thing to say. (I could pretend I was having metaphysical thoughts about uncaused events, but…I wasn’t.)
Oh, that these over-optimistic predictions had any chance of being true!
I’m very much afraid that the forces of religious obscurantism and reaction and all the other horrible things represented by blind belief are anything but defeated.
Wait until a really charismatic christian becomes US president in 2016 – and then look out for something very like “Gilead” in The Handmaid’s Tale
Or for Ahmenidjad to get his nukes before he’s overthrown (he is NOT popular at home) and use one on Tel Aviv ……
And a happy “new year” to all our readers!
In the contribution you mention, Dennett writes:
Around the world, the category of “not religious” is growing faster than the Mormons, faster than the evangelicals, faster even than Islam, whose growth is due almost entirely to fecundity, not conversion, and is bound to level off soon.
If this is true it would be the greatest miracle since the Resurrection. Perhaps all the evidential material for this prediction is contained in Dennett’s recent book on religion ‘Breaking the Spell’ (2006) – let’s hope so.
But it is certainly a controversial prophesy, somehwat different from those of other experts, such as Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer. The final chapter of Atran’s superb study ‘In Gods We Trust’ is actually entitled ‘Why Religion Seems Here to Stay’. Pascal Boyer’s ‘Religion Explained’ comes to a similar conclusion. In the final chapter ‘Why belief?’ Boyer argues that there is “… a particular feature of the human mind that creates the whole of religion, a central metaphysical urge that is the origin of all religion, an irredeemable human propensity to superstition, myth and faith, a special emotion that only religion provides, and so on. I can safely predict that there will always be a market for such explanations …”
Perhaps (as Dennett suggests) this ‘market’ will eventually become a minority one, but the demographics would indicate the opposite. Atheists, at any rate, don’t tend to reproduce their species with any great enthusiasm. They don’t go to all THAT much trouble to convert other people either.
When was the last time a devout atheist knocked at your door trying to sell you a copy of ‘The God Delusion’?
So Atran argues that, and Dennett argues something else, so what?
“Atheists, at any rate, don’t tend to reproduce their species with any great enthusiasm.”
Nonsense. They produce fewer and therefore much more robust members of their species, who proceed to prosper and grow fat, while the swarms produced by theists dwindle and pine.
Or to put it another way, countries with high birth rates correlate exactly with countries that are extremely poor and undeveloped. A high birth rate is not a straightforward ticket to reproductive or any other kind of success in the modern world.
I tend to go with the pessimists here, linking Rebecca Goldstein’s interesting comment about propositional atitudes to the seemingly inexhaustible need for most people to look for ‘meaning’ where there isn’t any.
I’ve just finished reading Burkhardt’s ‘The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy’and he notes that the decline of formal religious belief in 16th century Italy did not lead to an increase in the amount of rational thought around but to the spread of astrology, magical thinking, etc. so maybe I’m biased.
Yes, I think the propositional attitudes comment is very interesting and suggestive.
I imagine that’s what’s going on with ID, really: that if you’re going to start with a brute fact – the universe started with a singularity/with a timeless Mind – the brute fact that seems more credible to entities like us is a timeless Mind.
“I can safely predict that there will always be a market for such explanations …” ^2
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Macauley thought the mystique would last-alas-his were historical grounds.
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.