John Brockman runs a website called The Edge. Most (all?) of the contributers are authors and many of them are clients of Brockman. He is, among other things, a literary agent for prominent authors (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond). If you want to understand what The Edge is all about, read Brockman's essay on The Third Culture.Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman have just published an article on The Edge titled WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING. They make some important points that are often overlooked and frequently misrepresented. Here are some quotes ...
It is well documented that Christianity has withered dramatically in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The failure of the faith in the west is regularly denounced by Popes and Protestant leaders. Churches are being converted into libraries, laundromats and pubs. Those who disbelieve in deities typically make up large portions of the population, according to some surveys they make up the majority of citizens in Scandinavia, France and Japan. Evolution is accepted by the majority in all secular nations, up to four in five in some.
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Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth.
As a result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond their control. It is hard to lose one's middle class status in Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarians culture emphasize the attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples' need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life's calamities, help them get what they don't have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven. One of us (Zuckerman) interviewed secular Europeans and verified that the process of secularization is casual; most hardly think about the issue of God, not finding the concept relevant to their contented lives.
The result is plain to see. Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.
[Hat Tip: Brian Larnder at Primordial Blog]
16 comments :
Interesting, although I suspect the conclusion oversimplifies the situation.
I think there may be several causes for the changes in the worldview of the more 'progressive' nations.
Certainly more and more of the 'workings' of nature have been laid open by science and there is less need for supernatural explanations.
Similarly I think that the 'predetermined' social order has been increasingly challenged. The survivors of World War 1, WW2, Vietnam and the Summer of Love have increasing distrust of authority. This has spread to distrust of organised religions, and many people now 'pick and choose' their own spirituality, or dispense with it altogether.
Similarly the spread of social health care, improved health care, unemployment benefits, and pensions has made life safer and more predictable for the ordinary working man (and woman)...
...and finally it has become acceptable, and even fashionable, to consider oneself an individual first, and a member of a church, political party, or social movement a dim second.
No single cause, but many causes braiding together.
NationMaster.com is an invaluable resource for dispelling illusions about the supposedly paradisical nature of the Rest of the West (non-US Western nations). Look at stats for suicide, rape, assault, burglary, cancer deaths, etc. and you will find rates that are competitive with or even exceed the US. Yes, even in Western Europe or enlightened Canada. (Reruns of Corner Gas keeps me up to date on Canadian culture.)
On a more anecdotal note, consider the mayhem around Paris the last few years, whether rioting students or denizens of the 'suburbs' surrounding the city. Or the 'chav'-driven happy slapping and other street crime epidemic in the UK. Or continental Europe's brain drain.
Irreligious? Sure, when it comes to Christianity. But don't you dare attack their homeopathy, vaccine paranoia, or belief in other forms of mumbo jumbo. Europe's Muslims might start slacking off in their faith in a generation or so as well, but they will likely join their fellow Europeans in embracing all kinds of goofy New Age nonsense.
Interesting, I didn't know the history behind The Edge website when I posted that link. It sounds like it's going to be a valuable resource.
It's unclear what the authors believe comes first, increased quality of life or decreased religious influence.
Hi Larry,
Sorry this is off-topic but have you read this new paper in the PNAS?
Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli
Lenski's group actually spent 20 years to test Gould's idea about "replaying the tape of life", and the results support Gould's view - historic contingencies matter and new mutations are critical.
A big blow to the adaptationists.
From "The Edge":
"Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity."
I'm a non-believer. We live in a God-free universe. But I wonder what "disbelief" is, exactly. What do non-believer's believe in and why? That is, I think that the difference between a God-free and God-ridden ideology doesn't reside in absence of "faith" or its presence. Both the free and the unfree "believe"--take on faith. Disbelief is a mere wiping the slate clean. But a clean slate is quite a bore and so non-believers begin to fill in the slate again with their own rather thinly disguised mythologies. Sometimes they mythologize science and pretend to other that somehow science provides an ethical guide, but of course this is nonsense. Science is "mechanical philosophy", good for making better toasters, disposal diapers, aircraft, bombs, mobile phones, etc. etc., but not for guiding human social relations....
What do disbelievers believe?
So the recent quotes of statistics by sundry religious sources have been in error. Dramatically so, I didn't realize disbelief (or perhaps absence of organized religion) had grown two orders of magnitude in a century.
This is all the more encouraging as I'm reminded of TED's Gapminder talk, where the earlier bimodal wealth distribution has now merged into a natural unimodal one. This would tend to speed the process up until it stabilizes.
For myself, I note that as regards US I had been adhering to the idea that early evangelical churches combined with cultural inertia explained the religious statistics. I'm glad to have been offered a better model.
Oh, and I'm also glad that the Edge article debunked the nasty Commonweal article with the latter's recurrent mentioning of "Darwinism" and conflation of biology with just about everything else. (Even Darwin's wife was considered a "gentle Darwinian" for her social support.) An ironic debunking, considering that "darwinian" societies are the most religious.
A big blow to the adaptationists.
This is confusing for a layman; perhaps you could find time to explain. If at least the last of the three involved variations were fixed by selection (and possibly all three for that matter) how can it be such a catastrophe?
Torbjörn Larsson, OM said:
"This is confusing for a layman; perhaps you could find time to explain. If at least the last of the three involved variations were fixed by selection (and possibly all three for that matter) how can it be such a catastrophe?"
12 separate populations of E. coli (which normally cannot use citrate as an energy source under oxic conditions) were grow in identical citrate-rich environments for over 30,000 generations.
All 12 populations were experiencing a declining rate of fitness improvement.
Then, at the 33,127-generation mark, one of the populations was observed to have evolved the ability to use citrate. None of the other 11 populations can do it, even till today (>44,000 generations).
Thus, this evolutionary innovation is produced by mutational change - selection would at best be playing a secondary role in preserving the changes.
Also, it's not clear to me that "possibly all three" of the mutations were fixed by selection, since the authors of the paper stated that:
"We are especially eager to find the potentiating mutation or mutations. We want to know whether the potentiating mutation interacts epistatically with a later mutation to allow expression
of the Cit+ function or, alternatively, whether it was physically required for the later mutation to occur. We also want to test whether the potentiating mutation was itself beneficial or,
alternatively, a neutral or deleterious change that fortuitously hitchhiked to high frequency."
Lim/Hiong (please excuse my ignorance), thanks for your answer.
this evolutionary innovation is produced by mutational change
Oh, I believe I see what you mean now, the historical contingency of these mutations is of importance. Sure, some of the possible mutations were (I'm told) sampled many times over, others were presumably not.
Hmm, I'm not sure what innovation means as regards evolution, except that new traits should be innovation by any definition; I'm not sure about the fuzzy stages in between.
Looks to me from that chart like non-religious' share has shrunk since 1970.
N:
But the quotes from the statistics tells a different story. "[...]"The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000….""
If you look closely, the share has increased relative to others except as against islam. Again, the text has a blurb on that; islam is a religion that grows by population growth which differs from the others.
Quoting growth in raw numbers almost never gives the full story. The number of Christians has quadrupled, but that's not impressive at all when population also quadrupled.
I checked my impression with the numbers.
Population 2000: 6.1 billion
Population 1970: 3.7 billion
Increase: 65%.
Nonbelievers 2000: 918 million
Nonbelievers 1970: 697 million
Increase: 32%.
Huh? It turns out that the numbers you quote aren't the numbers the Edge guys are hyping, they're the numbers the way the Christians count them:
"(The WCE probably understates today's nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)"
For nonbelieving to keep pace with the other religions since 1970, there would have to be 1.15 billion nonbelievers. The fact that the pie piece on the right has a sharper slope than the one on the left, meaning it's shrunk, tells me there aren't.
FWIW, catching up on old threads.
@ Noumenon:
Sure, but my assessment stands as well, when correcting for islam.
Clearly us atheists need to discover the secret of breeding true! :)
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