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Hemant Mehta, the "friendly atheist" in his blog and this week's Reader, is congenial by temperament, heritage, and strategy. (He's speaking tonight at the Barbara's near UIC.) But that attitude also reflects his confidence that extreme fundamentalism will die out soon, and that supernatural belief will too, eventually.
Is this confidence justified? He says kids these days are too well-educated to fall for religious hoo-ha. The Pew Center has some evidence in that direction: of those born before 1946, 5 percent call themselves agnostic, atheist, or nonreligious. That percentage increases to 11 among those born 1946-64, 14 among those born 1965-76, and 19 among Mehta's generation, born since 1977.
But at this rate it will be a couple of centuries before believers are the same-size minority atheists are today. And trends of this sort have been reversed in the past.
and otherwise. Recently updated blogs are in bold text.
Actually decades, not centuries -- that's a rather steep rate of social change. Basically a doubling in a single generation and then another doubling over the course of two more generations. Projecting the same function forward would give us something like 35% atheists in the generation born starting around 10 years from today, and nonbelievers as a majority in the generation that's born starting maybe 2040.
Doubling is a powerful multiplier no matter what base you start from, like the old parlor trick about trying to fold a sheet of paper in half more than a few times.
Something as common as another Billy Graham Crusade, or an ecunemical agreement between Catholics and Lutherans would press trends in the opposite direction, much as has happened throughout Christian History.
JBP
You could have written that in Ireland 1802, Mexico in 1936 etc (when conditions were much less favorable, Church attendance lower, number of clergy relatively smaller) for a religious revival than today.
JBP
As to the historical question, of course, I can’t provide nor do I believe one could create an objective metric to measure the pros and cons of theism and atheism in human history. What purpose would this serve anyway? It certainly wouldn’t have any necessary connection to whether the supernatural is a metaphysical reality or not. In other words, suppose someone does comes up with this measure and shows conclusively that religion has caused more harm than good. While that’s not exactly a gold star for religion, it doesn’t have any necessary connection to whether or not religion taps into a supernatural reality.
I enjoy your blog and will try to check it more often.
To quote the father of Waugh's Guy Crouchback, God's love is not quantitative.
JBP
I would like to think that everyone agreed that the question of the truth of supernatural beliefs is an entirely separate question from the question of whether they've been a net positive for humanity or not. But they're both interesting and people keep trying to answer them both anyway. I find it perplexing that the second question seems all but unanswerable, yet it has the look and feel of a straightforward empirical question -- whereas from my point of view the first question is easily answered in the negative, while it has the look and feel of a hopelessly unanswerable one!