Last month's Economist had a special section "In God's Name" (I've scanned all 18 pages, 3.6 MB, here as a .pdf). Most of the article is "meh" but I liked the refutation of the common claim that Europe is becoming "Eurabia" with some sort of huge takeover by Muslims. They point out:
The second part—the imminent arrival of Eurabia—can be dismissed as poor mathematics. Muslim minorities in Europe are indeed growing fast and causing political friction, but they account for less than 5% of the total population, a tiny proportion by American standards of immigration. Even if that proportion trebles in the next 20 years, Eurabia will still be a long way off.There's much more there to be read, so take a peek.
The more interesting question is whether Christianity will recover. A new book by Philip Jenkins on European religion comes up with some gloomy statistics. Only 20% of Europeans say that God plays an important role in their lives, compared with 60% of Americans. A survey in 2004 found that only 44% of Britons believed in God, whereas 35% (45% among 18-34-year-olds) denied His existence. Only 15% of them go to church each week, against 40% of Americans. Even in the Catholic heartlands of Spain, Italy and Ireland attendance rates have dropped below 20%. And priests are dying out: in Dublin, home to 1m Catholics, precisely one was ordained in 2004.
Secondly, in between the trite mushiness of the New Scientist article from September and the no-holds-barred hard-ass atheism of the AA article by Whittenberger analyzing the logic of the atonement, we find a very worth-reading editorial in New Scientist from 11/10/07, "The Trouble with Reason," and an article, "God's Place in a Rational World."
The article is hosted at the Beyond Belief 2.0 conference website, and covers the event and its context (check out the new videos from the homepage). One of the funnier miscellany had to be the guy who wrote my university physical chemistry text, Peter Atkins, actually having said that atheist scientists should adopt a flag with a Mandelbrot Set on it...oh my. A flag. With a Mandelbrot Set. Wow.
Anyway, one of the things I liked the most with this new article was the focus on the issue of morality and its relationship to empiricism/scientism/science. The question of the evolutionary history and evolutionary purposes of morality are certainly fair game for science. However, jettisoning ethical philosophy because it is non-empirical or pretending that science is sufficient to deal with morality (scientism) are just plain irrational. A few good points were made that help to temper the red-hot passion for the elimination of religion; as Edward Slingerland said:
- Religion is not going away anytime soon (or maybe ever)
- Humans' rights & morality are just as unscientific in nature as God: I've written reams (much of it rambling and repetitive, I'm sure, of what others have already said on the topic) on trying to get my head around morality, and I don't know if I've succeeded or not. Judge for yourself: 1, 2
Lots of scientists are apparently starting to realize this second point by Slingerland, and embrace some forms of "spirituality" in order to explain issues like human meaning & morality given the vacuum left in those areas by science. As to the first point, it seems that Dawkins and all these other guys are still dreaming: religion will be with us as long as art and poetry and beauty will be -- a way to capture the human forms of transcendence and abstractions/ideals we're capable of seeing, but rarely attaining. Religion is beautiful when it's like that, like the dream we don't want to wake up from. On the other hand, atheism has a bit of a "cost" attached with it.
When you look at Atkins' proposal of an atheist "flag" and Kelly's interest in "ending religion," you see that atheists are really on a roll. And that roll is downhill. There is indeed a problem with atheism. Thankfully, the problems with fundamentalist religion are much more grave; deadly, in fact.
