The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

THEU

THEU

2,500+ Posts
I actually picked up this book from my mother-in-law and just started reading through it. I wanted to take one quote from it and see what the wise people of Quacks think.

"In short, the world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time. There was once a confident belief that secular European countries were harbingers for the rest of the world. Religion, it was thought, would thin out from its more robust, supernaturalist forms or die out altogether. But the theory that technological advancement brings inevitable secularization is now being scrapped or radically rethought. Even Europe may not face a secular future, with Christianity growing modestly and Islam growing exponentially." Pg X.

Thoughts?
 
sure - one question though...

having been through europe a few times, i curious as to which countries are "secular?"

i mean, are we talking politically, or are we talking populace wise. because there sure are a lot of christians in europe.

and there sure are a lot of "supernaturalists" everywhere.
 
THEU
Any prior theories that religion would thin out or die out, while not irrational in their structure, were not based on good cognitive science. That is, physical, evolutionarily coherent natural reasoning why religious thought and behavior are ubiquitous among human socieites were not then available. Indeed, that paradigm for considering the topic did not exist.

There are not now full fledged theories within this paradigm. But what work has been done suggests that religious ideas are always and everywhere being created, and the social forces that select and winnow these down to a few, institutionalize them or merge them with current institutions, etc, are also everpresent natural human behaviors.

In short, religion, while its landscape may vary, ain't going anywhere so long as its people we are talking about.

This view is, of course, completely independent of any consideration of religious ideas being themselves right or wrong.
 
There was once a confident belief that secular European countries were harbingers for the rest of the world.

There was? Who said this? Did others agree?

But the theory that technological advancement brings inevitable secularization is now being scrapped or radically rethought.

What theory is this? Is he making stuff up?
 
Perham1, that was a very good article. I especially liked page 11.
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In reply to:
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nbmisha and netslave essentially raise the question of the chicken or the egg. which came first isn't a trivial answer, its The Answer.

I agree with the above stating that evidence of mankind's mental predisposition to believe is a fingerprint of the devine. of course, there are arguments for the usefulness of religion that work even if there is no devine. so its a chicken and the egg type question.

carry on...
 
stat -- if a bunch of christians are running around fully secularized, then they either aren't christians or you are using the term in a manner I don't understand. maybe you mean they are moderate, not radical christians.
 
or maybe that the european governments are not slaves to religious dogma?

honestly, i'm just trying to get at what exactly is meant by "secular European countries."
 
Religion is an irrational human/social construct, a form of codified superstition. But that is part of human nature. People who can truly transcend this is very very rare. Even those who consider themselves not religious are probably superstitious about one thing or another or may hold a belief in a supernatural order of things.In both cases it means that they are religious, albeit in a non-traditional way.

It is possible that the current religions will go away and be replaced by new ones. This has happened many times through out history. Heck, this happens to people on a daily basis. But it would require a fundamental change in human nature (possibly through genetic engineering) for religions to disappear fully.
 
Net
Certainly the big religions of today are very highly iinstitutionalized, with that strength being much more than disappeared religions past. The probablility of the current biggies persisiting is certainly higher than for culturally minor ones, though not 100%.

I think in Dennet's book he references more than 1000 current religions, and many of those will go the way of the dodo, would be a fair guess. Those with the least institutionalization x population impact would be among the least likely to persist, in symmetry to the bigs.

Cultural evolution will go on. One cannot rhetorically or deterministically settle the outcome ahead of time.
 
I think Hitchens puts it well in God is Not Great:
"Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish-thinking. Neither contingency seems very probable." (p. 247)

My thought with regards to that passage is that it is a false statement to assert that the prevailing wisdom of any time was that religion was going to die away. It might have been a vogue thought for a relatively small group of people, but atheism has never really been a statistically-significant force in the Western world (and likely never will be, based on the logic expressed by Freud and Hitchens above).


Statalyzer:

There's quite a huge difference between "secularized" and "atheist".
 
stat - so then I think what you mean by secularized is that the individual religious person doesn't insist upon his or her government being an extension of his or her religious beliefs, or maybe even insists that his or her government be entirely neutral to all religious beliefs. If that is the case, then I think I understand what you mean.
 
stabone, I don't know if I would characterise religion as growing in the US or not. I did notice that in the UMC (of which I am a part) that membership is down, but attendence is up. Depending on the way you look at the data we grew or we shrank. It generally gets reported in the media as something like, "Mainline Denominations continue to decline." That is true, but not the entire story. This is in the midst of the 'mainlines' losing the most people, many either to apathy or to 'evangelical' denominations/churches.
The guy who wrote the book started a church in Manhattan that has an attendence of something like 5,000. The average age in his church is about 30 years of age, and they are mostly single. I haven't read the entire book yet, but I am sure that he has a view where he sees many young, single, urban people who have not been going to church, start to go to church. His church would seem to contradict the majority of what the media reports on. Of course his church could be a mere anamoly.
Because my experience is with the UMC I will talk about it. I know that we are experiencing exponential growth in both Africa and Asia. We have just under 8 million members left in the US (down from something like 16 million at the height), and we will soon have more membership outside the US than inside the US. Africa as a continent sends more missionaries to the US than the US sends to Africa. I don't know where I got that stat, I just know I saw it the other day, so I will look it up later if someone questions it.
China is also seeing exponential growth in Christianity, and South Korea is not majority Christian even though 50-60 years ago they were a very small percentage of the population there. Faith is growing in places. I don't think the growth in uniform in anyway, but people are coming to faith, and people are leaving faith. I would suspect BOTH in near record numbers.
 
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