The return of religion

It has seemed to me intuitively for quite some time that irrationality is on the rise. It seems harder and harder to find a person on the streets or a television program or a website exhibiting anything like logic, while it is a trivial task to find someone who believes in gods and other supernatural phenomena. Lately though I have been reading reports of studies actually confirming this to be true. The fall of Communism has sparked a comeback of traditional religions in Eastern Europe. Orthodox Judaism and Fundamental Islam are fluorishing. And Evangelical Christianity wields more power in the USA today than it has enjoyed in a century.

My theory is that religion is back on the rise after several centuries of decline (and the concurrent rise of reason) in part because science itself no longer offers a reassuringly rational view of the universe. In the classical, clockwork model that carried science from the dawn of Enlightenment to the early part of 20th century, many people no doubt found a suitable replacement for their old world view, provided by religion. But quantum theory changed all that. Uncertainty and unpredictability seem to be the rule at the smallest scales of reality, and thus all the seeming order at the scale we live our lives is built upon a ghostly foundation where anything's possible.

Of course, that's not really the truth either, and the flow of cause and event can still be considered deterministic if we loosen up our definition a bit. A bit like "vector" graphics versus "bitmaps," the paradigm of infinitely small scalability of physical law has been replaced by a new model of concretism and irreducibility. But if the laws defining such a system are quantized and fuzzy, they still yield predictable results higher up the scale. That is, we can still use the classical mathematical models of Newton today in all but the most extreme environments (small, hot, cold, fast), because the statistical nature of the underpinnings is too inconseqential at everyday scales to have to be accounted for.

Obviously, none of this discussion reaches the ears of the vast majority. Most don't even know what quantum physics is. But my guess is they sense the shift in the wind. It's enough that the face that science presents to the world has gotten stranger and stranger. People read newspaper articles (grossly simplified and distorted by a scientifically-illiterate media, but that is meat for another post) about how the universe was created and will someday die out, about matter being in two places at once or no place at all, about creation from nothing, about parallel universes. It's gotten so that even specialists don't pretend to conceptually understand or accept everything, but still have faith in the mathematics underpinning their ideas. How is this different from religion? Has science met its end not by running into a brick wall but by riding off into a sunset of increasing complexity? Is the universe just too hard to understand?

I don't know why anyone would imagine we could understand it. If our understanding of evolution is correct, our intelligence developed along with bipedlaism and opposable thumbs as a tool for survival. At the time, survival meant gathering berries and chipping away at rocks, not constructing rockets and skyscrapers and certainly not mastering our own genetic blueprints and speculating on the nature of reality itself. Why should our minds be capable of these tasks? Why should we believe that reality is something that can be grasped? Maybe it's just smoothly sliding scales of complexity without end. Maybe, indeed, it's turtles all the way down.

I believe this shift in science is one reason that religion is on the rise. There are surely others: multinationalism sweeping quickly into traditional areas has caused great social upheaval. People cannot resist cell phones, but with such technology comes an erosion of their old values. They see their children growing up in a way that is alien to them. Gender roles are questioned. Taboos are breached. It's no surprise that many of these cultures are rejecting the change in as vehement a way as they can muster, by hurling themselves back into the comforts of their traditional belief system. In the case of missionary religions like Mormonism, for example, cultures whose own beliefs have been made to seem irrelevant may even adopt those of another, as long as it provides a comforting world view and a way of life that is closer to what they have been raised to know. Even those of use who have cast off the mantle of faith and thrown in our lot with empiricism have a love/hate relationship with it. At least I do. How much more comfortable to have things mapped out, revealed to you rather than waiting to be found. And to be free of all the uncertainty and ambiguity that a scientific mentality necessitates.

In the end I think I understand many of the reasons people are drawn to religion. I still reject them for myself because apparently I was born with a mind that is incapable of accepting something without proof. It's my belief that the more you see, the more different systems of thought you are exposed to, the less likely that you'll then latch on to any particular one of them as "truth." But for most of the planet, who have not traveled and not been exposed to that diversity of opinion, it is still all too easy to fall back on the comforts of tradition.