Religion may not survive the Internet

[Angrboda]

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

— Aldous Huxley


I'd have to agree with John here. It's been observed that because of the sheer volume of material on the internet and in the media, you can go from sunrise to sunset without ever encountering a view which significantly challenges your own. Extreme conservatives can isolate themselves in bubbles of Fox News, WND, conservative blogs, religious and conservative forums, and other conservatively slanted information. Regardless of what narrow-minded group you belong to, you can find a plethora of information just perfect for reinforcing your prejudices. And the problem of media overload — having too many pleasures to choose from — means that many will skip from thing to thing, fix to fix, without ever really making a conscious rational choice. The internet and media might do just as much to bring about a dark age as to relieve us of one.

Beyond that, I'm rather skeptical of the notion that critical thinking, knowing how to know, can be effectively taught. I've been sampling the menu over the past year, but have yet to see any strong evidence that this can be effectively taught. I'm also of the opinion that people don't choose to believe on the basis of primarily rationally considered factors. I'm going to try to make this short. There's this "myth" among rationalists and atheists that the human mind is like a "truth detector" — that it samples and examines its environment, weighing the truth of things, collecting those things that are rationally supported, and discarding those things that are not. It is this sort of implicit model which I think underlies much of the intergroup contempt. If people who believe the things of Christianity have "truth detectors" for minds, then something must explain them not detecting the truth and abandoning their beliefs in favor of something rational. Thus you have rationalists impugning stupidity and delusion (in the sense of mental sickness) to people of religious faith; and probably vice versa. (I have been reminded recently of Drich, who, despite much malignment, is far from unintelligent, has mastered an enormous amount of material relevant to his faith, and is likely as "popular" among atheist debaters on this forum as he is because of his slipperiness in an argument; the extremity of his beliefs is not accompanied by extreme defects in ability to think or reason, at least not by any evidence from his ability to argue. So how does one explain that?) And it's not only religion, in politics, the progressives impugn the thinking ability of conservatives and also the reverse. Substituting a different model of human psychology, one that doesn't put rationality in the driver's seat, removes the paradox. If you replace the driving force which pushes people into beliefs and keeps them there with things that aren't concerned with rationality, the seeming irrationality of other people's beliefs is no longer such a puzzle; people with intelligence and reason can believe strange things because intelligence and reason isn't fundamentally what is guiding their behavior. Everybody, no matter what their beliefs, is convinced they know the truth; and they are all attached to their beliefs by irrational processes. (I think, in general, our minds are biased strongly towards conservatism, towards finding ways to retain what we currently believe, even in the face of contradictory information, and, that this is ultimately a good thing, in terms of the needs of the species.) When people think about human nature, they often marvel at capacities like reasoning and language. However, I think it's instructive to look at species that don't have these capacities if we really want to understand who we are. We are primarily a social species, not a thinking one. If you look at the way such species behave (chimpanzees, wolves, dogs, lions), you see the animal brain stripped of the behaviors that we ordinarily think make us special; don't look at language and rationality: those are the icing on the cake — the bulk of who we are, the cake itself, are these animal behaviors. Language and reason build on top of these kinds of behaviors, they don't replace them. And in that, they do so only incrementally.