Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".
Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."
(Via Chapel Perilous.)
Sadly, an end to religious intolerance and conflict are among the last things I expect to see banished in the readily foreseeable future. And while I welcome a Theory of Everything, there's withering reason to think we'll find it anytime soon. (Even if we did, I think the effects on entrenched religious ideas would be minimal; we've seen religions successfully shrug off far more immediate "death blows," from the realization that the Earth orbits the Sun to the discovery of DNA and genetic engineering.)
5 comments:
This kind of reminds me of the idea floating around futurist circles in the early to mid 20th C, that radio and telecommunications would eventually cause english to displace all other languages and dialects. Not quite the way it worked out, as language continues to mutate almost daily, a process actually sped up by modern telecommunications.
Even now, we see the internet acting as a vector for the transmission of religious ideas and spiritualism - from the benign to the fanatical. The so-called "cartoon riots" were able to spread worldwide in a matter of days thanks to the very technologies the author expects to displace religiosity! I don't see any reason why this would change in the near future.
See the latest episode of "South Park" for my answer to this "getting rid of religion will solve all of our problems" line of thinking. People will continue to fight over something or other for quite awhile.
(S.P. spoiler: In the future, wars are fought over scientific idiologies.)
Keep dreaming philosopher Daniel Dennet.
gotta agree with everyone here. religion isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much some of us might want it to!
And here I thought Denett was smart. Which he is, I suppose, but only in a niche context, apparently.
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