Here’s a provocative idea from Gregory Paul: the churches are dying.
One might think that the religion in its vast array of guises continues to be a potent force in human societies. And of course in some ways it remains so, especially in the conservative, reactionary, often proautocracy, sometimes violent flavors that are causing so much trouble around today’s world – think of the Russian Orthodox church in bed with Putin and his war, and the Evangelical driven MAGA fast working to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy. But at the same time theism is in grave crisis as it suffers enormous losses in popularity in much of the world. Most of the first world has been highly secularized for decades. Even the United States, long thought the last bastion of popular western religion Christianity especially, is seeing the churches losing ground like a downhill skier, with membership down forty percent since the turn of the century to under half the population, The Southern Baptists are shrinking, those who do not believe in God were a mere few percent when Ike was president, hit near a tenth in the 2000s, and are nearly a fifth if not more these days. Bible literalism is down to a fifth as creationism is slipping, while support for evolutionary science grows. As Ronald Inglehart detailed in Religion’s Sudden Decline, theism is in big demographic trouble in much of the second and third worlds as well. So much so that about half of the people of the globe and even more among Americans no longer think religion has the answers to societies problems.
An anecdotal observation in support of this idea is that I’m seeing a lot of strident, desperate apologetics in my in-box and online, and all of it is stupid. Seriously. William Lane Craig? Lee Strobel? Josh McDowell? Frank Turek? Greg Koukl? These people are the worst, and their arguments are all old and tired. Then there are there followers, who are even worse.
It would be nice to imagine that people are finally waking up, that there is new wave of rationalism that is causing people to abandon old dogmas, that atheism is finally winning. Paul makes a case that that helps, but that it can’t be the main impetus for people losing their religion. Just look around you — is MAGA a rational movement? Is the American government a shining beacon of reason?
Paul argues that there is something else driving people out of the churches.
But there is another aspect of modernity that is giving popular religion a sucker punch in its vulnerable supernaturalistic belly, an item as far as I know what not been discussed to date. And that secularization force is….
Aliens.
Especially, ancient aliens.
Not actual ancient aliens that visited our pretty little planet in ancient times and in the process set up human civilizations while being mistaken for the gods that silly people then worship. The possibility that they really existed being very, very minimal to say the most. It’s the new, thrilling and hip belief in ancient astronauts, the exciting new and modern creation myth, that is helping wreck that old timey, yawn inducing religion.
He points out lots of circumstantial evidence for that. There’s this new wave of gullibility demonstrated in popular TV programming. How can Ancient Aliens be so popular? I tried watching Graham Hancock once, and couldn’t cope with his combination of ignorance and confidence. Science fiction and fantasy have taken over the movies, which us SF fans might think is benign, except we aren’t wondering why people flocked to Star Wars.
Paul is also a science popularizer, and he’s running into a rising class of inquiry. Did ancient aliens kill the dinosaurs? That’s a question I never even thought of until now.
While flat earth geography remains fringe, AA is transforming the culture. When folks learn I research dinosaurs they often ask me the Big Four – are birds dinosaurs (yes like bats are flying mammals), were dinosaurs warm-blooded (yep), how do we know what color they were (we usually don’t, but of late preserved color pigments are giving us clues), and did the asteroid really kill them off (looks like, although massive volcanism going on down in India may have played a role). But I have of late received a new query. It starts with the asker looking at me as if I am going to tell them the real truth! So they make the ask. Was it aliens that actually killed off the dinosaurs to clear the way for humanity? I say no – can then see their disappointment that I am part of the conspiracy to hide the plain truth – and proceed to explain why the documentary biz is all about making money in part based on my personal experience and they don’t care what kind of schlock goods they put out as long as it generates revenue from the viewers whose interests are low on their priority list. I hope to at least sow some seeds of doubt. Worth a shot.
Come to think of it, I was also surprised by how many people have asked me whether octopus were of alien origin, an idea I would never have taken seriously.
One thing about religion in the USA is that, while the percentage of people who are churchgoing Christians is decreasing, the percentage of the churchgoers who follow fundamentalist or at least conservative versions of Christianity is increasing. The really big losers are the moderate or liberal churches, who are losing lots of people both to the non-religious side and to the fundamentalist side.
Another problem is that as it becomes more and more clear that they will not be able to get a majority of the population to agree with them, fundamentalist and ultra-conservative Christians are more likely to support authoritarian measures to control society in ways that they believe reflect god’s will. An even bigger problem is that there are often enough non-religious people who share their prejudices to give them a majority.
a decade or two back, I met? talked to? a person who, when the topic of religion came up, said something along the lines of “I can’t be religious since I believe in aliens” and I was so confused…
Later bits came up like “aliens mated with gorillas and that’s how humans were created” and something about aliens building a nuclear reactor in Africa
But…don’t they know that the “aliens” who abduct people are really demons in disguise?
Also, dont be fooled by those round-earthers and their propaganda.
A long time ago, when I thought I might try writing science fiction, I had this idea for a story: Humanity’s first interstellar explorers of habitable worlds find… dinosaurs, more or less. Over and over, one world after another. Finally, there’s one exception… Anyway, long (unwritten) story short, the humans end up sending an asteroid to kill off the dinosaurs on one of these worlds, in hopes of kickstarting an age of mammals there. Now, in reality, I know that evolution is highly contingent, and it’s absurdly unlikely for another world’s evolution to be that parallel to ours, and even less likely for such a crude “remedy” to work out as intended. But… story. (Also, “unwritten”.)
Anyway, I never wrote that story, or told anyone about it, until just now; and I never heard of anyone thinking that could’ve actually been our own past, also until now. (Even in the story, no one thought that.)
That doesn’t sound right to me. I thought there was big overlap between the conspiracy theory crowd and the fundamentalist crowd. They just believe all the things, so why would one belief push another out?
I mean, really we just need polling information.
‘I’m not saying it was aliens… but it was aliens.’
I might also wonder and wish there was (decent) polling – how many that left the church also just left politics? Having lost their faith in, well, faith, did they lose their faith in everything, including voting and other aspects that have involvement and, dare I suggest, ‘hope’?
a 20% loss in the big churches should have resulted in a much bigger election demographic shift against the GOP’s embrace of the religion these people are leaving…but we clearly didn’t see it in the 2024 election. So is this demographic leaving the evangelical churches also part of that huge 1/3rd of the country that didn’t vote, because they just gave up on everything?
Nemo @4: I once read (but couldn’t finish) a book where a technologically advanced civilization feared competition from upstarts, so was scanning the galaxy for signs of life, and anywhere they found them they lobbed an asteroid at that world with the intent of destroying all life there. Every once in a while their program went back to examine how successful their effort was and repeated the operation if needed.
it’s my personal belief that it isn’t aliens but, rather, the Avengers. after all, who needs gods when the earth is being protected by The Hulk, Dr. Strange, and that dude who shoots arrows.
convince me otherwise.
Why would aliens go to the trouble of lobbing a big asteroid at a planet, when they can just engineer a virus that turns the brains of ~23% of the dominant species to violent irrational ignorant mush? At minimum crippling that species’ development, maybe even getting them to ‘self-deport’ from existence?
It’s not a perfect plan, it needs to be subtle, otherwise the non-infected population will eliminate the infected ones and survive.
PRO TIP: they wear MAGA hats.
All this asteroid talk reminds me of Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Bios, about humans attempting to settle on a very Earth-like planet – except that it orbited near a super-jovian world that swept up all the flying mountains so that the smaller planet never experienced an ecological reset.
Therefore, [Spoiler!] evolution had continued primarily on a micro-organismic scale, producing bacteria, viruses, prions, etc, of such sophistication that the Earthlings had no better chance than HG Wells’s Martians.
@2, lochaber: surprise surprise, your alien-worshipping friend was half right!
Not manufactured by aliens, but there was at least one nuc reactor in Africa, way before the one in Chicago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
I think my old boss had some samples from that somewhere (hopefully not in his desk drawer).
All this discussion seems to effectively be about superstition. It resembles the inane childish discussions on ‘the big bang theory’ episodes where they would get caught up in arguing about comic book heroes. Religion is superstition. Superstition is the opposite of rational analytical thinking. Religion is essentially fictitious foolishness.
A more important question is: How is your front yard plumbing project coming, PZ? I assume it was the water line and not the sewer line. If it is the water supply line, it must be a real pain not having running water.
I suspect that exposure to the evangelical MAGA kooks, as it grows, makes religion look increasingly silly to those who are “on the fence” with their theism. I also know that desperate times, which America’s two leaders of Emperor Palpatine and Paypalpatine are working hard to engineer, tends to steer them towards religion. It makes me wonder where the popularity of religion in the US will lie in 5 or 6 years.
Larry @9: Don’t forget Mrs Peel!
Graham Hancock is Ancient Apocalypse
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos is Ancient Aliens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B5_londo.jpg
oops!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Aliens_-_Giorgio_A._Tsoukalos.jpg
Wishful thinking, that article, and it conflates religion with goddism. Bah.
The only reason why Fundamentalist and conservative churches are swamped with people is because they give the people exactly what they want to hear from MAGA hate speeches to creationism crap and everything else that’s entirely all made up by those who get rich off of spreading lies and made up stories and display hypocrisy when they accuse those who speak the truth of everything the fundies are clearly guilty of.
Old school deities sound silly in comparison to the new “scientific” aliens beings who mated with Olmecs and built the Great Pyramid of Giza (because brown skin people just COULDN’T stack blocks with assistance from those more “advanced”). At least, in comparison to the likes of Yahweh of Zeus, there might be intelligent life on other planet and they might be able to travel to other worlds. As astronomically (no pun intended) unlikely as it sounds, ancient aliens sounds a lot more plausible than “magical wizard who lives in the clouds.”
However, whether it’s those who thump the Bible or Erich von Däniken’s screeds, this all stems from the same assumption: Life on Earth just couldn’t have “created” itself. Someone had to do it, and, of course, they had to do it for a “purpose.” That human is a meaningless result of unregulated evolution seems to be an anathema to both groups.
My own feeling is that a huge number of people (the majority perhaps?) live in a world dominated by Clarke’s 3rd law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
People can’t be expected to learn the minutia of how everything works (like, say, the sun). Heck, I know I don’t, but I do know enough to be aware of the general physical processes that things run on and not to ascribe solar fusion to Ra (and if I really want to know the details of the Hydrogen -> Fe chain I can look it up). This applies to everyone – look at how many respected people knowledgeable in one field can talk utter bollocks when pontificating about subjects outside their particular field of expertise.
To many I suspect that taking “on faith” that science can explain things is exactly on a par with taking it “on faith” that religion, or aliens, explain things.
There’s perhaps a failure in education here, but I don’t know how to solve it (it’s not my area of expertise).
@8. anat : “I once read (but couldn’t finish) a book where a technologically advanced civilization feared competition from upstarts, so was scanning the galaxy for signs of life, and anywhere they found them they lobbed an asteroid at that world with the intent of destroying all life there.”
Was that Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski’s novel The Killing Star by any chance? Intresteing read & well written although I don’t know that I overly liked it. A very pessimistic approach to SETI & grim possible answer to the Fermi Paradox. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
“I’m not saying it wa saliens – but that’s a (slightly) better idea than Goddit..”
Nor sure why Americans are becoming less religious, but I suspect attending church has become boring and inconvenient. The Church(s) will need to start apps if they want to get the younger generations hooked. And definitely the alien thing.
They’re not really any less religious, stuffin.
What they are is less likely to go with the formalised religions, so that it’s mainly the truly sheepish who remain with them. springa73 made a good point to that effect @1.
But the wooishness and magical thinking are no less, and I reckon shermanj gets it right regarding superstition.
Quite silly, that is. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_but_not_religious
outis@12– If that sample was just a rock from the Oklo formation, it’s probably only minimally radioactive, especially as the big fission event took place 2 billion years back.
andywuk@21– Agree that it’s impossible even for very scientifically literate people to understand every aspect of modern science and technology and we all have to take some things on authority. But there are still fundamental scientific principles such as conservation of energy, 2LoT, etc., that are (i) observable, (ii) easily teachable, (iii) would help the average person reject many of the more outlandish anti-scientific claims out there such as perpetual motion machines. On the other hand, there is not a single epistemological test that can determine which god or gods are the right ones, let alone if they exist at all.
stuffin@23– My personal feeling (with only indirect evidence) is that the existence of the internet and the increased mobility of people has made it increasingly difficult for religious leaders to immure followers from external information. Having said that, the internet has made it increasingly easy for people to wall themselves off in echo chambers of their own liking — there’s no way the recent spike in flat earth theory among non-biblical literalists would have happened without ready access to online idiocy — so it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
StevoR @22: Not that one, but ‘Flying To Valhalla’ by Pellegrino, seems to have been published a bit before ‘The Killing Star’, so I guess he had been working on that idea for a while.
I’ve been spending some time lately on Reddit, and the UFO and related subreddits are bemusing and kind of depressing. A lot of familiar old stories that were popular when I paid more attention to pseudoscience stuff years ago, often with new details added. A very high level of credulity by many posters, who seem to believe anything someone writes an article/films a video about.(A lot of them are all aflutter this week about supposed ancient gizmos found under one of the Giza pyramids.) And the belief that “disclosure” is imminent.
Alternatively, did the ancient aliens land during the Mesozoic and get eaten by dinosaurs? Since when all aliens have known it’s best to stay away.
PZ is not coming clean about octopuses. While all marine octopus species are the product of terrestrial evolution, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus are not. Not just an extraterrestrial species they are highly intelligent interdimensional beings hiding in our seccade blind spots. With proper training and a modest dose of psychedelic Liberty Cap mushrooms a person can spot them. They are indifferent to human affairs and therefore mostly harmless. /s
Unfortunately, declining church attendance isn’t making the US (or Europe for that matter) any less conservative. Right-wing populism is thriving in many parts of secular Europe, and the religious-based opposition to gay marriage in the US has been replaced by much more secular opposition to trans rights and gender identity politics. “Think of the children!” “Unfair to women!” etc.
The fact that the vast majority of American evangelicals couldn’t care less if Trump’s moral turpitude is the antithesis of everything they claim to believe in as Christians makes it clear they now put their political values way ahead of their religious values.
If they were forced to choose between the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and Trump, a majority of them would choose Trump.
It’s been at least 10 years since I stopped believing that the decline in Christian belief in America would help the US become a more progressive and forward thinking nation. Right-wing evangelicals had no problem embracing conservative Catholics during their culture war against gay marriage, and we’re seeing that they have no issues embracing right-wing atheists and other conservative non-believers (Trump, Musk, et al.) as political bedfellows.
Turns out, the real enemy has been right-wing conservatism all along. Their politics is more deeply entrenched in their psyche than their religious faith, and bigotry and prejudice is doing just fine without that veneer of religiosity we thought was core problem.
Many in our organization have been studying elements of sociology; specifically, why irrational and superstitious thoughts are so prevalent in the human mind. One, of many conclusions we have drawn, is, that since pre-history, humans have had a need to understand the world around them to cope with it (and to survive). People have always needed and tried to find causes for inexplicable events. When (then primitive) reasoning failed, people resorted to wildly grasping for correlations without causation to explain things. This has led to all the religions, arrogant violent push of domination of society (rtwingnuts, fascists, etc.), ‘conspiracy theories’ (chemtrails, alien abduction, deities causing natural disasters because of inadequate veneration by people). I am sure the last is what tRUMP desires to accomplish in his demanding ‘world’ fealty to him as a deity.
The only cure for this madness is to embrace and educate others to embrace rational, critical analytical thinking and reject superstition in all its many forms. However, that cure is one most people don’t even consider, because they don’t have rational analytical minds to begin with. It’s a true uphill battle. PZ and many here are engaged in trying to implement that cure for themselves and others. But, as we have published: ‘You can lead a horses-ass to knowledge, but, you can’t make him think!’ © the Omnigma Organization.
@shermanj: Yeah, I remember having a conversation about the supernatural with my very secular friends — only one occasional church-goer among them — and being very surprised about how many of them had experienced a weird event that led them to believe that something beyond our understanding exists — i.e. they believe in the supernatural.
Now, they don’t base anything in their lives on that belief. As far as I know, none of them reads their horoscope, or consults tea leaves before leaving the house in the morning, it’s just that they remain convinced they have had an experience that something beyond the natural world is required to explain it.
We see this in the “Rise of the Nones” over the last 30 years — only a relatively small percentage of young people who turn away from Christianity become atheists and agnostics. A large majority still describe themselves “spiritual” and range from those who simply believe there’s some kind of supernatural power “up there” in control to those who still pray regularly, but do not identify with any established religion.
Rationality is hard, even for those who readily embrace it. It’s hard for most people to get to grips with the idea of no longer existing when your die, or to get your mind around why there is something rather than nothing. It’s just easier to wrap all those tough questions up in a comfortably neat little parcel and label it “God” or “something up there.”
Also, as I detailed in my comment before yours, this “madness” isn’t cured if religion goes away. Far right atheists have no problem finding non-religious reasons for their prejudices against minorities, and will argue that their positions are the more correct result of critical thinking, and this will continue long after religious thinking has ceased to be the problem.
@32 tacitus wrote: Also, as I detailed in my comment before yours, this “madness” isn’t cured if religion goes away. Far right atheists have no problem finding non-religious reasons for their prejudices against minorities,
I reply: I agree that bigotry can exist in atheist minds. There is no direct link tying rational thought to moral behavior. However, we observe and define two distinct, separate elements of what you label “madness” in the mindsets in question.
1 – superstition vs. rational analytical thought
2 – moral and ethical values systems
We admit that there are many highly rational minds that are moral sewers.
Conversely, we know there are irrational religious people who are quite moral.
@32 tacitus wrote: and being very surprised about how many of them had experienced a weird event that led them to believe that something beyond our understanding exists — i.e. they believe in the supernatural.
I reply: I have seen things that I cannot explain. However, I don’t resort to believing in the supernatural just because my knowledge and reasoning ability is limited. Without using the magic label, I must accept Clarke’s 3rd law is a temptation that i resist: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
@34, in addition to Clarke’s third law there i the quote from Feynman “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
People see and hear things all the time that aren’t really there. Our brains turn external output like darkness and quiet, add in some base fears, and suddenly you are “sure” you saw a monster.
@26. anat : “Not that one, but ‘Flying To Valhalla’ by Pellegrino,..”
Okay, thanks. haven’t read or even heard of that before that I can remember.
FWIW An episode of Ancient Aliens is being broadcast on Aussie TV* in Adelaide right now as I type. Did you know that people carving spirals in stone in non-western cultures ages ago = evidence for eartlly blacks holez!!1ty!! Ancientz Alieeeeens!!ty!!
Oh & you can substitute the words äncient alien theorists” for tinfoil hat wearing crackpots for instant credibilty(~~ish! They hope-fully)! Well, its late and people are credible and.. yeah. Strange shit does happen and don’t necesarily mena that the most bow-stretching non-finanical speculaters would dream and imagine and postulate it does..
.* Proper free to air telly at that.
Strange shit does happen and don’t necesarily mean what the most bow-stretching non-finanical speculators could dream and imagine and postulate it does..
I like some weird ideas and imaginative scenarios and am willing to suspend disbelief to entertain things that might just possibly be so .. be ..yah, limits of that. Seriously Dafuck.
@35. rrutis1 : That’s true.
Ofc it doesn’t automatically mean you didn’t.
For certain values of “monster.”
^ Multiple things can be true all at once includiing both / multiply human minds are flawed and play a lot of tricks and also there’s a lot of strange things we don’t understand out there that science cannot yet explain & as Horatio famously said in the Scottish lay set in tehn supposedly rotten Denmark a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m_mfIon7Gw”>
There are more things in heaven and earth…. (6 & a half mins.)
^ Macbeth meet Hamlet in current mental confsuion and nothern European not so mellow mists and fogs of war and procrastination and madness … a fusion much to be ..des.. something. Reckon the Scottish dude would probly win. But who knows. Shakespeare so they’d probly both die… & have long dying speeches each becoz .. yeah. The bard. Poetic licence. Respect. Despite mockery. Speeches worth hearing too.
@35 wrote: add in some base fears, and suddenly you are “sure” you saw a monster.
I reply: Just look around you. Even in the light of day, we see monsters roaming the countryside laying waste to every good thing. MUMP* cult and their cockroaches are destroying everything they can get their diseased hands on.
Wheeee! a free ride down the death spiral!!
*Professor Timothy Snyder created the term referring to MUsktruMP