One of my least favorite New York Times columnists, Ross Douthat, thinks the time is ripe for a religious revival because the rise of the 'nones' - people with no religious affiliation - may have momentarily stopped in the USA. See the graph below.
Here's what the Pew Research Center, who made this graph, says:
"After decades of sharp growth, has the rise of these religious “nones” ended? At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, we think it’s too early to tell."
See later posts for details.
All this is very interesting to me - especially since I spend a lot of time in Scotland, which has reached 51% 'nones', and seems a lot nicer than the US. But I'm writing about this because Douthat thinks that religion can be aided by Spencer Klavan’s book “Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating New Science Through Faith". I haven't read it, but apparently it tries to connect quantum mechanics to consciousness, which then... umm... GOD.
Douthat writes:
"This is not just the familiar case that the fine-tuning of the universe is proof that some Divine Intelligence set the whole thing up. It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there is to measure and observe."
No, it's not true that anything has "demonstrated" this.
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Indeed some physicists have argued that consciousness is involved in the so-called 'collapse of the wavefunction' - which is itself quite a murky phrase, by the way. One of the first to argue this was Wigner and one of the more recent was Penrose.
But there's no evidence that consciousness does anything to 'collapse' anything more than an unconscious measuring apparatus does. What we people do, which most measuring apparati don't yet, is talk for hours on end about how what we've measured is really really real. I think that's the main thing going on here. We are complex enough to talk about our internal model of reality, which we call 'reality', and we say something has REALLY happened when it gets incorporated into that model.
Jumping from this to GOD, and hoping that in turn will increase the number of people who join various specific religious organizations, is actually a sign of desperation. "Consciousness collapses the wavefunction, so you should go back to church". Oookay... 🤔
Here is the Pew Research Center's analysis of their polling data:
• Has the rise of religious ‘nones’ come to an end in the U.S.?, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/01/24/has-the-rise-of-religious-nones-come-to-an-end-in-the-us/
Here is a free link to Ross Douthat's article:
• Is the world ready for a religious comeback?, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/19/opinion/religion-atheism-books.html
Try not to fight with each other in the comments. Be nice.
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@johncarlosbaez
Wonder what sort of Christian theology Douthat would get if instead of Copenhagen the believed in the many worlds interpretation 🤔
Or they could try Barbour's related interpretation, where QM is perfectly timless and the universal wavefunction just happens to concentrate on state space points that from the inside look like they are part of a history...
@tobychev - Apparently Kavan's book inveighs against the many worlds interpretation on theological grounds. According to Douthat, who probably doesn't know anything about quantum mechanics:
"This is not just the familiar case that the fine-tuning of the universe is proof that some Divine Intelligence set the whole thing up. It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there is to measure and observe.
Klavan argues that really reckoning with this discovery should force a decisive choice. On the one hand, we can embrace some kind of “multiverse” conceit (popular in today’s pop culture for a reason), in which there is no singular reality and all possibilities somehow coexist. But that yields incoherence, nihilism, the death of the very scientific project that it’s trying to preserve.
Which is why the other choice is preferable, if you really trust the science: Accept that there is only one reality and that it’s “created when consciousness gives shape to time and space” — created in some sense every time we look upon it, and created fundamentally by the Power that said let there be light in the first place."