Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Isn't Popular
53 replies, posted
I sincerely recommend reading the article - the tite's a bit click-baity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/
Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees' education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do?
Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that, not with real people.
You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change.
The one that focuses most on refugees, Modeling Religion in Norway (MODRN), is still in its early phases. Led by Shults, it’s funded primarily by the Research Council of Norway, which is counting on the model to offer useful advice on how the Norwegian government can best integrate refugees. Norway is an ideal place to do this research, not only because it’s currently struggling to integrate Syrians, but also because the country has gathered massive data sets on its population. By using them to calibrate his model, Shults can get more accurate and fine-grained predictions, simulating what will happen in a specific city and even a specific neighborhood.
Another project, Forecasting Religiosity and Existential Security with an Agent-Based Model, examines questions about nonbelief: Why aren’t there more atheists? Why is America secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe? Which conditions would speed up the process of secularization—or, conversely, make a population more religious?
Nevertheless, just like Wildman, Shults told me, “I lose sleep at night on this. ... It is social engineering. It just is—there’s no pretending like it’s not.” But he added that other groups, like Cambridge Analytica, are doing this kind of computational work, too. And various bad actors will do it without transparency or public accountability. “It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he and Wildman believe the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
“That’s why our work here is two-pronged: I’m operating as a modeler and as an ethicist,” Wildman said. “It’s the best I can do.”
For the longest time it wasn't popular because when you had a famine or some form of social turmoil it was easier to say "god ordained it suck it up" than it was to admit your government was trash.
No shit its unpopular today because not believing in a god is still taboo and having to own up to our own mistakes and the realities of our decisions is a lot harder than just saying "god ordained it". Religion is one of the many ways of altering our perception of it to make it more tolerable. Reality is a scary thing and it takes an ubermensch to accept it for what it is and stand by it.
Since the year 1900 atheism has grown more than any religion, or religious group, globally.
I think that trend isn't likely to change as long as we keep getting access to more information.
It's will take couple more centuries to make Atheism more popular for around the world.
But for now, only most secular Western countries will have atheism to flourish in matter of decades.
Disagreement proof below:
http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/
Yes, As long countries have semi or full diehard Theocracies and ones have State Religions will dictated Internet, Most religions like Islam will be still existed.
Statistical evidence accumulated by Stephen Pinker in the book "Enlightment Now" shows that without a doubt, religiousity is decreasing globally, even in muslim nations.
The article I posted mentions some key factors that correlate with the rise in secularism:
Shults’s team tackled these questions using data from the International Social Survey Program conducted between 1991 and 1998. They initialized the model in 1998 and then allowed it to run all the way through 2008. “We were able to predict from that 1998 data—in 22 different countries in Europe, and Japan—whether and how belief in heaven and hell, belief in God, and religious attendance would go up and down over a 10-year period. We were able to predict this in some cases up to three times more accurately than linear regression analysis,” Shults said, referring to a general-purpose method of prediction that prior to the team’s work was the best alternative.
Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (FOREST), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe.
“The U.S. has found ways to limit the effects of education by keeping it local, and in private schools, anything can happen,” said Shults’s collaborator, Wesley Wildman, a professor of philosophy and ethics at Boston University. “Lately, there’s been encouragement from the highest levels of government to take a less than welcoming cultural attitude to pluralism. These are forms of resistance to secularization.”
Basically the way we're measuring this stuff is changing to become more accurate, and while secularism is rising, there are factors that can slow or reverse the rise of seculairsm. The more educated, safe, free and open to diversity a population is, the more likely that population will trend toward atheism.
We're also getting better at determining factors that cause religious groups to become xenophobically violent:
Another project, Mutually Escalating Religious Violence (MERV), aims to identify which conditions make xenophobic anxiety between two different religious groups likely to spiral out of control. As they built this model, the team brought in an outside expert: Monica Toft, an international-relations scholar with no experience in computational modeling but a wealth of expertise in religious extremism.
MERV shows that mutually escalating violence is likeliest to occur if there’s a small disparity in size between the majority and minority groups (less than a 70/30 split) and if agents experience out-group members as social and contagion threats (they worry that others will be invasive or infectious). It’s much less likely to occur if there’s a large disparity in size or if the threats agents are experiencing are mostly related to predators or natural hazards.
This might sound intuitive, but having quantitative, empirical data to support social-science hypotheses can help convince policymakers of when and how to act if they want to prevent future outbreaks of violence. And once a model has been shown to track with real-world historical examples, scientists can more plausibly argue that it will yield a trustworthy recommendation when it’s fed new situations. Asked what MERV has to offer us, Toft said, “We can stop these dynamics. We do not need to allow them to spiral out of control.”
There's definitely some ethical concerns with this kind of data in terms of how it's acted upon, but overall I think these methods are pretty interesting
"Not believing in a god is still taboo" is such a sad, pathetic statement and I'm glad it's not the case where I live.
actually it's not taboo here
I'm glad we're beyond the "atheism is just being edgy" thing
In all my years I have met around 3 Christians in day to day life that were not there trying to preach something, all my friends parents are non believers, all my friends are non believers, as far as I know all THEIR friends are non atheist.
Might come to a surprise to an American but I'm actually a little shocked if I meet a Christian my age here.
It's a different story with immigrants of course, lota African Christians and Muslims from elsewhere.
Which was just something invented to shut down atheists.
"It's just a phase!"
Maybe teenage rebelliousness, questioning the "obvious", and a distrust for authority figures can also extend to magic cloud man as well???
When it comes to the US, when you look at their films and sometimes the weird shit they say about things, Christians appear to have this weird fantasy of being prosecuted by athiests and proven right by some divine intervention or something, where athiests are all evil and hateful and they end up converting everyone.
When in reality its the total opposite, and Christians act like total cunts to athiests and LGBT, and Christians are the majority.
Just watch 'Gods not dead', it's like everyone lives in fucking opposite land.
I edited it to say the 'really vocal' since you're right it's not the majority.
There are some politicians however try and make 'war on religion' a thing though for certain, because it benefits them when they can use that line.
it does seem like a huge number of them though don't really understand why or how someone can be atheist. It seems they misinterpret 'not believing' as 'rejecting'.
I remember my history teacher told us in a passionate rant that we should never elect an atheist into public office because atheists have no morals and would have no problem shooting someone in a head (yes, that is the actual example he chose), whereas Christians answer to a higher power and thus have to have morals.
You may be unsurprised to learn yes, he was a baby boomer
He's right because Stalin was an Athiest.
Now that you say that I think that was exactly what got him started on that rant
That's because a lot of religious folks seem to be under the mistaken notion that religion and morality are the same thing and that it's impossible to have morals and ethics without being religious.
All this talk of crazy religious people and I grew UU.
Every time someone makes this argument, a valid response is "So you are saying that without god, you would go out and murder and rape people without hesitation or thought"
Imagine, hypothetically, if every religion in the world was erased from the minds of every person in an instant. Would there be an increase or a decrease in the atrocities people commit against each other? Would everyone suddenly revert to a state of amorality?
Considering we haven't seen a correlation between the rise of crime and the rise of secularism, I'm gonna say probably not.
Erasing religion (an organized thought-structure) alone doesn't really do much when it comes to erasing the consciously and unconsciously held ethical values which said religions sometimes provide a justification for. As long as society exists and is actively maintained there will be some vague form of culturally instilled and internalized morality for all but those deliberately against such things. Removing one fetter on all individuals does not automatically remove those other, more secular ones.
Ahh, the old classic "Religion is only for dumb people who cannot accept reality argument" and literally, unironically using the term "Übermensch" when referring to yourself. snap
This argument is so tired and so overused that it's annoying to even justify it with a response. It reeks of someone who has just surface knowledge of religion taken from either tertiary sources or atheistic sources. No, religion isn't for those who are inferior to you who can't accept the world we live in. Do you honestly have no idea of recent history? The Civil Rights Movement was headed by Black Churches, Martin Luther King was a priest for God's sake. Does the Nation of Islam ring a bell? Sure they bastardized Islam so much that they could hardly be considered Islamic, but it was still a group of oppressed people standing up to the status quo and trying to change their world by using religion. One of the greatest opposers to Nazi government were the German Catholic churches who hid Jews in their basements and had their priests sent to Death Camps.
The fact that your seriously unintellectual notion that religion is only for the weak minded who accept anything given to them was so agreed with by this forum shows a serious lack of widespread knowledge about how people practice their religion. It's regrettable that these easily debunkable notions are so widespread and I wish all those who agree with your ideas would do their research.
You assumed all of this. I am no where near an Ubermensch, for that is the title of those individuals who have changed society to their own form of it. I am but a peon compared to those of the likes of Ford, Bezos, Bismark or Peter the Great. Secondly I think if people want to worship a god that's totally fine by me. Woe to those who use religion for selfish gain though.
I have a very similar view of religion as yours, In the modern age churches, mosques, and other places of worship have done nothing but good for a vast majority of people but I hold that religion fundamentally was developed to help us understand the world without a microscope. Regardless of this I will hug you no matter what God you worship or don't.
If you'd like to learn more about my mindset towards religion I can safely say i'm in the mu'tazzila catagory just with more Christ and less Muhammad, more on that here.
Religion is made less important by the knowledge of how the world works in actuality.
Religion isn't something I have any issue with, I think the communal aspects of church and etc are wonderful but none of the background information about religion is really valuable to our world. Parables and stories are great, but many religious groups take their texts literally and thus those parables and stories are rendered into literal tales that suddenly lose a lot of meaning or value.
I don't get the idea we need to value religion inherently as you seem to be suggesting. We don't.
I think you'll see that trend go in the opposite direction eventually. The birthrate among atheists is significantly lower than that of religious people.
Source - Religious 'nones' projected to decline as share of world populat..
You act as if an increase in world knowledge corresponds with a decrease in religiosity. This is just not the case as there are innumerable numbers of influential scientists who are religious even in our modern world. I detest the literal interpretations of religious texts too, but I understand that they are a minority who are shunned by reputable theologians.
I never said that everyone must value religion inherently, I was attacking the seemingly accepted on here notion that religion is only for those who cannot accept the world they live in and that they just accept what's done to them as an act of God. Not only is this wrong is a rational sense as watering down the diverse beleifs of a majority of the world's population into an easy, one sentence phrase is just plain stupid, and it is wrong in the literal, historical sense as there have been many groups centered around religion that have enacted change in the world.
Innumerable scientists? Hmm last I checked the first scientists were Mu'tazzilites who believed firmly in Reason over revelation which then continued in renaissance Europe after they we're stamped out by religious fundamentalists. Sure they believed in a God but reason was who they answered to in their monasteries of logic.
Now whats wrong with not accepting the world we live in? It's a nasty, brutish place full of diseases and sharp things, some sharp things even have legs, eyes and even brains to help them stab you. Not accepting the world we live in led us to build cities, society and yes religion. living in denial is an essential part the human condition. Now some people live in denial of the future and would prefer to change things to the past, that is what I'm concerned about.
I already did that. So stop copying me.
Sure there are educated scientists who are religious. I didn't dispute that.
But yes.
An increase in knowledge does result in a net decrease in religiousity. You may feel this isn't true. But as I stated earlier, it is the case, and it has been statistically correlated to that. I do not think education causes people to be less religious. It's just correlated with it.
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