So, let’s take this hypothetical (harrumph) youth. They see irrationality around them, obvious and immense, they see the waste and the pain it causes. They’d like to do something about it. How would you advise them to go about it?
I think math, science, and engineering education is likely very corrosive to religious belief. Seeing that things behave the way they do regardless of what anyone important thinks, and that you can figure it out, is likely a huge blow to religious thought (and intellectual authority in general). The world is no longer run by a magical will, it is a mechanism that runs according to its physical regularities. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the enlightenment and the deistic clockwork universe came hand in hand.
On the authority point, I think it was Ian Hacking in The Emergence of Probability that traced out the changing meaning of “probable”. Long ago, it meant something like “attested to by an authoritative source”, and then changed to meaning “supported by evidence”. That’s a significant jump in my mind.
Teach people science and math, and they’ll be able to figure out the rest. God is the explanation when you lack a better one.
I think math, science, and engineering education is likely very corrosive to religious belief. Seeing that things behave the way they do regardless of what anyone important thinks, and that you can figure it out, is likely a huge blow to religious thought (and intellectual authority in general). The world is no longer run by a magical will, it is a mechanism that runs according to its physical regularities. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the enlightenment and the deistic clockwork universe came hand in hand.
On the authority point, I think it was Ian Hacking in The Emergence of Probability that traced out the changing meaning of “probable”. Long ago, it meant something like “attested to by an authoritative source”, and then changed to meaning “supported by evidence”. That’s a significant jump in my mind.
Teach people science and math, and they’ll be able to figure out the rest. God is the explanation when you lack a better one.
People do have an astoundingly aggravating ability to compartimentalize these things, though: see “Outside The Laboratory”.