Do Scientific Advances Make Religion Obsolete?
Hypothesis One: Advances in scientific knowledge and technological innovation in a society contributes to the decline of religiosity (a secularizing trend).
Hypothesis Two: A society lacking in scientific advancement and technological innovation is more likely to practice religion and view religion as irrational, non-rational, emotive, and even pathological in varying degrees.
Possibility #1: Scientific investigation is a different type of rational activity from choosing beliefs and participating in religious rituals and activities.
Possibility #2: Religious beliefs and participation are affectual; habitual; traditional; routinized behavior that is an emotional, habitual response.
Possibility #3: Thinking about abstract concepts such as God, the afterlife, divine beings, requires theoretical reasoning.
Consider the thoughts of Immanuel Kant on religion. Kant argues that no viable argument for God’s existence can be made. Likewise, we cannot prove or disprove a miracle, for its alleged supersensible cause is not something whose conditions are determinable for us. Even if we experience some event whose cause is supersensible, for example, a miracle healing, we have no way whatsoever to establish that this is so, and have nothing to guide our hypotheses about how to test for miracles or how they come to be. Humans cannot prove or disprove God, divine beings such as angels and demons, miracles, and other supernatural phenomena. We can only think about them, imagine them, and rationally create consistent systems of beliefs we call religion.
Consider what David Hume had to say on religion. Like Kant, Hume asserts that sufficient evidence is lacking to prove the existence and nature of God rationally. From an empirical perspective, Hume perceives that it is beyond the rational capacity of humans to comprehend the existence of God on the premise of experiential evidence. Religion as a cultural phenomenon fosters intolerance and persecution of its opponents. It feeds on people’s emotions and fuels psychological states of uncertainty and fear regarding famines, storms, illnesses, and the unpredictability of future events. Religion denigrates people by requiring them to engage in various forms of self-denial. Through its dogmatic and absolutist interpretation of morality, religion permits moral vices such as hypocrisy, fraud and cruelty.
Is religion a combination of possibilities? Why?