Couple of religion items.

(1) The current (Nov. 3) issue of The Economist has a 14-page “special report” on religion worldwide, written (or at any rate, edited—as usual with The Economist, it’s irritatingly unclear) by John Micklethwait. Good coverage of Korea, Africa, Turkey, India. Interesting speculation about the revival of Christianity in Europe (via U.S.-style “privatization”). Some Steynian stress on the demographics, i.e. that more religious populations tend to have more kids.

I don’t know about that. Yes, more religious populations do tend to have more kids. Taking the world as a whole, though, the religious-philoprogenitive peoples have (a) more tribalism and close-kin marriages, (b) lower IQ profiles, and (c) more problems coping with modernity. I suspect that smarts and modernity will triumph over sheer numbers and tribalism, or at least keep them at bay, globally at any rate. Locally, here and there, things might go the other way. (Reading those two sentences, they are not a bad thumbnail sketch of world history this past half millennium.)

And the current cliché, retailed by Micklethwait, that the 21st century will be dominated by religion, is open to serious doubt. It depends what you mean by religion. Our spiritual longings won’t go away as long as we remain human (which some people tell us may not be much longer). That the big old organized religions, with their dogmas and hierarchies, will continue to satisfy them, seems to me not probable. The current fervor in Islam, for instance, may look like the rosy glow of a renewed youth, but I think it is more likely the fever flush of a terminally ill patient. Micklethwait’s account of the Korean megachurches confirmed my own impression that Korean Christianity is a bit too consumerist and faddish to last more than a generation or two. “You don’t see many graveyards in megachurches,” etc.

Assuming we do make it to the end of the century in recognizably human form, and still running our own affairs (as opposed to having them run for us by smart machines or bioengineered superhumans), I think religion will be less of a force in 2100 than in 2000, though perhaps not a lot less. These huge metaphysical conflicts don’t work themselves out in mere decades. The Church-State conflict in medieval Europe rumbled on for 700 years. The State won that one, though more by co-opting the opponent than by annihilating it. The Science-Religion conflict, now well into its third century, still has legs. There are good reasons to think that science is getting the upper hand, though. There is, for example, the Flynn Effect, which Flynn himself, in his new book, seems to think is caused by a slow shift to more “scientific” styles of thinking—more critical, skeptical, classificatory, quantitative.

Micklethwait doesn’t tackle the question I’ve asked a couple of times on this site: Does Jihadism, with its obvious craziness, cruelty, and megalomania, threaten to cast a blight on all religion? Has it generated a new defensiveness among (for example) Christians, illustrated by the obsessive Islamophobia we are getting from some quarters? Has it been an encouraging factor behind the “new atheism” of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchins, and Harris, that has been selling so many books recently?

(2) The “Beyond Belief 2.0″ conference has wrapped up, and we’re waiting for the videos. Meanwhile the commentaries are worth reading, if you like this sort of thing—big names in the human sciences talking and arguing about those sciences (and about some other stuff too—cosmology, for example). Dennett and Harris were both present, though Dawkins and Hitchens apparently not.