> Religious studies fails to make kids more religious
You can definitely make kids believe in religion. There's a reason entire societies in the past held the same religious views.
You can definitely make kids believe in religion. There's a reason entire societies in the past held the same religious views.
And then when they do really believe in it, more often than not rather than “I’ve thought deeply about all the doubts and I can give thoughtful responses to them”, their attitude is more “asking tough questions is a sin”
Of course, even the best possible religious education isn’t going to convince everybody. But when parents ask me if they should worry that sending their kids to Catholic school is going to indoctrinate them in Catholicism, I always reply—based on my personal experience of having spent the majority of my K-12 education at them—that the average Catholic school is more likely to turn your child into an atheist than into a convinced Catholic. And many religious schools of other persuasions do no better
I don't think they went that far with me, but I did get frustration and telling me to stop asking questions. Pretty sure not being able to answer anything I came up with had me thinking it can't be true.
And this was specifically in a religious education class we did once a week at a church separate from school.
If I could go back in a time machine and talk to a younger version of myself, I think I could give far more intelligent answers to my questions than anyone I asked could.
Back in the Middle Ages, many of the smartest people in society ended up working for the Church. That doesn't guarantee they were right, but they were far from simpletons. Someone like Thomas Aquinas, whether he's ultimately right or wrong, he's a much more nuanced thinker than shallow dismissals of mediaeval scholasticism would suggest. And one can make similar remarks about Jewish scholars such as Rambam/Maimonides and Ralbag/Gersonides, or the great Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina/Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd/Averroes and Mulla Sadra. But nowadays, religion struggles to attract people of the same intellectual calibre. Which isn't to say none of them exist, but they are hidden away in remote higher education institutions, and there is a big disconnect between them and your average K-12 religious education teacher. Of course, in the Middle Ages, your village priest/rabbi/imam was unlikely to be anywhere near the level of that era's intellectual giants, but they arguably had less of a disconnect with them too.
You are assuming that the primary purpose of religion is to explain those phenomena which the natural sciences seek to explain – an assumption many reject.
I think your emphasis on evolution in particular shows a particular bias – someone whose idea of religion is centered on 20th century American Fundamentalist Protestantism. Many religious thinkers have absolutely no problem with evolution. Some have even tried to co-opt it – e.g. the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who not only made evolution the centrepiece of his theology, he also was a practising palaeontologist and geologist, who made genuine contributions to the field – he was part of the team excavating the "Peking Man" site near Beijing in the 1920s and 1930s, and discovered there a species of extinct buffalo named after him (Bubalus teilhardi). So he had absolutely no problem with the theory of Darwinian evolution.
Naively it seems like that has changed. We are far less likely to believe in the power of prayer or that god is the proximate cause of events. I don't think that science is the only cause of this change and in fact religion has been a moderating influence sometimes. But science and evolution do seem particularly powerful. It does give an explanation for many of the most important events and feelings in our lives.
But i think we often take those scientific ideas for granted in the modern world. We teach kids to wash their hands and brush their teeth long before they know the lords prayer. So we don't need to look to god for an explanation of why they died of an abscess or dehydration after diarrhea. And if they do die the questions will be narrower. A question of faith more than practical cause and effect.
For many mediaeval philosophers, the primary thing God explained is "why does anything exist at all?" The existence of particular things had natural explanations, which could be studied by natural science – of course, much more primitive in those days, but they would not have had a problem with the latter developments in that field, just as contemporary philosophers who follow them don't either. Whereas, "why does anything exist at all?" is not a question that currently natural science has any consensus explanation for. Yes, it all starts with the Big Bang–but why the Big Bang? Did that happen for some known (or knowable) reason, an unknown reason, an unknowable reason, or no reason at all? At the ultra-speculative fringes of theoretical physics you will find attempts to answer it – e.g. Max Tegmark's ultimate ensemble theory – but that is far from being an established scientific consensus, and many question if it is really science at all, as opposed to philosophy masquerading as physics.
Another thing God explained for the mediaevals is "what is the ultimate source of rationality and ethics?" And those are questions for which I'd argue the natural sciences still don't have established answers, and quite possibly never will have established answers.
> Naively it seems like that has changed
I think there has been less change than you think there has been. Most people today have an overly simplistic model of what educated people one thousand or two thousand years ago believed. One encounters many people who anachronistically assume that mediaeval and ancient Christians had a similar worldview to 20th century American young earth creationists. Even before Christianity, Plato and Aristotle were much closer to today's "sophisticated theology" than the kind of "explanation for why a birds song is beautiful" you are talking about
Most serious Catholics I know agree with this, btw.
For example, the N-years-latee Catholic versus atheist ratio among graduated students, and what we would expect it to be from a secular school after controlling for variables like socioeconomic status and parent's religion.
Yes, data is not the plural of anecdote–but sometimes the anecdotes pile up so high, it becomes rather implausible that the data is going to tell a substantially different story.
I hear this sentiment a lot, but having been in all sorts of church, para-church, and religious education settings, I've never once seen it for myself. I have stumped many tutors in my life, but not once was I chastised for "sinning." Not that my experience is worth more; it's just still very foreign to me.
What I have seen is a severe lack of religious knowledge in most adults. For whatever reason, many of these people don't have the drive to understand things for themselves. This is strange because if you genuinely believe in what you preach, it should be one of the most important things to get right.
I suppose this isn't much different from other aspects of our current culture, though. Most people seem satisfied with an extremely shallow understanding of things.
It describes my own personal experience. No, no one ever explicitly told me "asking hard questions is a sin". But I was sure made to feel like it was, and while maybe that wasn't consciously intended, I suspect it kind of was intended, at least at a less than entirely conscious level
> Most people seem satisfied with an extremely shallow understanding of things.
I'm shocked by the number of professionals who have extremely shallow understandings. Pick a mental health diagnosis at random. Go looking (e.g. on PubMed) for scholarly debates over the scientific validity of that diagnosis – seek, and ye shall find. But, how familiar is the average psychologist or psychiatrist with those debates? In my experience, many who make a whole career specialising in said diagnosis, have never bothered to even go looking for them
https://humanists.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/faith-s...
Australia has been doing that since the 1960s. State governments fund public schools, federal government funds private schools (the majority of which are religious)
The Catholic Church forced them into it by threatening to close its private schools and send all the students to public ones, thereby overwhelming the public school system. They actually temporarily did that in one small Australian city (the “Goulburn school strike” in 1962), [0] just so everyone knew they weren’t bluffing. Their brinkmanship paid off; although the system funds all private schools equally (both secular and religious), the Catholic Church has always been the largest beneficiary, since it controls more Australian private schools than any other organisation (around 54% on an enrolment basis)
In the 19th century, Australia's colonial governments (which later became its state governments) provided public funding of private religious schools, both for the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. In the second half of the 19th century, there was a big push for secular government education. Although that in itself might be seen as a religiously neutral idea, in practice it was something most Protestants were happy to support, the Catholic Church opposed. The result was that Australia ended up with a government school system which while officially religiously neutral, was de facto perceived by many as Protestant; most Catholics continued to send their children to Catholic schools, albeit now without any government support.
Not only did Catholic schools no longer have government funding, but the Catholic minority was on the whole less well-off than the Protestant majority. A big part of how Catholic schooling survived was the reliance on religious orders to provide teaching staff. However, by the 1960s, Australian Catholic schools were trying to deal with the post-war baby boom simultaneously with a crash in vocations to religious orders. Many Catholics were angry about the fact that their taxes paid for the education of Protestant children but not their own, while their own kids suffered from ballooning class sizes, overworked teachers and schools that were physically falling apart.
Much like in the US where Catholics traditionally supported the Democrats, Australian Catholics historically supported the centre-left Labor Party; the conservative side of politics was very Protestant. However, many Catholics were angry at the Labor Party for refusing Catholic demands for public funding for religious schools, despite relying on their vote to gain and remain in power; conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies saw this as an opportunity to try to get Catholics to switch their political allegiance from the left to the right, so he went to the 1963 election with a policy of federal funding to construct science laboratories for all secondary schools without distinction (whether public or private, secular or religious), and he won, and the decision of many Catholics to switch sides played a big part in his victory. The Labor Party then realised that if they continued to oppose public funding of religious schools, they might lose the Catholic vote permanently, so they begrudgingly came around to supporting it too.