Errancy

Coincidentally, increased interest in religion is accompanied by decreasing educational standards. In the United States, public education has been in decline since the 1970s, while private, religious schools and "home schooling" have increased their influence. In Europe, the reverse has been true. With the decline of public education, more and more Americans are inclined to believed the "Inerrancy of the Bible," and several other hocus-pocus notions passed off as "intellectual arguments." The main effect of those beliefs is giving power to a select few who otherwise would never have held (or been considered for) public office. A secondary effect of rule by the Illiterati is the increasingly ramshackle state of public education, and the increasingly backward "education" received by children in all schools. That has already gone on long enough to degrade the United States' ability to compete in world markets, especially in industries requiring "high tech" skills. Eventually, this portends a decline in the wealth, power and influence of the United States.

Note: it is not unreasonable to expect people to fall into superstition when accurate, up-to-date knowledge is not available. I believe myself to be exceptionally resistant to crazy myths, but found myself attracted to them when I used to hike alone in wilderness areas. In the wilderness, Fear is behind every tree and under every footstep. In unfamiliar territory, the mind goes its own way, concocting surmises and suspicions, all the better to protect oneself against Nature's abuses. Even the pretty deer are possibly death in disguiise, when they carry Lyme disease. How would I know which was a Deer, and which Death? Those are primitive fears, which invent demons in far away, strange places.
 

In more civilized places, where we have the luxury of sitting back and sipping our drink, we may ask whether ancient fears and the superstitions they engender mean anything? In their orginal context, clearly they did. But, can we extend those notions to modern stories about gods, devils, souls and the like? My answer is "No." Religious belief is the work of our child-self, our threatened ancestors, who could not explain the workings of the world as we do with modern science. Religions make sense of the world by a myth, by analogizing events to human activites. We generalize our belief about ourselves, that we are autonomous, voluntary creatures, to beings larger than ourselves who move the winds, the seas and the earth. Thus the anthropomorphic gods of antiquity. In later antiquity, it was understood that gods like Jupiter could not be, so the priests kept the notion of gods, but dispensed with the bodies. (They wanted to keep their jobs.) At about the same time, it also became clear that multiple disembodied gods made no sense, so they were reduced to just one, universal Being.
 

Religious ideas underwent major development in the last 2000 years or so of antiquity, and were consolidated in the next 1500 years or so. Then, starting around the Renaissance in the West, and much earlier in the East, the next stage of human evolution developed. Ours is this most recent stage in the development of ideas. The equivalent of our species' childhood and passage through puberty is over, and now, at last, we are young adults. With that, we realize that our old myths are just our old fears. Those who make arguments about the gods, and the priests who try to control us, want to put us back into a childhood long past. But we cannot go back. So, seemingly "adult" arguments, such as "intelligent design," are the cant of a drug addict who won't give it up; rationalizations for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. No doubt those were warm and comforting beliefs in a secure and loving past in which our child-self was the center of the known Universe.
 

Should we hang onto the rationalizations? Of course not. Everything depends on whether one prefers to give in to the whimpering child or be an adult. The argument about "intelligent design" - really a political campaign aimed at controlling us - is convincing only to those who refuse to analyze it. 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant (and others) buried that argument and all its relatives once and for all as far as the intellectual world is concerned. If people want to believe in gods, demons and souls, they are free to do so, but those beliefs are without empirical or rational foundation. That people believe such things is still a proper subject of study, even if what they believe makes no sense. We can try to figure out why you think 1+1=3 or 5 or anything but 4, even while we know the "correct" answer is just 4.
 

What's wrong with religious arguments about gods? Plenty. A lot of what's wrong is incredibly simple. "Intelligent design" - formerly the watch and watchmaker argument - assumes what you see has a design. But, put another way, any design you "see" is in your mind. Proof: take a Rorshach test. What the argument fails to prove is that there is any design inherent in the world we know, other than what we ascribe to it. "Intelligent design" does prove that people can find patterns in their experience, and that is all.
 

There's another famous neo-Platonic argument about Perfection, which "proves" the existence of a perfect god. The key link in the argument is that perfection includes (entails) existence; that is, anything which is perfect must exist. The difficulty is that I have never seen a perfect triangle, although some triangles may be thought perfect. In fact, I have never come across a perfect anything. At least for me, the world is filled with "imperfection." (Or, I could take the attitude that it is what it is, which has nothing at all to do with perfection.) What's the point? "Perfect" entails whatever you define it to entail; i.e., words mean whatever you want them to mean (said the Caterpillar). If you want, you can define your god into existence, but that is not the same thing as making it exist for anyone else. (Kant showed that the traditional "proofs" of the existence of God boil down to the Ontological Argument, that the universal entails existence, which is false.)

One of the things one learns in mathematical logic is that ALL does not imply SOME. If you find SOME to begin with, you can connect it to SOME other things. But saying that everything is thus doesn't mean there are SOME everythings. There may not be any at all. If it were otherwise, someone could send me a perfect triangle.

There's a lot of "common sense" stuff going around lately which actually is deceptive, even ignorant. Conservatives hope to lull people to sleep, and induce pleasant dreams in them. The preachers are helping their cause, as we all know. Cartoons are fun to watch, a relief from the "real" world, just because the real world is quite different. Conservatives are not improving it by their activities.

Finally, a reminder. During the Ancien Regime, and for slaves in the Ante Bellum South, it was illegal to read or own books. Without dispensation, peasants and slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write. Literacy was a Noble enterprise. It still is, and so is educated intelligence, except, now, everyone is a Noble.