These past three years, an international team of computer scientists, philosophers, and religion scholars has worked on what’s called the Modeling Religion Project, which is building computer models that can give well-meaning world leaders—and, unavoidably, also politicians and zealots of all stripes—an empirical tool to assess competing policy options to predict which policy will produce the best outcome and, hopefully, make for a healthier and happier world. In very short and practical terms, it can be said that they were attempting to develop a computer code for a religion that can be acceptable to all of humanity.
IMAGE CREDIT: THEATLANTIC.COMThe author of the article,
Atlantic Magazine associate editor Sigal Samuel, reports that the project has spawned related several spin-off projects, such as one developing a model on how governments can best integrate refugees and another on figuring out why there aren’t more atheists and why America is secularizing at a slower rate than Western Europe, but some experts have expressed pessimism over these projects that use new and highly technical methodology.
Says Wesley Wildman, Boston University professor of philosophy and ethics: “Whenever there’s bafflement, you’ve got a trust problem, and I think there will be a trust problem here... We’re modelers, sociologists, philosophers—we’re academic geeks, basically. We’re never going to convince them to trust a model.” But he believes that policy analysts, acting as bridges between the academic world and the policy world, will be able to convince the politicians. “We’re going to get them in the end,” he says.
Read “Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular” in the July 23, 2018 issue of TheAtlantic.com now!Check out a related 2014 reading in the Forum, “Two free-thinking advocates discuss God, sundry subjects”, and a related 2014 reading, “Minority faiths in Middle East face extinction due to religious intolerance.”
