I think that generally speaking, access to knowledge is dangerous to religions and a threat to the perpetuation of religious beliefs. By knowledge I mean information beyond that provided, or approved of, by a religion. Unrestricted access to information. The concept is pretty simple, if people aren't aware that there is an alternative, or aren't aware of the details of an alternative (or many alternatives) they're less likely to question what they've been taught. Exposure to broader knowledge can cause doubt and doubt weakens faith which, as I understand it, requires certainty to achieve effect. I'm probably doing a terrible job of explaining/clarifying this but I think what I'm saying is obvious. I'll probably improve my wording if the thread continues so please be generous and don't try to tie me down on something horribly nitty unless it improves the conversation in some way.

Since the internet provides access to knowledge on a previously unimaginable scale, I've often wondered if the internet would have an adverse effect on religious beliefs. This study seems to suggest that it does:

Study: Using The Internet Is Directly Proportional To Losing Faith

Does anyone think that this is a false correlation? I believe the specific logical fallacy is called Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Does anyone have anything to add to the very loose idea that unrestricted access to information is likely to have an adverse effect, (again, generally speaking) on the holding of religious beliefs? There's also a negative correlation claimed between levels of education and religious belief, which would fit the model.

I doubt that we could prove this either way right now but I'm curious about whether other people share my suspicions or not.

The correlation found in the study is likely due to the universal adoption of the internet as a whole, combined with the decrease in religion seen in the last few decades, not the cause of it. You could likewise conclude that it's the use of cellphones that are causing a decrease in religion, or that sitting in chairs decreases religion.

There is likely some truth to the premise, but these studies are difficult or impossible to control for.

You were the one who recommended Freakonomics a while back, were you not MB? Love that stuff.

But it's realistic that the internet could have caused this, by exposing people to information (and influences) that they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. Even on social media where most people are exposed to ideas and information in keeping with their own environment/context and ideas, there's still the inevitable exposure to contrary and new information. Whilst I doubt the early mobile phones could have had any influence in the same way, the newer smart phones that can access the internet could actually be contributing to that, yes.

Not so sure about chairs. Although it wouldn't surprise me if the comfort level of churches has actually had a small influence on attendance on occasion .

I've given reasons for how the dissemination of information could negatively influence religion, do you have a counter argument?

Yeah, fun read huh.

It *could* and likely does have *some* influence, but these types of studies, as you know, usually present the correlation without definitively proving causation. I agree with the premise in general, but there are many factors that are probably aiding to the trend as well.

Using the internet is direct access to information and allows the ability to verify and get a general consensus of large groups of people. It has been and is going to continue to destroy belief systems of all kinds...religious, scientific, economic, etc...

There has long been a complaint from local churches that many young people, when they go off to college, never return to church. No doubt the internet can accelerate that tendency. Many of them were never Christians but grew up in a "Christian" community so, in order to have friends, meet girls, please their parents, they had to attend church. Once freed from a system they never really believed in, the next step is obvious.

C.S. Lewis tells an amusing story of what happened when he was at university - can't remember if it was Cambridge or Oxford. When he first got there all students were required to attend church service every morning. The chapels were always packed because grades depended on attendance. While he was there the requirement was dropped and the chapels were almost always nearly empty. He thought this was a good thing because now it was easy to identify the people who needed evangelizing - before, no one did.

Most "Christians" are woefully ignorant of their faith. If they are easily convinced that it's false they were likely not genuine believers in the first place - nominal Christians who were just going along with the crowd. I think the internet may be an advance as great as printing itself, maybe greater, as knowledge is being made available to people who didn't even have access to printed material. As with books, the internet (i.e., true knowledge) can do no harm - it's what you do with it that counts.

The internet is used (mostly?) for porn, therefore I agree. Internet is bad news for faith.

This is very similar to the assumptions made about the state of religiousness after Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species, which basically debunked a literal interpretation of the Bible's creation story. So academics who read his book basically said that it ensured the end of religion, but the opposite was true instead. Go figure...

You seem to rely heavily in this post on your judgement that those who left the faith were part of a "system they never really believed in" or not "genuine believers in the first place ". Whilst this discussion certainly includes those 'go-alongs', and they might even form the larger part of the numbers who lose their faith, I think that we have to also include thoughtful people and true, hardcore believers who have left a faith because they have been exposed to contrary concepts, or evidence that they found more compelling than what their religion was telling them.

If this was purely a numbers game though, then I think the internet will really be big trouble for religions because I think that they're going to lose huge number of go-alongs.

Is this actually true LZ? Also, you're not agreeing with what I said in my OP at all. Nice strawman though.

And you don't think that it has had an extremely detrimental effect on religion? Since the game hasn't played out yet, I don't think that you can say that it hasn't ended religion, it still might. I think it will only contribute (and has contributed) to a lessening of dependence on divine theories and couldn't end religion alone, if religion can even be ended.

Which academics are you referring to?

I don't think the article, or the two graphs, support the headline. There may be some correlation but I think directly proportional is a stretch.

The news article on the atheistrepublic.com does not link or name the actual study. Some digging revealed that the paper's name is "Religious affiliation, education and internet use", written in 2014. The article is not published or peer reviewed and nor is the subject the authors' field. The work is basically a simple anaysis (logistics regression) performed on selected variables from the General Social Survey (GSS).

Even if we assume that the analysis is performed correctly, though this is impossible to say without a peer review or controlling the dataset manually, the study is very weak. This is simply because the author does not sufficiently explore the subject of his research beyond some mandatory oneliners from random sociological papers nor does he sufficiently explore other explanations.

What other explanations? Well, the most obvious question he should have raised is if irreligious people simply use the internet more. And he would have found much data to suggest they do. His supporting literature needs to be much more encompassing and other explanations explored more.

All in all the paper is interesting but seems very hastily put together. If this had been delivered as the final paper in an undergrad degree I would have been surprised if it had gotten higher than a C. I doubt it will ever get published in its present form.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.5534

Yeah I agree, perhaps cutting and pasting it then attempting to make it sound less certain in my OP was a mistake and I should have rewritten the title to something like 'Is there a correlation......'

In what way do you think that is a correlation? I think that there is one, obv, but I don't think it's directly proportional.

I'm not relying on the study.

Not sure what you mean here. This isn't a study of the religious affiliation, or not, of internet users. It's a "measure the effect of education and Internet use on religious affiliation". What's pertinent I think is that the correlation, if there is one, has a sensible explanation, don't you think?

The study (or rather an article doing a poor job of explaining the study) is what you bring up as external link for your OP.

The issue you bring up here is a perfect example of the errors I am talking about. By using logistics regression and thereby implicitly testing a model where increased internet use predicts religious affiliation, the author has forgotten that it might as well be that religious affiliation predicts increased internet use. I use the word "predict" due to the analysis used, which represents relationships in odds ratios not correlation coefficients.

It also bears mention that the news article on atheistrepublic.com is very bad. The headline wording itself "directly proportional" is fairly embarrasing when we are presented with two graphs that anyone with a modicum of insight can see are not directly proportional. Directly proportional means a relationship can be described as a linear function. I would advice against using this news article as a source for any conclusions. Misrepresenting the paper, not linking to the paper and omitting to mention that it is not peer reviwed makes for a poor news piece.

I linked it because it asks the same question that I've been asking myself for some years and the results seem to support what I think is likely. As I've already said though, and I'll repeat now, I'm not relying on it.

I don't have an in depth understanding of statistical techniques, the furthest I got with stats was undergrad level, I probably don't understand what you're saying here.

Yes, it's bad, and the title is blatant rhetoric, and I've already agreed that a directly proportional relationship is not what I'm talking about (see my reply to Dereds). Do you have an opinion on the actual OP question? Can increased exposure to information generally lead to a decrease in religiosity? Is that a likely, reasonable, rational correlation?

I think you need to be more consistent in your questions. On matters such as these you want reliability. Asking if access to information can make more people irreligious is not the same as asking if access to information to knowledge that contradict religion will tend to make people irreligious at a greater rate.

Agreeing to your hypothetical here will not necessarily affirm the hypothesis of your OP.

We're both aware that the sum of human knowledge contains much contradictory information, particularly wrt religion, and we wouldn't have to search hard or far to find something that contradicted theories like Islam or Christianity. Just watching the world news would be highly enlightening for someone who had only known one of the two. So I assumed the latter in the former (**with a qualification, see below). They're not necessarily different things, I don't see how you have one without the other.

**The 'rate' at which is is happening isn't a factor for me in this conversation, I think it's a red herring. I'm content to go with 'it's happening' and have already said, three times now I think, that I don't care whether or not it's directly proportional. It will suffice that there is a correlation.

Why not?

I generally don't see the internet working in a truth seeking direction. As in, the internet isn't exactly access to information all raw and unfiltered, but access to all kinds of rather subjectively treated information.

Take any conspiracy theory you have ever wondered about. There are entirely communities on the internet that have taken a lot of time to flush out all the details of that conspiracy in a way that makes it completely convincing. Want to know the truth about 9/11 by googling? Well, it turns out there are a lot of (superficially) very persuasive websites out there that can very easily convince suspecting people that 9/11 was actually fake. Access to the net isn't really access to "truth". Now if you want you can also go to debunking websites, and find those compelling. But based on your predilections, you will chose to spend your time on websites that (for the most part) reinforce your views.

Take atheism. There is an enormous amount of resources out there these days for an uninformed atheist to become an informed atheist. Want to be able to quickly counter most standard apologetics? Well you can find that quickly. Want whole communities to help reinforce your views and give you more nuance and the like? Have at it! But the same is true of religious communities, and so on. That access to the internet has turned sort of lightly nonbelieving leaning people into hardcore atheists I think is beyond doubt, but I don't know how successful it is at turning strongly believing people into atheists.

I think it will be more trouble for false religions than for Christianity. I don't deny there is the possibility that some true believers apostasize and that some of them may be led astray by the internet, but I think that number will be very small. On the other hand, the internet is a wonderful tool for spreading the faith - multiple translations of the Bible in many different languages, Christian forums for discussions that may not have been possible before, Christian websites like those of Craig and RTB and many others, and many, many sources that were previously unavailable. The internet has been very instrumental in my own growth in knowledge and faith - I've found books and other sources that I would never have come across otherwise, and I've had access to critics and answers to those critics that were previously unknown to me. This forum has helped me tremendously as I've seen the utter inability of skeptics to put any dent in the fundamental truths of the Bible. I believe that the truth can't hurt someone who is open to it and willing to pursue as far as possible.

Philippians 4:

Maybe, except for a small problem with your logic in that the people who believe those religions that you are so sure are 'false' generally think that all the other religions are false. And yet, religiosity is on the decrease. which religion do you think is seeing the biggest decrease?

I'd be interested to see a map showing global internet usage vs religiosity. My guess is that you'd see the biggest increase in internet use in the West (and 'westernised' countries) and a corresponding drop in religiosity. Less so in the Middle East and not at all in China.

It hadn't escaped me that there are two sides to this coin - but - if there's any truth to the idea that exposure to broader information causes a decrease in religiosity then surely that will act as a dampener to the spread of individual religions.

Like you?

You seem to want to link the 2, MB, internet use and decrease of religiosity. But correlation does not mean causation. It could be that some 3rd factor ( eg wealth, education, or some other facet of society) has caused an increase in internet use and a decrease of religiosity.

There is a correlation between ice cream sales and rise in crime. Does this mean one causes the other?

For the same reason you can't resolve the question "Do jews steal our money?" by asking "Is it not true that Jews on average are richer than non-Jews?"

You always need to be certain that what you are measuring is what you are claiming to be measuring. Twisting the form of the question to get the answer you are looking for will get you nowhere.

Not 'seem' to, I am suggesting that there is a link. I thought this was clear in the OP.

Yes, I also addressed this in the OP, did you read it all?

In the case of your ice cream/crime correlation example, it's false because the real correlation is between temperatures and crime and ice cream sales. Temperatures rising and ice cream sales/crime rising as a result is a sensible explanation isn't it.

So, I've given a sensible explanation for why internet use and decrease in religiosity might be positively correlated, do you have an explanation to offer for why they're not?