The Future of Religion

At the beginning of the 21st Century it is clear that 'religion' is a social phenomenon; an outcome of social evolution that is reaching a critical junction. The evidence points to the conclusion that all major religions evolved in response to the urgent needs of society to find meaning and support in difficult times and punish wrong doing. Religion also manifested in response to the need to fulfil a desperate craving for redemption in life after death and to explain the how and why of life's genesis.

In essence, religion evolved to confirm the existence of an infinitely wise and powerful creator and the nature of creation itself.

However, at the beginning of the third millennium these raison d'etres are fast disappearing. The set of ethical and moral principles that coevolved as part of all religions are beginning to pass their specific religious use-by date. Many are now taken as a given, encoded in legal conventions and entrenched as basic human rights by most societies. These early moral frameworks, originally enshrined in religion, are now generally accepted on a broad scale by peoples of all societies. Though still valid, they have now become mainstream.

The Ten commandments of Christianity; the Book of Life of Confucianism and the Koran of Islam, all provide a similar basis for a subset of the ethical and moral values of human behaviour; establishing codes of conduct which encapsulate the moral structure of future society. These were the norms that created the original basis for a future civil society.

But the great Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, did not postulate a set of rules; rather he created a set of insights or self-organising principles by which society could evolve. Jesus Christ did a similar thing. Some of the early rules are now dated, as are the early theories of the physical universe, but many of the core truths remain valid. They were the encapsulation of wisdom by forward and radical thinkers of an earlier time.

However, repeating them like a mantra doesn't enhance or rejuvenate their validity. These early ethical principles evolved in response to the survival and potential needs of human society over the past 150 millennia, since the emergence of modern humans. They should and will continue to evolve in response to tomorrow's needs.

By adopting literally what was enshrined in books over two thousand years ago, we are rejecting the capacity of humans to continue to adapt and learn as well as their ability to improve all processes. Ethical and moral principles will continue to evolve and of course have already done so. The meta-wisdom of 2000 years ago was invaluable to human progress, but like everything else it must continue to evolve in order to be relevant to future human societies; reflecting their requirements to a more relevant degree.

The need to find a creator is also rapidly reaching its use-by date. Evolution, Quantum Cosmology and the Big Bang have all conspired to push the early metaphysical cosmogonies into the background of mythology. Even the ‘god of the gaps’ is in full retreat. The Pope now begrudgingly accepts Darwin and Galileo into the theological fold and the Big Bang has become the new moment of creation. But what created the Big Bang? Certainly not a god; just as a god did not create an earthquake or a flood or the earth.

Today's scientific explanations instead favour a never-ending quantum or recycling phenomenon, which triggered a rapid expansionary process, powered by a huge energy field. The use of a god, substituting in a causal context for real intellectual analysis does not explain anything. It is just a replacement for currently unknown causes- an intellectual cop-out. The big bang itself may be just one of an infinite number of creation events, each engineered by the evolutionary process through a explosion of energy. Whatever the cause, it does not advance human understanding by eternally repeating the nostrum that a god was responsible for it.

There appears to be no limit at this point in time to life's ability to acquire new knowledge. As seemingly insurmountable problems arise, new and novel techniques co-evolve to push the knowledge barrier back further. Therefore the God notion will continue to recede and attenuate. There have been periodic predictions that the number of new theories will eventually peter out. But this has been proved nonsensical. The ever-evolving Theories of Everything, marking the quest for the ultimate building blocks of the universe, is not the end of the search; just the beginning of our intellectual odyssey. One can understand religion’s past evolutionary benefit, but it is probably of greater benefit to humanity to now examine other equally optimistic but more rational scenarios for life's outcomes

The ‘god' concept on the other hand is basically an excuse for intellectual laziness. It is also a dead end as far as the knowledge discovery process goes. Having served its social purpose it is now not adding any new knowledge to human enlightenment, although offering a significant proportion of humanity with comfort. Cold comfort however when a tsunami strikes or its leaders are found to be complicit in criminal abuse against its most vulnerable believers.

A personal god has been a popular figment of the imagination for a long time; eternally and totally supportive of the lucky recipients of its beneficence. As with a personal trainer, a god will look after an individual's needs providing that person remains subservient to it; lavishing gifts and praise and asking for forgiveness, for real or imagined sins. A personal god is invoked by salesmen, politicians and the wealthy as well as the poor; guaranteeing longevity, redemption and overall success in their everyday lives.

Provided all protocols are carried out as required, the god will grant the acolyte special favours, such as ensuring continuation of life or in the best American pentacostal tradition, making the individual seriously rich; while millions of the less privileged die of starvation, AIDS or conflict. The big payoff however, the glittering prize, is immortality. This means making it big time.

Immortality, Nirvana, Heaven is the potential pinnacle of life's attainment. For the wealthy it represents risk minimisation; to get to keep what they have acquired on earth. For the poor it represents their only chance to attain wealth and equality, all that they missed out on in their earthly life. At the most basic level it is a classic reward system, rewarding good behaviour and punishing evil as prescribed in all religions, combined with the carrot of eternal life.

Religion has been at different times a great comfort to the deprived, oppressed, aged and infirm, but it doesn't solve their problems. In fact it often blocks progress as evidenced by the Hindu caste system, which decrees that the lower caste must remain at the lowest level of the social hierarchy, in the cause of social stability. Those who have had reduced opportunities in this life, such as the members of a lower caste, carry the hope of future equality. Those who have acquired substantial wealth in their earthly lives sustain the hope of retaining it.

The afterlife, however, is not what it used to be. Not many now believe that the celestial fairy light canopy is the home of angels. Fewer and fewer believe that the prophet Jesus was immortal and not too many believe that the souls of sinners will burn in hell.
Heaven and Hell are increasingly seen to be metaphors, extremes of the spectrum of possibilities; a method of dispensing final justice in order to keep ethical and moral constraints on society, while at the same time maintaining the power of religious brokers. Even amongst the most rational there is a deep belief that those guilty of atrocities on earth must somehow receive a measure of justice in the afterlife and that innate goodness and truth will eventually be rewarded.

Unfortunately to date there is no hard evidence suggesting that this is the case; or that an afterlife exists except in our imagination. The need for an afterlife is however deeply ingrained. It obviously assists in the survival of the human species at the most basic level, in terms of the need for nurture. At a deep it therefore provides the bonding so essential for the cohesion of the family, tribe or group.

For most animal species there is a dominant leader from which the group derives its strength and guidance. In the human species this is no less true, with the emergence of both family and tribal leaders, whether patriarchal or matriarchal. Obviously a god plays a similar role; all-powerful and all-wise, positioned at the peak of the pyramid. If this super-leader does not physically exist, then it can be anthropomorphically created. There is evidence that humans appear to have evolved neural structures that reinforce such a hierarchy.

Love for the gods or spiritual love is no less real however than physical love. But the need for spirituality is another matter altogether. Spirituality manifests as an innate yearning, a quest for a deeper love and true enlightenment; a feeling of the numinous and of wonderment. Did this need for spirituality evolve as other emotions and feelings did? No doubt! It evolved to push the bounds of human potential. Without the urge to comprehend the unknown, to understand the unknowable and revel in the thirst for love, truth and knowledge, evolution would be less effective and life would lack most of its essential drive. Spirituality doesn't need a god but it does need a mystery.

All religions also come complete with a set of ethical guidelines such as the Ten Commandments. Although each set evolved independently of religion, prophets were able to successfully distil this knowledge from the social discourse and incorporate it within a religious framework. This framework therefore received moral authority from the God-Head. This usually had the desired effect of establishing its credibility.

Each ethical standard has a genesis and a long history of trial and error; a sifting out of the essentials forming the basis or bedrock for a society. Ethical rules all aim to extend human potential and foster equality, compassion and human understanding. They also represent the basis for the evolution of the formal legal edifice that circumscribes our life today.

The evolution of emotions such as virtue, altruism, guilt, sadness etc. are also intimately linked to ethical guidelines such as sacrifice of the few for the many; reflecting feedback from countless social interactions; their successes and failures.

In the future, Churches are likely to transform into social organisations, already a major part of their function; providing essential support for the sick, poor, alienated and disenfranchised. Most churches now provide social and economic support functions in many countries. Churches have also recently migrated to the cutting edge of human rights. Religious orders such as the Jesuits and Buddhist Monks have long championed human rights as an imperative of the morality of their religions.

If freed from the baggage of the 'god' notion, religion’s ideals of charity, social justice, morality, truth and wisdom are likely to be attained far more effectively in the future.

The future of religion is therefore not difficult to divine. Its evolutionary origins and purpose are clear. Its future rests on the adaptive and cumulative wisdom of humans- not gods.

The Future of Society

Director of The Future of Life Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, proposes that a process of evolutionary convergence is driving the complexity of society to a new level.

Recent research by a team of scientists from the University of Florida, has shown that insect colonies follow the same evolutionary “rules” as individuals; a finding that suggests insect societies operate like a single “superorganism” in terms of their physiology and life.

The researchers believe that the rules that guide social insect species and group behaviour may also have applicability to other species, including humans and human society.

David Tow postulates that a process of evolutionary convergence is a major driver governing this process.

Evolutionary convergence occurs when many critical feedback loops allow key knowledge-based processes such as computation and communication, to be optimised or reach convergence very quickly - eventually almost instantaneously from local to global and back to local again. At the same time new knowledge is generated, which continuously triggers change, feedback and problem solving on a continuously accelerated cycle. This has the capacity to create social complexity on a grand scale.

On the business and scientific front, global collaboration is now the norm, encompassing international networks of researchers, project alliances and commercial consortiums and involving diverse countries and cultures. Pluralist political, economic, trade, educational, cultural and environmental systems are also developing on a global basis including institutions such as the UN, WHO, UNESCO, EU, APEC, WTO, NATO, G20 etc. With increasing coverage and frequency of communication mediated by the Web, explosive growth in such social systems is already occurring.

This enmeshment process is now leading to a new phase in life's development, the realisation of a global human entity or intelligence. In other words, the same type of social Superorganism as emerges for insect species. According to Tow, such a global entity will eventually encompass all forms of human existence- biological, artificial and virtual.

Virtual communities will manifest in the form of groups of intelligent software agents- programs which cooperate to perform specific tasks and achieve goals. These are already being deployed within the cyberspace of the Web to solve communication and knowledge-based problems. Their current service capability includes locating, categorising, assessing, computing and negotiating information. More importantly however, they now have the capacity to learn, adapt, mutate and replicate- that is, to evolve in a primitive way.

Intelligent agents are only one example of the prototypes of virtual societies, with the eventual potential to evolve to a level of complexity similar to and symbiotic with our own. Eventually all such communities will merge with biological life throughout the universe. The evolution of society and civilisation, from the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, to the sophisticated global society that we experience today will continue to be guided by this accelerating process, leading inevitably to the emergence of a global superorganism structure and intelligence.

The overriding outcome of evolutionary convergence ensures the continuing realisation of individual and social potential through the accumulation of knowledge and complexity. Enhancing the potential at the individual level expands the potential of the group, which in turn enhances the potential of society at large. Benefits at the societal and group level in turn feed back to each individual, so that knowledge gained at all levels is constantly recycled through a diffusion process. And so the cycle repeats endlessly, allowing life to continuously leverage its opportunities and extend its horizons.

This leads to an accelerating convergent process, where each increment of information gained catalyses the generation of all other elements, producing new knowledge at an accelerating rate. Concurrent with this process is the generation of meta-knowledge; a set of guiding principles which are continuously extracted from the base lode of information; designed to ensure that all knowledge contributes to the survival and the realisation of benefits for society at large.

These principles may be termed ethical codes, morality, human rights or principles of social justice. They include the set of modern democratic principles that encode the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the group, such as equality under the law and freedom of speech. These become the rules that set the social and behavioural boundaries of human evolution, formulated through trial and error over eons.

The forces governing such historical outcomes according to this thesis are manifestations of the flow, exchange and refinement of information within a social context. Only at the local level is history therefore contingent. At the global level it is convergent, with the deep undercurrents of evolution guiding its progress.

The Future of War

Aggressive wars and conflicts- that is those not waged in direct defence of a nation or region, cause massive destruction to human life and its environment as well as future generations.
Therefore it is morally incumbent on all governments to avoid or minimise the horrendous social and economic consequences.

In addition, wars are not only immoral but also illegal under national and international law. At the Nuremberg trials following the defeat of Nazi Germany, aggressive wars were judged to constitute the worst of international crimes, with prevention the major reason for founding the United Nations.

Methods for managing such conflicts and avoiding escalation between major powers have been greatly bolstered since the end of WW2, with the creation of institutions such as the UN, NATO and later the EU. In addition, new methods of mediation and diplomacy have gradually evolved in which third party nations and groups are involved in the resolution of conflict and peacekeeping processes. Although these methods are far from perfect, there are grounds for optimism that over time, combined with increasing globalisation ensuring the intermeshing of all national interests and cultures, major conflicts between and within states will become impossible to sustain.

Post cold war there have been numerous civil and neighbouring national conflicts, often involving ethnic or separatist groups, creating great suffering and subsequent large flows of refugees. However a study of wars and armed conflict, The Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century, shows that the number of armed conflicts has fallen by 40% since the end of the Cold War.

Also since its establishment, the UN has played a significant role as effective peacemaker, with a positive outcome achieved in 66% of peace missions. There has been a sixfold increase in UN efforts to prevent wars from starting, a four fold increase in UN peacemaking missions to end unresolved conflicts and an eleven fold increase in the number of states made subject to UN sanctions.

A variety of techniques from mediation and peace-keeping to trade sanctions and threat of reprisal, are being applied in order to force warring parties to the peace table. These have been applied with mixed success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir, Northern Ireland and the Sudan, while high-pressure mediation is continuing in more intractable conflict areas such as Palestine, Somalia, The Republic of Congo, North Korea and Burma. There is no doubt that that we are witnessing the evolutionary genesis of globally mediated methods for permanently maintaining peace across the planet.

It is now clear that most military analyses relating to the future of war are severely skewed and one dimensional, failing to adequately factor in drivers beyond traditional geopolitical and weapons trendlines. These future drivers- primarily globalisation, cyber-culture and global warming are now approaching with the force of a tsunami and will overwhelm all other traditional military drivers by mid-century.

Failing to adequately take their consequences into account is to blindside future reality, with the potential to lead to further irrevocable impacts on a fragile world.

Globalisation involves the interweaving of the cultural, educational, legal, economic, political, and technological protocols of all nations in a dense web of dependencies and relationships. China and the US for example are now joined at the hip despite ideological disparities and are mutually interdependent. The US needs China’s financial reserves to prop up its massive dollar debt, while China needs US markets for a large proportion of its exports. These two superpowers are also indirectly connected by the web of alliance and trade networks of the international community as a whole. They are now both too big, too interconnected and too focussed on trying to improve the quality of life of their own populations to become involved in massive national global wars.

The outstanding template for globalisation is of course the European Union, which now links the economies of 27 nations, that up until a century ago warred continuously, with massive loss of life and potential. Now their populations work together, trade together, marry together and share a common currency despite the current difficulties in the Eurozone. The EU is the third force in an increasingly multi-polar world, counterbalancing both the US and China. Emerging economic powerhouses such as Brazil and possibly Russia will make up a fourth force.

Globalisation is also being accelerated by the Cyber revolution- providing access by all populations to the world’s knowledge base and providing an unstoppable catalyst for democracy, despite short term futile attempts at national censorship. It now mediates civilisation’s social, scientific and commercial progress, with the potential to provide enormous computational and decision power for future global governance.

Simulated war-gaming, involving complex scenarios based on holistic social, cyber and economic factors, will therefore be increasingly applied to pre-evaluate the potential outcomes of waging war. The result will be that military imperatives will play a significantly reduced role in the future. This will be accelerated by the emerging dimensions of cyber and economic warfare, which within the next decade will overtake military systems capacity as key determinants in the geopolitical supremacy stakes.

Cyber warfare in particular will become increasingly common, used as a proxy for direct weapons-based assault. Recent major attacks on Google as well as 2,500 major companies worldwide, demonstrate the potential for even small groups to wage global computer and economic warfare- hijacking strategic planning data and shutting down critical control systems and infrastructure.

But global warming is the biggest challenge, with the greatest potential impact ever faced or ever likely to be faced by our civilisation. By the middle of this century the budgets of all countries, particularly those of the major and middle powers will be focussed on mitigating the disastrous outcomes including- increased frequency and severity of catastrophic events, resulting in massive damage to both the natural and built environment, acidification of oceans, scarcity of food, water and energy, disease pandemics and unprecedented refugee flows.

The stresses on all societies will be enormous, but only through global cooperation will anarchy and conflict will be constrained. This will require planning and allocation of resources on a global scale. The budgets and assets of all major powers including the US, China, India and the EU will need to be synchronised and focussed on avoiding this over-riding threat to the future of humanity. National rivalries will be subsumed and military and weapons programs drastically cut.

A timeline on the evolution of this process is as follows-

By 2020- battlefield strategy will evolve towards one that is increasingly fought in covert form – not through the use of large-scale traditional weaponry as in previous wars, as conventional military values become obsolete. Most attacks will be focused on subduing increasingly integrated terrorist and criminal groups, military juntas and authoritarian regimes as well as minority ehtnic groups.

A high proportion of battlefield operations will be automated, with drones and robots operating remotely and eventually autonomously, using satellite and sensor surveillance and the latest Web based intelligence for decision support. Cyber and economic warfare will also play an increasing role, conducted both by governments and criminal and terrorist groups.

At the same time there will be greater emphasis on a variety of peace-keeping and mediation initiatives, involving a range of alliances between Governments, NGOs and military forces such as the new-look NATO, operating at the local level in cooperation with civilian populations. These strategies will increasingly be applied to support failing and dysfunctional states and establish democratic institutions and are now beginning to be rolled out in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will become the primary template for future military operations.

By 2030- superpower states – US and China, will no longer able to sustain long term conflicts using 20th century arsenals of air, sea and land forces. The US will be forced to abdicate its traditional 20th century role of global military dominance as its resources become spread too thinly and it struggles to maintain quality of life for its population against unsustainable mounting levels of debt.

Similarly China, India and middle power nations will be forced to channel most of their resources to developing infrastructure, capacity and social services. Numerous flashpoints involving quelling local insurgencies and ethnic uprisings will remain. Increasingly the UN and representative government groups such as the present G20 will work together to minimise conflict globally. The EU will be seen as the template for global cooperation and peace-keeping will become the norm for conflict containment.

By 2040 – it is realised by most nations that conflict and wars are increasingly unsupportable. Globalisation continues to accelerate, with the creation of more complex networks of alliances and treaties binding nations and regional groups. At the same time countries start to lose their traditional status, with pressure for more fluid cross border relaxation as in the EU. The mixing of races and nationalities eases pressure for conflict, and provides greater accessibility to global health, education, and knowledge resources.
The reality of climate change, with its increasing frequency of disaster events, forces ideological disparities to play a secondary role.

By 2050- all available global resources are marshalled to overcome the immense problems associated with global warming. The end of wars between nations is in sight.