The latest Skeptiko podcast features Dr Jeffrey Kripal, whose recently-released book Authors of the Impossible (Amazon US and UK) traces the history of psychical phenomena through the last two centuries of Western thought. Alex Tsakiris asked Kripal, as an academic studying comparative religion, for his thoughts on the future of religions. Kripal’s response is, I think, pretty spot on:
[T]he far future is much easier to guess at than the near future because in the far future, say 10,000 years out, none of the religions today will exist in their present forms.
That’s a pretty good guess from what we know about the past. If the future behaves at all like the past, none of the religions will be around. They’ll have morphed into something else or they will have died down. And so I basically say if you’re worshipping a God, you’re basically worshipping Zeus, because there are no more temples here for Zeus. So that’s the first argument.
The second argument, though, is that that doesn’t mean religion will go away. At least in the Western sort of economically stable, educated world, whether it’s in the West or Asia, I think religious belief and religious systems are going to hinge largely on this question we were talking about earlier. About what mind is or what consciousness is. If it’s established beyond a shadow of a doubt that consciousness is simply brain processes that we’re essentially biologically robots and mind is a kind of extremely elaborate froth of firing neurons, well, that’s going to have a devastating effect on the future of religion.
But my own guess is that that will not be established because it’s not true. So I think there will be a kind of philosophical, metaphysical base for religious belief but that doesn’t mean the individual belief systems will continue to have the same power over us. Basically what a comparative sees is that all belief systems are relative to their place in time and that none of them are completely true. And that they’re largely functional. They work for people. They serve certain needs, certain social needs and emotional needs. But they’re not literally true like a mathematical statement or something.
Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible looks at four individuals who have “thought in a very sophisticated way about what is today called psychic and paranormal experiences”: Frederick Myers, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust. There’s also a documentary based on the book in the works which will features interviews with Vallee and Méheust, as well as other notables including Dean Radin and Stephen Braude. You can find out more at the official Authors of the Impossible website.
In the interview Kripal also reveals that he’s just finished a new book that looks at “pulp fiction, science fiction and superhero comics and tries to tease out some of the paranormal currents there by looking at the real-life experiences of the authors and artists”. Sounds like my type of guy.
