Ex-Catholics are second-largest US "denomination," what about physicists?

I don't agree with people who think science and religion are incompatible, though I don't have much patience for the specific mythology of most religious doctrines. I know plenty of people who combine the two (and some who say they are atheists, but attend religious services and participate in a religious community actively, more as a community of conscience than a doctrinal one).

It's pretty interesting to watch the migration of belief, though, as an indicator of what people are actually looking for in their lives, in the same way that U.S. immigration patterns highlight periods of economic difficulty or political instability in the source countries (or comparative changes, as in the times that the U.S. economy or social freedom increase faster than those of the rest of the world).

A recent Pew Forum study of religion (released March 3, 2008) shows that one third of those who said they were raised Roman Catholic in the U.S. are now former Catholics. That group (about 30 million) is almost twice as large as the second-largest single denomination -- 16.5 million Southern Baptists. Despite the loss, the percentage of the U.S. population and total number of Catholics in the U.S. has remained relatively stable at 66 million, presumably because of the large percentage of recent immigrants from Latin America who are Catholic.

The weird thing is that at the same time the Catholic church is losing so many of those born into it due to its doctrinal rigidity, equally rigid and unforgiving Protestant denominations are growing as well. What does that tell you about the underlying priorities of Americans? That they're pushing forward into a more objective, empirical view of the universe as something not intimately controlled by an invisible puppet master? Or that they're starting to think that way, and don't want men in dresses and funny hats to tell them what to do, but still want the fuzzy comfort of some kind of deity and religious community to take the edge off the image of a harsh, impersonal universe?

I'm guessing the latter, in most cases, based on the number of people who describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious," which is having your cake and eating it, too. You don't acknowledge a deity or denomination who can tell you what to do, but don't want to think you're just one of a type of forest ape who's learned to build particularly secure nests.

It is a scary, big universe out there, if you put your own existence into the context of a universe with millions of galaxies compared with which our whole Solar System is just one of a trillion motes of dust.

But if we're so good at focusing on our own concerns and ignoring those that don't have any day-to-day impact on us -- Darfur? Bosnia? Tibet? Your best friend from elementary school who you haven't talked to in a couple of decades? -- why worry so much about how big the universe is compared to your own little slice of it?

I'm optimistic about humanity and it's persistent existential angst. (Not my own, of course; since I'm so close to it I can see that it's far more significant than the global concerns of an entire species.)

We're easily self-obsessed enough to narrow our field of concern to things that can fit in our own brains. Why worry about a universe so big you can't conceive its size, made up largely of dark matter you can't even perceive, when the lawn needs raking, you're worried about work and your car keeps making that weird sound that's not quite bad enough to do something about?

Think about lunch, instead; it'll have a more immediate impact. Or about why a Pope so concerned about the dignity of religion and the church in the modern age would go out in public wearing a silly had and red designer loafers? Then you can claim to be thinking spiritually and get a laugh at the same time.

Besides, there was an article out yesterday claiming that physicists (the most quantitative religion, if you consider how strongly they believe in quantum mechanics and string theory and how ridiculous both seem compared to the behavior of the super-quantum universe) found evidence of what came before the Big Bang that created not only everything in the universe, but the universe itself.

They now think that before the Big Bang, there existed -- wait for it -- a universe exactly like the one we're in now. Talk about an anticlimax. Who cares. Once you've seen one universe...

On the other hand, they may just be trying to hang onto what shreds of dignity they have left, as sub-nanoparticular points in an increasingly large universe.

When you grow up enough to shrug off the mythological comforts of your childhood, you probably still like to have something fuzzy and warm to hold onto, however weird it turns out to be.