In his book Het Nut van God (2001), Hans Jansen suggests that for a religion to remain attractive, it requires a belief in a creed or an assumption that is necessarily unverifiable. The reason for this somewhat counter intuitive requirement is that religious beliefs that can actually be verified will sooner or later be proven false.
Occasionally a religious movement will start out with a verifiable claim. According to Jansen this will inevitably end in one of two ways. The first option is that the claim will be proven false, and the movement will disband. The second is that the movement will modify or adopt new claims that will fix the “problem” of verifiability.
He gives a few examples of this. One extreme example is that of Lou the eel vendor, who claimed to be the resurrected body of Jesus Christ, and in fact immortal. Unsurprisingly, after his death his following mostly disbanded.
A more common claim is the expectation of the Day of Judgement in one’s lifetime, including the exact day. For a while the religious movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses claimed knowledge of the exact date, but after successive failures its leaders modified the claim to the prediction that the End Time is merely “imminent”. Of course the first Christians also expected Christ to return within their lifetime, but this seems to have been corrected in the Gospel of John.
According to Jansen there are sociologists that think that members of a religious movement will intensify their belief after a failed prediction, based on a research paper by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter (“When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World”, 1956). However, Jansen suggests that the infiltration of the small group of believers by several undercover researchers fundamentally changed its course and writes that (at least up to 2001) there was no research that confirmed the researchers’ conclusions.
Jansen has more to say on the topic of how religious movements attract followers and remain relevant (or not). For now I’ll conclude with one question that just popped up in my mind. There seems to be a trend among apologists and (subsequently) believers that seem to want to defend their beliefs with the claim that their scriptures contain “scientific predictions”. This trend seems weird to me for at least three reasons.
First of all, ever since the development of modern science, religions (well, at least Christianity here in the West) has had to abandon lots of claims about the natural world. To give just one example, it used to be a common belief that God used lightning to punish the wicked. In fact I read (probably in Wikipedia, but I’ll go with it for now) that when the truth of the matter was discovered, for a while adoption of the lightning rod was seen as blasphemous.
Two other aspects that I think are weird about this trend of claiming that scripture contains scientific truths are (1) these truths in scripture can only be found using discoveries made by scientists. The method seems to be to interpret obscure passages to mean what the latest science tells us about a certain topic. (2) However, science is always evolving. Sure, some discoveries are here to stay, but often apologists focus on difficult topics like the Big Bang or the structure of the universe. The science on those topics is bound to change a lot. Inevitably the ongoing development of science will make these “scientific predictions” obsolete again. Perhaps apologists should stick to their “unverifiable” claims.
