Reviewing a recent biography of John Stuart Mill that focuses on the British philosopher’s attitude toward religion, and a recently published book that looks at the diminishing authority accorded in contemporary culture to the supernatural, John Cottingham examines what these two books have to say about the secularization of the West. Cottingham finds more merit in the latter book, written by Paul Gifford, but nonetheless contends that its core argument is unconvincing:

Gifford is well aware that there is more to being religious than the holding of certain beliefs: religion, he acknowledges, has been a vehicle for “community, tradition, emotion, ritual, color, beauty, value, art, poetry, and much else.” But he nevertheless insists on focusing almost exclusively on the cognitive element within religion because of what he calls the “great ditch”—the decisive shift in outlook in the early modern period leading to the rise of science and its application to technology, which produced “continuous innovation and increase” that “swept all before it.” The rise of a new “form of knowing associated with science,” Gifford argues, has “peripheralized religion in the West.”

If this thesis is hardly new, Gifford deploys it in an informative way, with almost every page enriched with quotations from an array of sociological, historical and other sources. But the thesis is highly problematic, not because there is any doubt about the magnificent achievements of science, but because there seems no good reason to think that these achievements are what have led to the decline in religious belief.

Excluding fundamentalists and fanatics, most religious adherents (certainly all those known to me) have a deep respect for the ways of knowing championed by science. They simply do not believe that these ways of knowing exhaust all reality. To insist that there is no meaning or truth outside the limits of science is not science but metaphysics, and Gifford’s airy dismissal of metaphysics (he cites with approval the discredited positivism of A.J. Ayer) thus verges on the self-refuting. If there is a connection between the rise of science and the decline of Western religion, one would need a philosophically more sophisticated account of such key notions as “natural,” “supernatural,” and “otherworldly” in order to make the case convincing.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.