A Time Machine for Religious Scholars

It’s the next best thing to time travel, says Wesley J. Wildman: computer software that helps scholars test theories about the role religion played in shaping historical events and make better-informed predictions about the future. Wildman, a professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics at the Boston University School of Theology, is the principal investigator for a three-year project to develop the software. The program is part of a broader scientific study of religion project that received $2.4 million from the John Templeton Foundation and other organizations in 2015.

The free, web-based software, Complex Learner Agent Simulation Platform (CLASP), will function a bit like a world-building strategy game. You select or adapt default settings, or input unique data on elements including geography, water sources, and the culture, society, and beliefs of your human inhabitants. Then you run the model. Does it produce the results you expected, or do you need a new theory?

For example, let’s say no one knows why an ancient civilization stopped worshipping one god and began worshipping another within 25 years. You theorize a severe drought was the cause. You would feed CLASP your information about this civilization, including the drought and people’s religious beliefs, and run the simulation. If your simulated citizens are still worshipping the same god, perhaps there’s a hole in your theory. There might be another factor—for example, the rising power of a nearby community that believes in the competing god—that you may not have taken into account and that could explain the change in belief.

Wildman believes simulation software like CLASP has a critical role to play in moving religious studies away from conjecture and toward testable hypotheses. “People are starting to see that you can handle complicated issues and clarify complicated theoretical situations using modeling and simulation that you just can’t any other way,” says Wildman. And this new technology isn’t just for the computer-savvy: CLASP requires no knowledge of coding, which Wildman says will “open up a world of research” opportunities for people working in the scientific study of religion.

The software is being developed at the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBCSR), a Massachusetts-based nonprofit cofounded by Wildman to explore the science of religion. In one recent study, Wildman believes the IBCSR resolved a 200-year-old dispute about how violence spread among some post-Reformation Anabaptists. Wildman says that, using computer analysis to compare data sets for two competing theories, the institute’s research team showed the evidence best supports the claim that the violence was passed down from generation to generation within congregations—as opposed to by traveling preachers. The institute has also been experimenting with predicting the future. Using data about human beliefs from the World Values Survey, it built a computer model to show how religion might evolve in the next 50 to 100 years under the hypothetical conditions of more widespread science education and sufficient global access to food and water. Wildman says a possible outcome is that superstition would decrease, leading to an age where reverence for nature overtakes belief in the supernatural.

Wildman predicts that eventually, a religious scholar will have to test any new theory with a computer simulation so others can compare the scholar’s predictions “against a dataset to see whether the theory holds water or not.” He says that though the preliminary technology is imperfect, “it sure is a lot more precise than what we’ve got at the moment: people sitting in their bathtubs having ideas about things.”