“By analyzing religious Web searching behaviors, Jansen says he sees no evidence of secularization, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream.”

That is one of many possible interpretations, another is that agnostics and atheists may also be interested in religious sites, yet for entirely different reasons. With the publication of a multitude of books that are critical of faith and religion it is no wonder that the topic generates increased interest, despite an assumed increase in secularization.

“He also found that the results dispelled the stereotype that religious people are not as accustomed to technology as non-religious people.”

How does he know this, does the IP address give away the believe system? Do atheists search for different terms than theists?

I would also like to hear a response to Haegar’s post

I am not religious but I have looked up religious information multiple times in the last few weeks. Oftentimes my students have questions associated with the curriculum (7th grade social studies). I do want to hear more about this.
Is there anyway to read more about this study for free?

haegar, I think you’re pretty much spot on here. This study actually reveals almost nothing, and no conclusions about religiosity or secularization of populations can really be inferred from it.

However to be fair to Jansen saying “he sees no evidence of secularization, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream” is defensible according to the data gathered.

Granted, this is hardly groundbreaking and it isn’t even a conclusion. Seeing no evidence for something means you have nothing to base a conclusion on, so a scientist/skeptic of integrity would withhold any inferences until sufficient evidence is gathered. (Thus, Jansen’s equivocation amounts to him saying “I don’t know”)

I wish I could get papers published in journals where all I’ve contributed is that I didn’t know something.

Faith and reason are not separated entities. They are like two wings of a bird. A bird cannot fly by using only one wing, so you cannot go on in your life by using only science, discriminating it from the religion. Indeed we are too much accustomed to the duality and we cannot see the world, the life like an unity, an whole. We discriminate good and evil, science and religion, material and immaterial and so on. The human being is a whole. Aristoteles used to say he is a “sinolo”, that is a compound of mind and body. If God exists everything is his projection. Every aspect of the life. I like also to emphasize the Catholic Church has been always branded to be obscurantist, nevertheless the first University was the Catholic University of Bologna.
The book I have recently written may help in this direction. The title is “Travels of the mind” and it is available at http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TravelsOfTheMind.html
If you have any question I am most willing to discuss about this topic.
Ettore Grillo

You say, “By analyzing religious Web searching behaviors, Jansen says he sees no evidence of secularization, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream.” But, I’m not really sure I agree.

Hi!

Hi! I’m Jim Jansen, the author of the study.

Thanks for the interesting and skeptical comments.

The full study is here (free) – http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/jansen_searching_for_salvation.pdf

Let me address the one comment about “proving”.

In science, one cannot ‘prove;’ anything. We set up hypotheses and see if the data disproves them. If we disprove them, they are, obviously, not true. If we fail to disprove them, all we can say is that there is no evidence at the moment to indicate the hypotheses are incorrect.

For this study, based on prior work, the indications were that we should see less religious based searching and more more searching for cults, non-mainstream religions, etc. We did not see such trends in the data.

As for the comments that *all* of this searching might not be by religious folks, is true. Again, however, as a trend, the data is stable. So, as a ballpark number, I stand by the findings.

Finally, what *is* directly shown is that the search engines do not good a good job of returning religious information, which might be a cause for the viral information sharing one often sees with religious information.

Best,
Jim