Connecting Reason and Faith on a Social Media Platform

Iconic Silicon Valley companies currently confront a credibility crisis of motive and trust. Helping spread fake news and propaganda, turning users into lab rats, mining personal data through addictive apps, stashing away billions of dollars in off-shore tax havens as disclosed by the Paradise Papers, suggest that under the veneer of connecting all and doing no harm, something more sinister is brewing in these Internet juggernauts.

Recent data reveal that on Facebook alone, as many as 126 million Americans were exposed to fake news stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, eroding our democracy. Russian operatives also created close to 3,000 fake Twitter accounts and over 1,100 videos on 18 Google channels. During a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein bluntly told representatives of Facebook, Google and Twitter: “You bear this responsibility. You’ve created these platforms.”

Americans are souring on tech titans who symbolize Silicon Valley and its increasingly questionable ethos. Not only are they accumulating wealth and power at an exponential rate, they are turning their companies into monopolies to silence discordant opinions and diminish, if not destroy, diversity.

Allow me to focus on Facebook. 

As the social media leader with over 2 billion active monthly users worldwide, can the tech giant remove our fears and restore our trust in the company, even if partially?

In his commencement address at Harvard this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expanded his company’s mission to include ‘three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building communities across the world.” Zuckerberg defined purpose as “that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for.”

In other words, it’s not only about connecting all of humanity, it’s infusing these connections with a sense of purpose. Who can argue with that? The problem is that noble mission statements can often mask fiercer motives, especially when a company develops a global reach.

Yet it is plausible that the idea of purpose can transform the way we connect with one another in the virtual world.

Imagine that Facebook creates a platform that connects proponents of reason and faith, two ancient antagonists that have caused much sorrow in the world.

Let me clarify what I mean in a specific context: Silicon Valley.

According to a 2010 survey (the numbers could have only gone up since then) there are over 450 churches, synagogues, mosques and temples in the Santa Clara County alone, serving over 40% of the Valley’s 2 million population. The remaining 60% includes not only atheists but also those with complicated relationship to their faiths, particularly millennials who shun organized religion and pray in their own way but not in traditional places of worship.

If such a platform were created, could that be an example of the kind of meaningful project Zuckerberg envisions? Perhaps. After all, meaning, purpose and transcendence can flow from both the secular and the sacred. Any connection between the two can not only inspire fresh views on, say, stem-cell research and global warming but also deepen our understanding of how love, justice, suffering and forgiveness shape human affairs.

At the same time, we must also note that faith and reason can coexist within the same person. 

Perhaps no one exemplified this as persuasively as physicist Charles Townes (1915-2015). An article he wrote half-a-century ago in the IBM journal “Think” provides insights into the evolving nature of relationship between science and religion. After building the case that the two shared fundamental similarities - revelation in one is epiphany in another, for instance – Townes concluded that the two will eventually converge. “I believe,” he wrote in 1966 in The Convergence of Science and Religion, “this confluence is inevitable. For they both represent man’s efforts to understand his universe and must ultimately be dealing with the same substance.”

A devout Christian, Townes was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth-century, winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964 for inventing the maser and the laser. He tempered his idea of convergence: “Perhaps by the time this convergence occurs, science will have been through a number of revolutions as striking as those which have occurred in the last century, and taken on a character not readily recognizable by scientists of today. Perhaps our religious understanding will also have seen progress and change. But converge they must, and through this should come new strength for both.”

Can Facebook facilitate this convergence in some way? It's difficult to say but what is clear is that this dialogue in the age of social media will not happen through staged spectacles between well-known cerebral atheists like Richard Dawkins and prominent theologians. It can only happen when practitioners of reason and faith can explore the connection between the two in a spirit of humor, humility and curiosity.

Even if a social media platform makes the flow of ideas between proponents of reason and faith easier, including those who see no conflict between the two, it does not mean it will remove our suspicion of Facebook, or of Amazon, Google or Apple, companies that are also vying for global domination, particularly when the call for regulation and antitrust probes against the Big Four is gaining steam in the Valley and beyond.

But it’s a start. The unexplored region between technology and faith beckons people with open minds seeking rational and spiritual truths. Done right, it may even be that algorithms will someday lead to epiphanies and clicks to catharsis.