Is Peter Thiel Right?

Fear Not: Peter Thiel on Religion, the End Times and Human Agency

I have just returned from a blissful week in the mountains. Just before I left I watched several interviews with Peter Thiel about technology, religion and human agency, even Tyler Cowen waded in with comments in an unrelated video. These thoughts have been playing on my mind all week. Will, as Peter seems to suggest, humanity, driven by a global superpower and technological disruption, return to religion and avoid Armageddon? There are lots of points between the lines in Thiel’s vision worth considering very carefully.

Momentum

The End Times. Armageddon. The Antichrist. These are terms that were once most comfortably at home within the realm of the religiously fervent, the eschatologically obsessed, and the footnotes of apocalyptic literature. They are, we tell ourselves, the lexicon of a bygone era, relics of medieval fearmongering, of firebrand sermons delivered to illiterate masses who cowered beneath their steeples. And yet, as Peter Thiel, one of the most sophisticated minds of our time, outlines over two conversations with Peter Robinson (here and here), these ideas may be more relevant now than ever before.