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Monday Miscellany, 2/24/25

Monday Miscellany, 2/24/25

Last updated on: February 24, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 2/24/25 2025-02-21T17:03:49-05:00 Gene Veith

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In UK, the young are more religious than their parents or grandparents. The USA is back in the AI game. And a pro-life victory in Latin America.

In UK, the Young Are More Religious Than Their Parents or Grandparents

The British newspaper Independent has published a story by Tara Cobham whose headline and deck say it all: Gen Z far less likely to be atheists than parents and grandparents, new study reveals. “With many of younger generation found to identify as ‘spiritual’, research counters assumption spirituality is on decline and in fact implies God is ‘making a comeback.’”

Now this is a British study of the British population, so it probably doesn’t apply to the U.S.A. It is probably more reflective of Europe, showing how irreligious the previous generations had become.

The survey found that only 13% of 18 to 24 year olds (a.k.a. Generation Z) are atheists. Of this cohort, 62% said they are “very” or “fairly” spiritual.

Of those 25-44 (a.k.a. Millennials), 20% said they are atheists. But 52% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

Of those aged 45 to 60 (a.k.a. Generation X), about 25% are atheists. Only 36% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

Of those older than that (a.k.a., Baby Boomers), 20% are atheists. Only 35% say they are “fairly” or “very” spiritual.

The study was commissioned by atheist Christopher Gasson in support of his book The Devil’s Gospels: Finding God in Four Great Atheist Books. He said that he found the results “gobsmacking.”

He made the point that these findings do not mean that large numbers of the young, or really anybody, are necessarily turning to Christianity, which is true. But they do suggest that “the fields are white for harvest” (John 4:35).

The USA Is Back in the AI Game

In our Monday Miscellany for February 3, we reported that Despite Stargate, China Pulls Ahead in the AI Race. The post was about the half-trillion dollar “Stargate” Artificial Intelligence initiative, which was upstaged by news of China’s DeepSeek AI program, which outperforms OpenAI for a tiny fraction of the cost and energy use.

But now, the USA is back in the game. . .thanks to (who else?) Elon Musk. His artificial intelligence company xAI (what else would it be called?) released Grok-3, which reportedly outperforms all of the other platforms, including DeepSeek.

Musk’s new technology, in the words of the news story about it, “incorporates synthetic datasets, self-correction mechanisms and reinforcement learning to enhance its performance.” (Go to the link for what this means.) The result is supposedly something closer to “reasoning,” with fewer “hallucinations.”

Go here and here for comparisons of Grok-3’s performance with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. A Reddit user, though, made an important point:

Grok 3 used 263 times the computing power of DeepSeek V3, yet only achieved 33% higher test scores—showing that the Scaling Law is slowing down.

Despite using 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs, Grok 3 didn’t improve significantly, while DeepSeek focuses on energy-efficient learning, mimicking human intelligence.

Instead of brute-force scaling, DeepSeek’s Mixture of Experts (MOE) model activates only what’s needed, making it sustainably smarter.

With AI costs skyrocketing, the future probably isn’t about more GPUs.

Grok-3 will be available to X Premium+ subscribers for $50 per month, as opposed to ChatGPT, whose basic version is available online for free.

Bonus question: Without Googling or consulting Artificial Intelligence, who can explain the origin and meaning of the word “Grok”?

A Pro-Life Victory in Latin America

The American Convention on Human Rights (1978) includes the following provision:

Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life. (Article 4.1)

This has been described as “one of the strongest statements of the right to life in international law.”

Twenty-five of the 35 member nations of the Organization of American States (OAS) have committed to the treaty. The United States actually signed it in 1977, before it was to go into effect, but did not proceed to have it ratified by Congress. Canada refused to adopt it because of the abortion article. Mexico adopted it with the explicit exception of Article 4.1.

But most of the Latin American countries are strongly pro-life, though efforts to overturn those laws have been intensifying. One was a court case that pro-abortionists hoped would be the Roe v. Wade of Latin America.

In Beatriz v. El Salvador, a woman who was pregnant with a child who had a rare and inevitably fatal brain disorder had wanted an abortion but was denied one in accord with the laws of El Salvador. The baby died, and the mother died four years later in a motorcycle accident. Abortion advocates filed a suit, hoping to overturn El Salvador’s anti-abortion law. Comments Daniel Philpott, “El Salvador’s laws protecting life are some of the strongest such laws within states and are often the target of abortion rights advocates.”

El Salvador’s Supreme Court supported the existing law, so abortion advocates appealed to the American Court of Human Rights, which enforces the American Convention on Human Rights. The court actually ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but on very narrow grounds, requiring El Salvador to change its medical protocols in high risk pregnancies, which pro-abortion groups are hailing as a victory.

But as Philpott says in his Substack post A Little Noticed Major Victory For Life:

Far more significant is what the court refrained from: declaring that abortion is a right. It did not even require exceptions for abortion or that abortion be decriminalized in any way in the laws of countries. It did not accept the plaintiffs’ argument that “obstetric violence” warrants abortion nor that Beatriz’s pregnancy and birth had contributed to her death. The ruling leaves intact the protection of the right to life in the American Convention and in El Salvador’s laws.

Philpott concludes that while pro-abortionists are aggressively targeting Latin America and Africa, where abortion prohibitions are common, “the Beatriz decision is a major victory for the cause of life.”

American Convention on Human Rights

artificial intelligence

Generation Z and religion

Grok-3

Pro-Life laws in Latin America

Religion in the UK

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