In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture. In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900. And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated the collapse of religious faith. To the delight of the faithful, and to the chagrin of the faithless, they have all been wrong.
It is interesting to contemplate why religion hasn’t disappeared. Why, in roughly 10,000 years of history, have humans created roughly 10,000 different religions and 1000 gods? It is well known that religion leads people to fly planes into sky scrapers, to shoot staff at abortion clinics, to fracture governments in Northern Ireland, and that it has caused endless wars. Religious societies have higher crime rates than secular ones and pay a huge economic price for their faith. And religion in its fundamentalist form has held back cognitive evolution for thousands of year - we can only guess how much further science and technology would have advanced worldwide today without it. (We can only dread what will happen if the current attempts to prevent the teaching of evolution in various parts of the world are successful. See here, for example.) Why do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system that is so evidently false and self-contradictory?
I want to sketch out some possible answers below. However, let me declare that they are not my own. They are drawn from a book of essays (50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, eds. Russell Blackford & Udo Schuklenk) supplied by an international cast of contributors, including public intellectuals, novelists, philosophers, psychotherapists, and scientists. The result is a stimulating mixture of rigorous, informed argument, and highly personal, even whimsical, accounts of how each of these notable thinkers have come to reject religion in their lives.
Although each essay is unique, several common themes emerged, and what I have written below is an attempt to pull together material on this topic from this wide range of views.
THREE POSSIBLE REASONS WHY RELIGION PERSISTS IN AN INCREASINGLY SECULAR WORLD
Evolution
There are at least two possible evolutionary explanations for the adoption and maintenance of religion in humanity. First, as humans, we often have a low tolerance for uncertainty. We become cognitively dissonant with probabilistic world models. As Michael Shermer points out (p.69), this low tolerance for uncertainty probably originated in the Paleolithic environment in which it was almost always better to assume that everything has agency and intention.
There would have been a selective advantage to adopt the default position that other people, animals, and even inanimate objects in the physical environment possess agency (capable of acting) and intention (acting in a manner that could affect you). False positives (assuming something is real when it isn’t) will not take you out of the gene pool because they only make you more cautious, but false negatives (assuming something is not real when it is) can result in you being a high risk-taker and therefore a meal for any animal that really does have agency and intention.
Second, we have evolved an emotional system that is capable of over-riding logic and reality and also capable of convincing us of the ‘truth’ of many strange things, often making even the most rational among us vulnerable and rendered practically helpless. We have evolved this way for good reasons. Gene proliferation depends on it (falling in love and bonding), as does maternal-infant attachment and numerous other phenomena integral to human experience. As Kelly O’Connor argues (p.220): “It is an unfortunate by-product of this propensity for emotion to override reason that perpetuates belief in the supernatural …. Enter emotions like fear, depression, curiosity, uncertainty, and a desire to confirm the utility of seemingly meaningless despair, and the amygdala can convince the neocortex of just about anything.”
Birth, Culture
We tend to adopt the values and beliefs of the culture we were born into. Passionate Mormons in Utah, or bible-belt Baptists never seem to understand that they would almost certainly have a different faith if they had been born in India, or even if they had been born on the same land mass thousands of years earlier. If an accident of birth determines the particular faith we are likely to hold, it is our family that helps maintain that belief. As Dale McGowan notes (p.196) we continue to skate on the thin ice of a evidently false system ” … by believing what we hear from those that we love, from those who wish nothing but the best: that religious faith is inherently good, and that all good people are people of faith.” These beliefs, often gained in childhood, often persist, because as Laura Purdy (p. 211) reminds us, children are not generally taught to demand good evidence for claims, and indeed are often discouraged from making those demands.
Once religion has taken hold in a culture there are usually many pressures to maintain it in the interest of the alleged common good. That community pressure can be strong. In the UK at the moment the reaction to calls to remove bishops from the House of Lords, and prayers from the beginning of Parliament or from local council meetings meet with passionate resistance that feels disproportionate to the issue. In Italy recently a judge was sacked for wanting to remove a crucifix from his courtroom. And of course, in other parts of the world apostasy, and even mere criticism of a faith, are met with death threats and murder. As Adele Mercier (p.43) observes: ”Call any 50-year-old Canaanite with sexual designs of a 9-year-old a lecherous pedophile, and from those who disagree with your assessment you’ll get a disagreement; say the same about Mohammed and you’ll get a death warrant.”
Needs
It is easy to see how religion can meet various human needs, and successful religions grow, not so much by convincing new adherents of doctrinal truth, but by meeting social and psychological needs. Religious observance provides opportunity for regular gatherings and community and the chapel, synagogue, or mosque can be a focal point in small or larger communities. As I have argued, people who are inherently troubled by uncertainty can find a plethora of ‘certainties’ to choose from - though they are most likely to pick the ‘certainty’ from their own community. Religion can help people create an existential meaning and purpose (as well as convincing them that religion is the only source of meaning and purpose). As Julian Savulescu remarks (p.170): “It is difficult to confront ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unavoidable losses of human life and choice, without clutching at false truths.” It takes a brave person to peer into the deep well of mortality and not to embrace superstition and irrationality in the face of fear.
However, psychotherapist Tamas Pataki (pp. 206-08) notes, religion can also satisfy and pacify other enduring human desires and dispositions. Religion meets the needs of people with hysterical dispositions - the need to separate the lower (sexual, profane) from the higher (moral, spiritual) aspects of personality. This is accommodated in the architecture of most religions. It also meets the needs of people with obsessional dispositions - those with the need to attempt to control sexual and aggressive influences. These can be satisfied with the ‘magical’ gestures of daily religious ritual and practice. Religion also meets the needs of those with narcissistic dispositions - the need to feel special. These needs are met by being made to feel special, one of the Chosen, of the Elect, or by having a conviction that one has an intimate relationship with an omnipotent being.
If there is any truth in the above analysis, religion is here to stay because many people will not want to risk removing themselves from their comfort zone by critically examining the basis for their faith.
Why do you think religion persists?
The fear of death is probably one factor for some people. Maybe it is hard wired to try to find some kind of meaning in life when stacked up against raw nihilism and the alternatives on offer for some just don’t fulfill that deep need. I also wonder if the reasons also tie into psychologist Drew Westen’s recent theories (http://bit.ly/deHK4D) about why people vote against their best interests where stories win out over fact. Simplistic thinking is perhaps easier to grasp than complex inter-related, sometimes contentious but ever changing and ever updated scientific fact.
I find the evolutionary argument unconvincing. Every time I read it it seems weak. Why assume that too-easy belief is safer than too-easy scepticism? Both can lead you astray in appropriate circumstances. The idea that stones can think and have motives is surely a hindrance to their use, not a help.
However, for me, the killer is this: what evolution can do, it can also undo. There is so much evidence against religious belief and the disadvantages that it brings are so great that we would surely have evolved away from it now that our lives depend so strongly on practical realities.
I think nurture is more convincing than nature: when young we have no critical filter; we accept everything we are told as true. I know: I remember when I did, and moreover made a fool of myself at school repeating silly things I had been told and had believed.
Every dictator that ever there was has understood the value of drilling children in the beliefs he wants to promulgate. This is why Richard Dawkins considers teaching children religious belief to be a form of child abuse.
How many people do you know who, brought up as atheists, willingly embraced religion in their adult years? If evolution predisposes us to religion, then many would. They would simply be expressing their genes.
Why also would many, brought up religious, lose their faith later on? That is better explained by rationality overcoming emotional conditioning.
This, finally, is why education is so important. It is alarming to hear that the Tories would increase the number of religious schools when it is achingly obvious that the need is to reduce their number to zero.
I very much enjoyed reading your article. I would be interested for you to expand on your statement that religious cultures have a higher crime rate than secular.
donovan moore
editor
spiritnewsdaily.com
emsquared
I agree with you on both points. It is hard to resist the allure of superstition when staring into the abyss. And it is so true that people prefer the story to the reasoned argument and evidence. I think this is true about many things in society, and not just about religion (homeopathy, for example). In the book I refer to, Susan Blackmore points out, after a lifetime of researching the paranormal, that she is convinced of 2 things: 1) the paranormal doesn’t exist; 2) nobody is really interested the evidence. They will always fall back on the anecdotal rather than the scientific study, always take support from the TV or newspaper, rather than the lab or the journal.
SilverTiger
I agree that the power of nurture is strong and share your concern at Tory plans to increase faith schools, and I share your wish for more good education as a way of combating religion’s spread. Although it took a very long-time, education eventually helped me escape.
I do, however, have some time for the argument that the amygdala can convince the neocortex of just about anything. The evolution of an emotional system may not have caused religion, but it certainly provides a fertile ground for some of its seeds.
don
The religious US has higher crime rates than the largely secular Europe (Poland and Ireland being the exceptions to the claim of secular). In Europe the murder rate and the number of people in prison is lower. And secular Europe appears to be much better at the moral behaviour of looking after the poor and needy than the religious US.
Interesting research published HERE, summarized HERE. See also HERE.
“”Call any 50-year-old Canaanite with sexual designs of a 9-year-old a lecherous pedophile, and from those who disagree with your assessment you’ll get a disagreement; say the same about Mohammed and you’ll get a death warrant.”
This is slightly innaccurate. Mohammed married Ayesha when she was six, but did not consummate until she was large enough for him to penetrate at nine years old.
While he was waitng, he did mufa khathat or thighing, where he rubbed himself off between the tops of her legs without actually entering her. http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/mufa-khathat-cleaning-mess-up.html
Trencherbone
Thanks for the information and the correction. Regardless of the fine, but important detail, I still suspect (unfortunately) that any criticism, whether accurate or not, is likely to attract a death threat - simply because it dares to criticise.
I’ve only been an atheist for, what, 5 years? And I keep wake up thinking that everyone in my former church would surely have converted to atheism by now. Yet, they continue to be Christians. It just baffles me! Yet I had no such thoughts when I myself was a Christian. In fact, just the opposite! I wondered why not everyone was a Christian. Oh well… I’m highly irrational.
To sum up, I think religion is simply convenient. It’s easier to get into / stay in one than to get out of one.
Temaskian
I agree that the convenience of the status quo is very soporific. Until really challenged by something there isn’t the impetus to examine the roots of where you are and consider why you are where you are. If it isn’t the family and dominant culture, then tradition and status quo can be very powerful.
I can’t get over the image of waiting until a girl is large enough to penetrate. Were there practice runs and then one day, eureka? Sorry. Like I said, I can’t get past the image.
Zoe
And all done by a human being who invented a religion!