For the past 4 years, when I've been asked "why are you an atheist", I've responded along the lines of "because I think it is true".
This is changing, though.
Which of these two possible uses for religious belief–'to accurately represent the world' or 'broadly, to improve society'–is most important? I don't think it ever has been the first. Religious beliefs arise in people as a result of a variety of complicated factors but there must be straightforward reasons that the beliefs are held.
To hold a belief, it must be holdable, i.e. it must not conflict too strongly with any existing beliefs. But also, if one is to hold onto a belief in a sustained manner, one must be motivated to do so. Religious believers hold onto their beliefs because they consider the belief to be beneficial to them, their circle of family and friends, and society at large. Nearly every religious belief comes in a package that is sometimes referred to as 'life stance'. This package of beliefs must be considered holistically in order to see both how any religious life stance is a holdable belief and why one might be motivated to consider this the most beneficial of many mutually exclusive life stances.
And this is the sense in which I consider religious life stances (those that require an acceptance of the supernatural as opposed to secular life stances) to be failures. It can be demonstrated that, for instance, Christianity does not benefit individuals, their kith and kin, or society at large. (I need to demonstrate this)
PS This blog will not be exclusively about religion.
I think you're correct that people continue to hold religious beliefs because they feel those beliefs in some way make society better. But isn't that way typically predicated on religious belief? When your system of morality is just Divine Command Theory in disguise, a society that follows the teachings of your religion is inherently good, regardless of the non-metaphysical benefits it may provide.
ReplyDeleteWhile I obviously agree with you that Christianity's benefits are far outweighed by its harm, I don't think there's a way to reliably demonstrate this to someone who takes Christianity very seriously. I hope I'm wrong...
So, there are a number of challenges in demonstrating that Christianity or any religious persuasion is objectively less beneficial to society or individuals than a particular secular alternative.
ReplyDeleteA major one is that, along with a set of social norms and incentives for behavior, nearly every major religion includes a mechanism that changes the criteria for good outcomes relative to secular life stances. A Humanist might say that any actions that improves the health of humanity without any major negative affects is a good action. A belief in an eternal afterlife changes this, though. Any action that increases the chance that anyone will live in paradise forever is automatically considered. So something like using stem cells, whose impact on the afterlife is in question in Christian circles, is trumped on the grounds of afterlife despite it's high hopes for the secular world.
Another major problem is causality. It's almost impossible to discern causal direction in natural experiments (is Jane better because she's a Christian, or a Christian because she's better? or the psychopath was an atheist, but would he have been worse if he felt justified by Christianity). So I don't think I would gain a lot of traction by comparing Christian behavior against secular behavior.
I think the promising approach is to look at things at the margins. In other words, can it be demonstrated that, as things get more secular in societies, societies get better.
> I think the promising approach is to look at things at the margins. In other words, can it be demonstrated that, as things get more secular in societies, societies get better.
ReplyDeleteReligionists re-define "good" for societies in exactly the same way that they re-define it for individuals. While you or I see the secular Western world as perhaps the best place to live in the history of the world, many (especially fundamentalist) Christians consider secular society to be a vile institution that leads people to sin, and write off the correlation between secularism and quality of life as coincidental.
I don't disagree with you that we can sort of empirically demonstrate that religion is harmful by looking at the overwhelming correlation between many different measures of quality of life and secularism, but I do think that serious religionists are almost by definition deaf to such arguments. Pragmatically, sometimes there might be a way to short-circuit religion's redefinition of the concept of "good" and get someone to question their faith using that argument, but just as often you'll run into a brick wall or even foster resentment that way ("how dare you say religion is harmful, are you calling me a bad person?"). So, pragmatically, my answer to the question "why are you an atheist?" will depend on the asker.
Someone could ask that question when they really mean "why did you become an atheist?" (actually I think that's usually what they mean, assuming "they" are religious). There's some subtlety in there. I stopped being religious because I came to understand the value of reason and empiricism in overcoming the logical fallacies human minds tend to make. I moved from simply lacking religion to thinking of myself as an atheist because I was suddenly able to see the harm that religion causes.
Anyway, my experiences have led me to the conclusion that you can not convince people that their religion is wrong, but you can give them the tools to do it themselves. That being the case, if an able-minded religious person asks me why I'm an atheist, I'll simply try to give the least alienating answer and move on to topics other than religion as quickly as possible.