The important part of religion is not the factual details (which is the part casual atheists fixate on), it's the values and worldview. It's quite clear that the secular world is doing a bad job filling the void as people abandon the church. Also, the big flaw in your framing of this whole thing is the notion that any single person can develop a meaningful worldview or even assess the validity of claims, from first principles. Society would cease to function if people didn't accept inherited wisdom at some level. Few people have the intellectual horsepower or energy to criticize the entire western Christian/enlightenment tradition let alone find something to substitute in its place.
You can think of the great illuminist achievement as divorcing morality from religion. You can reconstruct the same set of moral beliefs from christianity, without god or christ. If the point of religion is to be a social club that helps practice a morality that does not depend on god, then it doesn’t seem to me that you view religion as important in any ontological sense. It’s just practical. You also can’t claim that the bible has a privilege of being morally always right, since it’s not divinely inspired. Sometimes, experts will come up with better moral arguments, and you will have to update doctrine.Further, once you notice this, religiosity becomes a lot harder. You talk as if it was possible to just turn back the clock, but it’s not. When in doubt about god, about why and how to believe, you lack good arguments. Btw, you can say communism gave people a moral code and a drive. I find it hard to think society should try reviving it.
"The important part of religion is not the factual details (which is the part casual atheists fixate on), it's the values and worldview."
But that unavoidably concedes the functionalist theory of religion and avoids confronting the question of truth. In addition, if the values and worldview are so important for social cohesion, premising them atop obvious falsehoods is basically inviting those values and that worldview to be discredited (unless you argue there's some sort of costly-signaling-via-epistemic-self-debasement going on here).
"It's quite clear that the secular world is doing a bad job filling the void as people abandon the church."
And would be people be abandoning the church unless the church were also doing a bad job? People don't abandon churches - costly acts for many given how their community networks often overlap with church - for arbitrary reasons.
"Also, the big flaw in your framing of this whole thing is the notion that any single person can develop a meaningful worldview or even assess the validity of claims, from first principles. Society would cease to function if people didn't accept inherited wisdom at some level. Few people have the intellectual horsepower or energy to criticize the entire western Christian/enlightenment tradition let alone find something to substitute in its place."
This is a good point. Many people's worldviews are adopted in large part due to habit, custom or culture rather than actual conviction (although this actually backs up Bryan's point - it is completely consistent with his notion of Rational Irrationality). But would society cease to function if it stopped taking religion as seriously? The actual beliefs one needs to live a life don't really deal with complex theological matters (like the manner in which Jesus is present in the Eucharist - a belief which was literally a matter of life and death at some points in Christian history), and "theologically serious" believers of any religion tend to be a minority.
If you argue "the masses need religion" then how much are we talking about? And on what particular issues should that religion comment?
"But that unavoidably concedes the functionalist theory of religion and avoids confronting the question of truth." Perhaps, but it also depends what you mean by truth. I don't think many people literally believe much or most of the most magical/supernatural stories in the Bible, if you really cornered them. They are stories that represent truths about the world. They are certainly not falsehoods unless you insist on taking it as literal history.
Now, I'll say I'm quite likely defending some people in a way they don't care to be defended. But in my view the Christians of the world are more likely to be on the right track (for themselves) and much more likely to be making the world more like the world I want to live in. I think their values are like mine and the stories of the bible, for the most part, reinforce that. I see no reason to corner people or tell them they are stupid for believing things that are at odds with scientific rationalism when take literally.
"And would be people be abandoning the church unless the church were also doing a bad job?" This is a complicated topic. Many churches *are* doing a bad job by caving to secular pressures. No point going to church to hear what you can hear on the Daily Show anyway. Also, it is by definition built on faith (in God, but also faith that the values being presented are true/valid even if they can't be derived from first principles). The values have costs, or at least they seem to in the near term, in terms of how you live your life. Other ways of living (e.g. going for immediate gratification or lifelong material consumption) seem easier in the moment. Once you see other people taking the "easy" route, the flood gates are open. I think people and society will be the worse for this. We are seeing the consequences quite clearly already. Sounds kind of like being "tempted".
"If you argue "the masses need religion" then how much are we talking about? And on what particular issues should that religion comment?" I hate to put it that way, but it's kind of what I think. We are better off if we all agree on a proven value system and I think Christianity has a pretty good record in modern times. Once you start telling everyone to do what seems right for them, it's going to fall apart. I go back to the fact the *nobody* can make this stuff up, you *have* to inherit it (or adopt it). Religion happens to be the way we culturally encode hard-learned lessons.
Sure, I get you're making a very qualified defense of what might loosely be called "cultural Christianity." But how much of "cultural Christianity" is actually due to Christianity per se and how much is really an extremely diluted form of Christian symbolism suffused with Enlightenment ideas?
If you look at Christianity throughout history, it has often been used to justify very different value systems. Some Christians absolutely believed Christianity justified racism, for example. Medieval Catholicism bears essentially no resemblance to the "cultural Christianity" you defend.
You can say "Christianity has a pretty good record in modern times" but if you look back to premodern times, when Christian belief and theology was literally a matter of life and death, the picture starts looking much less rosy. And it would be very presentist to suggest that contemporary, highly-diluted "cultural Christianity" is "the true message of Jesus" (Calvin, Augustine and Aquinas would all strongly disagree with such a proposition).
You say that we're seeing negative consequences in our society due to a decline in religion. I'm skeptical. Complaints about "the young are degenerates" literally go back to Plato, and today's society has a superior material standard of living and lower violent crime rates than even forty years ago. I despise wokeness too, but wokeness isn't so much a "lack of religion" but a substitute religion... one that actually bears many hallmarks of cultural Christianity ("privilege" filling the role of "original sin" for example).
What "Christian" values do you consider necessary to preventing societal collapse, exactly? Because keep in mind that Jesus himself said divorce must never be permitted... yet No Fault Divorce was introduced by conservative hero Ronald Reagan. Whilst I agree marriage has become much less compelling to young men (albeit, in my opinion, for other reasons than NFD), I haven't seen society collapse from NFD. Or from permitting same-sex couples to marry or from teaching evolution in public schools (the two big preoccupations of the George W Bush-era religious right).
I'm not saying society will collapse, but I think people are without purpose and trying to substitute with woke and environmentalism, but not really filling the void. And I purposely didn't use the term "cultural Christianity" because that's less than what I mean. It's something I think Dawkins even said, like "yeah, yeah, I'm a cultural Christian" [but you're all still morons for believing in fairy tales].
I'm trying to give Christianity a bit more credit. For example, you can think of God as an old bearded guy in the clouds on one hand, but I see more of an embodiment of the brute facts of life on earth as a human being, that punishes and rewards humans and societies based on how they adhere to proper ways of behaving. "Proper" not because these rules are arbitrary and someone says so, but because that is actually the way to live a meaningful life in a human society in a sustainable way. Or at least it's one proven way.
Anyway, I come back to meaning and purpose and having a path in life. One thing that comes to mind is that we used to have a default - your default is to get married and have children. If you're the man you are to provide and protect. The woman is to nurture the family. We can certainly quibble about how constraining that could be and gender equality and all that, but having that default expectation I think is very valuable.
You can go off and do something unusual, but having it be respectable to be normal in this way is important. Now it's literally like "are you a boy or a girl? Are you attracted to men or women? How are you going to make it big in the world? How are you going to get rich and famous?" And on and on. You pointed out what happened with divorce, and it has not been good. Again, we don't want people to be locked into abusive relationships, but having those taboos against divorce added value. Religious people are much likely to get divorced, in my view because they take it more seriously.
The question of a "cultural default" is something you're (perhaps accidentally) equivocating on. The word "normal" has two meanings - a statistical meaning (how most things are) and a moral meaning. Historically, society has done MUCH MORE than say "this is how most people live, and it makes most people happy, so you should consider it the most likely fulfilling lifestyle for you" (which is what statistical normalcy would justify). Instead, religion has been (and in some parts of the world still is) frequently used to justify PUTTING DEVIANTS TO DEATH. Threats of hell and damnation were not incidental features of the history of Christianity - they were exceedingly common and there are many people who quite literally experience symptoms of PTSD from being raised in a "fire and brimstone" religious tradition.
You're arguing, at best, for a soft functionalism that justifies a Disney-Christianity devoid of theological content, as a way to back up the social norms of 1950s postwar America (which were most assuredly not the social norms embraced in biblical times, and not even the universal norms of the Christian world... the nuclear family model, for example, is a minority position and most societies including many Christian society practice extended families). And even if these norms are perfectly fulfilling for most, society back then didn't have escape hatches for the misfits. Serious, theologically-minded Christians, however, are often very determined to seal off those escape hatches.
Do I think we should respect people's choices if they choose to live a conventional lifestyle? Of course. But I don't see how that is incompatible with a live-and-let-live, classically liberal mindset. And once again, your assessment of religion's beneficience is very much predicated on a highly selective, sanitized form of religiosity that serious advocates of the Christian vision would consider "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."
If you want to make a proper comparison from which to assess the costs and benefits of religion, you can't take the weak tea religiosity of culturally-Christian Westerners who visit church for weddings, funerals, and maybe Christmas and Easter. You need to use the fundies as a baseline, and across a wide variety of denominations. And factor in not just benefits, but also costs (including opportunity costs).
Belief that the universe in its delicate balance, intricate design and the miracle of our consciousness, came about by random chance without meaning or purpose, requires a great deal of faith indeed.
This is a strawman, all of these are understood in much greater detail scientifically than you're hinting at, even if there's still work remaining to be done.
It's similar to ignorantly saying "I dunno how humans could possibly evolve from monkeys." But if you go actually learn about evolution and what the state of the art is, you'll find enormous amounts of incredibly detailed evidence. Basic everyday objections and misconceptions like this have been solved conclusively long ago, and the frontier of the field is currently busy with scores of very smart people spending millions of dollars and dedicating their careers to investigating the intricate remaining edge cases that are actually difficult.
Reason alone cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, and scientific explanations for the phenomenon of consciousness fall extremely flat. I have a degree in physics, and while I'm not all that religious I find it hard to look at Maxwell's equations and not think "this beauty feels pointed at the divine somehow".
There's plenty of bogus religious explanations of everyday phenomena which have been proved untrue. I can't stand creationists, for instance. But there are some questions we all struggle with which hypothesis testing is pretty useless at answering.
you should read "The Devils Delusion, Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions" before posting such sincere beliefs. Funniest book by a secular mathematician I have read.
Although 99% of people who are religious form their beliefs irrationally there are 1% who do not (that 1% tends to congregate on substack). And among non-religious people the vast majority form their beliefs in an equally irrational way—many “non-religious” people will still believe in ghosts or aliens or lizard conspiracies. The irrational non-religious people just happen not to believe in one thing which many other irrational people believe in.
In Christianity, really ? So the contemplative mystics dont exit ? Plus the various books on doubt, uncertainty that infest bookstores suggests the reverse hypothesis. Most Christians have are reflective about their beliefs. The only dogmatic believers I run across are devout atheists, especially marxists who despite recent history of their cults. insist on blind obedience to a falsified set of beliefs.
I think comparing religions to fraternities is apt. One group has weird handshakes, the other has weird beliefs. Both are harmless, so long as they keep to themselves. It’s only when they infringe upon my “freedom from” rights, where there are issues.
Can’t remember if it was Hitch, but one of the many hilarious things I have read about the silliness of religions (even just the monotheistic ones) is that they can’t all be right. I quite enjoy that concept when looking at religious folk.
Like often (usually?), Caplan's claims here are precisely the opposite of the truth (and I think he knows this). For one, I don't think the ancient peoples made up their gods. Read Jaynes on the sheer commonality of ancient experiences with the supernatural.
People get their religions from their surroundings, which I think is reasonably rational - religions with very few followers are unlikely to be true.
I agree with what you are saying at a high level Dr Kaplan, but maybe “irrational” is the wrong word to describe religious behavior. You said it yourself, it’s cheap to hold these beliefs, and when the behavior gets expensive the behavior gets ignored. There are benefits to believing things that aren’t true, so perhaps the better question to ask is whether the unseen costs of doctrinal belief outweighs the benefits of faith. According to you, and I agree, they are. It seems then that the reason people believe in faith based doctrines is because the unseen damages are prohibitively expensive to view and weigh. There are transaction costs associated with parsing credibility between philosophers, economists, your pastor and grandma. Maybe the better framing of the problem of religion is not a question of rationality, but a systemic scrutinization of why *rational* decision making in the credibility and evidence weighing marketplace led to this dysfunctional result. It looks like barriers to entry/transaction costs to me. Developing a universal standard of evidence takes work, and unless that work vertically integrates into your career or life style (scientists, engineers, academia in general), it may be an expensive effort that the rational religious thinker will avoid.
Similar to your observation that "[t]he gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low," I have offered a revised version of Pascal's Wager which incorporates time value to explain why (like Saint Augustine) a great many people happily sin in their youth but become religious later in their life when the discounted value of perpectual suffering in hell begins to exceed the present value of sinning. I also modify Pascal's Wager to include the greatly reduced risk of an untimely death in modern society - since it is difficult to implement the time-optimized strategy if death is highly unpredictable - to explain the secularizing trend in modern society and the "no atheists in a foxhole" phenomenon.
The whole point of a religious belief or a Faith,not necessarily an identical thing is that it has to work for you,enhance your life boost your self-esteem and give you perceived status in society,in your community or even just to yourself. Everyone hates and despises you - that's because only you know THE TRUTH,the others are all materialstic profit seekers. You get lynched and killed,you are a Holy Martyr even if only to yourself,but often suddenly to a lot of other people. You suffer grinding poverty,it's the test your God puts you through,the refining fire,those others laughing at you from their swish cars they're all bound for hell fire. BUT, conversely,you got Jesus and next thing you know,you gotta job. You're marrying the bosses beautiful daughter. You now live in a big house in landscaped grounds just outside the city. That's the reward of Faith. Faith in the Christian God,in Allah,in that Laughing Buddha statuette,in THE UNIVERSE. Ask and you shall Receive. If you don't receive that's EXTRA STRONG PROOF that GOD LOVES YOU because he is keeping you unspotted from the World. Who wants to be a Millionaire? It's absolutely and logically rational to belong to a lot religion and have a Faith because it makes sense of your life.
I'm not convinced that (reasonable) believers hold their beliefs with certainty. In Christianity, for example, struggling with one's faith is almost perpetual (mimicking Jesus on the cross perhaps). When they describe certainty they instead seem to be signalling a decision to fully commit, for the moment, to their faith. The scientist wants preciseness regarding something like belief, but that's not how religious people conceptualise it.
Also religious beliefs are kinda only sorta beliefs. People who seem in one sen very sure of the afterlife don't act at all like they would if their relative was merely embarking on a journey of exploration that would prevent all contact for the rest of their life. And usually not when it is their term.
Some do, my point is that a belief is a multifaceted thing and you can have some but not all aspects of it.
You can't say that science doesn't disprove the resurrection and claim that it proves evolution or does disprove the theory that people used to ride dinosaurs [1]. All are claims about what happened in the past that can't be directly interogated but can be answered by assuming no targeted violations of natural law.
It is, after all, possible that the fossil record is all created by the devil to trick us. Ultimately, the *only* way science proves anything about the past is by applying the hypothesis that natural law worked as well then.
I think people get confused here because the only salient hypothesis with the resurrection is the one which assumes supernatural intervention while there were other non-supernatural potential views one could have had about the age of the earth and evolution that we could falsify. But as long as you are concerned about the overall probability the cases are identical.
---
1: Here prove is used in the informal sense of provide overwhelming evidence.
Of course I think there is plenty of evidence, tho not decisive, for Christianity. It is "a convenient hypothesis" as some mathematician said. But most people aren't very good at thinking. They do believe based on small evidence. But they are still being rational-- it is their best explanation. Ghosts are rational in that sense too-- if you don't investigate mch, ghosts are not unreasonable, thoif you do and are smart, ghosts are clearly a false belief.
The important part of religion is not the factual details (which is the part casual atheists fixate on), it's the values and worldview. It's quite clear that the secular world is doing a bad job filling the void as people abandon the church. Also, the big flaw in your framing of this whole thing is the notion that any single person can develop a meaningful worldview or even assess the validity of claims, from first principles. Society would cease to function if people didn't accept inherited wisdom at some level. Few people have the intellectual horsepower or energy to criticize the entire western Christian/enlightenment tradition let alone find something to substitute in its place.
You can think of the great illuminist achievement as divorcing morality from religion. You can reconstruct the same set of moral beliefs from christianity, without god or christ. If the point of religion is to be a social club that helps practice a morality that does not depend on god, then it doesn’t seem to me that you view religion as important in any ontological sense. It’s just practical. You also can’t claim that the bible has a privilege of being morally always right, since it’s not divinely inspired. Sometimes, experts will come up with better moral arguments, and you will have to update doctrine.Further, once you notice this, religiosity becomes a lot harder. You talk as if it was possible to just turn back the clock, but it’s not. When in doubt about god, about why and how to believe, you lack good arguments. Btw, you can say communism gave people a moral code and a drive. I find it hard to think society should try reviving it.
"The important part of religion is not the factual details (which is the part casual atheists fixate on), it's the values and worldview."
But that unavoidably concedes the functionalist theory of religion and avoids confronting the question of truth. In addition, if the values and worldview are so important for social cohesion, premising them atop obvious falsehoods is basically inviting those values and that worldview to be discredited (unless you argue there's some sort of costly-signaling-via-epistemic-self-debasement going on here).
"It's quite clear that the secular world is doing a bad job filling the void as people abandon the church."
And would be people be abandoning the church unless the church were also doing a bad job? People don't abandon churches - costly acts for many given how their community networks often overlap with church - for arbitrary reasons.
"Also, the big flaw in your framing of this whole thing is the notion that any single person can develop a meaningful worldview or even assess the validity of claims, from first principles. Society would cease to function if people didn't accept inherited wisdom at some level. Few people have the intellectual horsepower or energy to criticize the entire western Christian/enlightenment tradition let alone find something to substitute in its place."
This is a good point. Many people's worldviews are adopted in large part due to habit, custom or culture rather than actual conviction (although this actually backs up Bryan's point - it is completely consistent with his notion of Rational Irrationality). But would society cease to function if it stopped taking religion as seriously? The actual beliefs one needs to live a life don't really deal with complex theological matters (like the manner in which Jesus is present in the Eucharist - a belief which was literally a matter of life and death at some points in Christian history), and "theologically serious" believers of any religion tend to be a minority.
If you argue "the masses need religion" then how much are we talking about? And on what particular issues should that religion comment?
"But that unavoidably concedes the functionalist theory of religion and avoids confronting the question of truth." Perhaps, but it also depends what you mean by truth. I don't think many people literally believe much or most of the most magical/supernatural stories in the Bible, if you really cornered them. They are stories that represent truths about the world. They are certainly not falsehoods unless you insist on taking it as literal history.
Now, I'll say I'm quite likely defending some people in a way they don't care to be defended. But in my view the Christians of the world are more likely to be on the right track (for themselves) and much more likely to be making the world more like the world I want to live in. I think their values are like mine and the stories of the bible, for the most part, reinforce that. I see no reason to corner people or tell them they are stupid for believing things that are at odds with scientific rationalism when take literally.
"And would be people be abandoning the church unless the church were also doing a bad job?" This is a complicated topic. Many churches *are* doing a bad job by caving to secular pressures. No point going to church to hear what you can hear on the Daily Show anyway. Also, it is by definition built on faith (in God, but also faith that the values being presented are true/valid even if they can't be derived from first principles). The values have costs, or at least they seem to in the near term, in terms of how you live your life. Other ways of living (e.g. going for immediate gratification or lifelong material consumption) seem easier in the moment. Once you see other people taking the "easy" route, the flood gates are open. I think people and society will be the worse for this. We are seeing the consequences quite clearly already. Sounds kind of like being "tempted".
"If you argue "the masses need religion" then how much are we talking about? And on what particular issues should that religion comment?" I hate to put it that way, but it's kind of what I think. We are better off if we all agree on a proven value system and I think Christianity has a pretty good record in modern times. Once you start telling everyone to do what seems right for them, it's going to fall apart. I go back to the fact the *nobody* can make this stuff up, you *have* to inherit it (or adopt it). Religion happens to be the way we culturally encode hard-learned lessons.
Sure, I get you're making a very qualified defense of what might loosely be called "cultural Christianity." But how much of "cultural Christianity" is actually due to Christianity per se and how much is really an extremely diluted form of Christian symbolism suffused with Enlightenment ideas?
If you look at Christianity throughout history, it has often been used to justify very different value systems. Some Christians absolutely believed Christianity justified racism, for example. Medieval Catholicism bears essentially no resemblance to the "cultural Christianity" you defend.
You can say "Christianity has a pretty good record in modern times" but if you look back to premodern times, when Christian belief and theology was literally a matter of life and death, the picture starts looking much less rosy. And it would be very presentist to suggest that contemporary, highly-diluted "cultural Christianity" is "the true message of Jesus" (Calvin, Augustine and Aquinas would all strongly disagree with such a proposition).
You say that we're seeing negative consequences in our society due to a decline in religion. I'm skeptical. Complaints about "the young are degenerates" literally go back to Plato, and today's society has a superior material standard of living and lower violent crime rates than even forty years ago. I despise wokeness too, but wokeness isn't so much a "lack of religion" but a substitute religion... one that actually bears many hallmarks of cultural Christianity ("privilege" filling the role of "original sin" for example).
What "Christian" values do you consider necessary to preventing societal collapse, exactly? Because keep in mind that Jesus himself said divorce must never be permitted... yet No Fault Divorce was introduced by conservative hero Ronald Reagan. Whilst I agree marriage has become much less compelling to young men (albeit, in my opinion, for other reasons than NFD), I haven't seen society collapse from NFD. Or from permitting same-sex couples to marry or from teaching evolution in public schools (the two big preoccupations of the George W Bush-era religious right).
I'm not saying society will collapse, but I think people are without purpose and trying to substitute with woke and environmentalism, but not really filling the void. And I purposely didn't use the term "cultural Christianity" because that's less than what I mean. It's something I think Dawkins even said, like "yeah, yeah, I'm a cultural Christian" [but you're all still morons for believing in fairy tales].
I'm trying to give Christianity a bit more credit. For example, you can think of God as an old bearded guy in the clouds on one hand, but I see more of an embodiment of the brute facts of life on earth as a human being, that punishes and rewards humans and societies based on how they adhere to proper ways of behaving. "Proper" not because these rules are arbitrary and someone says so, but because that is actually the way to live a meaningful life in a human society in a sustainable way. Or at least it's one proven way.
Anyway, I come back to meaning and purpose and having a path in life. One thing that comes to mind is that we used to have a default - your default is to get married and have children. If you're the man you are to provide and protect. The woman is to nurture the family. We can certainly quibble about how constraining that could be and gender equality and all that, but having that default expectation I think is very valuable.
You can go off and do something unusual, but having it be respectable to be normal in this way is important. Now it's literally like "are you a boy or a girl? Are you attracted to men or women? How are you going to make it big in the world? How are you going to get rich and famous?" And on and on. You pointed out what happened with divorce, and it has not been good. Again, we don't want people to be locked into abusive relationships, but having those taboos against divorce added value. Religious people are much likely to get divorced, in my view because they take it more seriously.
I mostly rambled, but there it is.
The question of a "cultural default" is something you're (perhaps accidentally) equivocating on. The word "normal" has two meanings - a statistical meaning (how most things are) and a moral meaning. Historically, society has done MUCH MORE than say "this is how most people live, and it makes most people happy, so you should consider it the most likely fulfilling lifestyle for you" (which is what statistical normalcy would justify). Instead, religion has been (and in some parts of the world still is) frequently used to justify PUTTING DEVIANTS TO DEATH. Threats of hell and damnation were not incidental features of the history of Christianity - they were exceedingly common and there are many people who quite literally experience symptoms of PTSD from being raised in a "fire and brimstone" religious tradition.
You're arguing, at best, for a soft functionalism that justifies a Disney-Christianity devoid of theological content, as a way to back up the social norms of 1950s postwar America (which were most assuredly not the social norms embraced in biblical times, and not even the universal norms of the Christian world... the nuclear family model, for example, is a minority position and most societies including many Christian society practice extended families). And even if these norms are perfectly fulfilling for most, society back then didn't have escape hatches for the misfits. Serious, theologically-minded Christians, however, are often very determined to seal off those escape hatches.
Do I think we should respect people's choices if they choose to live a conventional lifestyle? Of course. But I don't see how that is incompatible with a live-and-let-live, classically liberal mindset. And once again, your assessment of religion's beneficience is very much predicated on a highly selective, sanitized form of religiosity that serious advocates of the Christian vision would consider "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."
If you want to make a proper comparison from which to assess the costs and benefits of religion, you can't take the weak tea religiosity of culturally-Christian Westerners who visit church for weddings, funerals, and maybe Christmas and Easter. You need to use the fundies as a baseline, and across a wide variety of denominations. And factor in not just benefits, but also costs (including opportunity costs).
Belief that the universe in its delicate balance, intricate design and the miracle of our consciousness, came about by random chance without meaning or purpose, requires a great deal of faith indeed.
This is a strawman, all of these are understood in much greater detail scientifically than you're hinting at, even if there's still work remaining to be done.
It's similar to ignorantly saying "I dunno how humans could possibly evolve from monkeys." But if you go actually learn about evolution and what the state of the art is, you'll find enormous amounts of incredibly detailed evidence. Basic everyday objections and misconceptions like this have been solved conclusively long ago, and the frontier of the field is currently busy with scores of very smart people spending millions of dollars and dedicating their careers to investigating the intricate remaining edge cases that are actually difficult.
There need not be tension between understanding and wonder- the design of the universe is made more impressive by its comprehensibility.
Reason alone cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, and scientific explanations for the phenomenon of consciousness fall extremely flat. I have a degree in physics, and while I'm not all that religious I find it hard to look at Maxwell's equations and not think "this beauty feels pointed at the divine somehow".
There's plenty of bogus religious explanations of everyday phenomena which have been proved untrue. I can't stand creationists, for instance. But there are some questions we all struggle with which hypothesis testing is pretty useless at answering.
you should read "The Devils Delusion, Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions" before posting such sincere beliefs. Funniest book by a secular mathematician I have read.
I attain this with ease, not by believing, but by declining to believe. Most of my whole "belief system" is so composed.
Consider the following rational argument for believing in a religion:
P1: There are some facts about the universe that cannot be explained without a creator God.
P2: It is likely that that God would have made himself known to humanity by now, and that this would have spawned a religion.
C: You should believe in whichever religion presents the best empirical evidence of itself relative to other religions, not relative to naturalism.
P1 and P2 are both false though
Why do you think p2 is false?
Although 99% of people who are religious form their beliefs irrationally there are 1% who do not (that 1% tends to congregate on substack). And among non-religious people the vast majority form their beliefs in an equally irrational way—many “non-religious” people will still believe in ghosts or aliens or lizard conspiracies. The irrational non-religious people just happen not to believe in one thing which many other irrational people believe in.
In Christianity, really ? So the contemplative mystics dont exit ? Plus the various books on doubt, uncertainty that infest bookstores suggests the reverse hypothesis. Most Christians have are reflective about their beliefs. The only dogmatic believers I run across are devout atheists, especially marxists who despite recent history of their cults. insist on blind obedience to a falsified set of beliefs.
I think comparing religions to fraternities is apt. One group has weird handshakes, the other has weird beliefs. Both are harmless, so long as they keep to themselves. It’s only when they infringe upon my “freedom from” rights, where there are issues.
Can’t remember if it was Hitch, but one of the many hilarious things I have read about the silliness of religions (even just the monotheistic ones) is that they can’t all be right. I quite enjoy that concept when looking at religious folk.
Your rights? What are these and why should anybody care about them ?
There are no rights in Survival of the fittest.
Well the fittest certainly aren’t those who believe in fairy tales.
Are they not? Seculars aren't reproducing themselves as Afghans.
I’d agree insofar as I wouldn’t suggest asserting secularism rights in Afghanistan.
Like often (usually?), Caplan's claims here are precisely the opposite of the truth (and I think he knows this). For one, I don't think the ancient peoples made up their gods. Read Jaynes on the sheer commonality of ancient experiences with the supernatural.
People get their religions from their surroundings, which I think is reasonably rational - religions with very few followers are unlikely to be true.
I agree with what you are saying at a high level Dr Kaplan, but maybe “irrational” is the wrong word to describe religious behavior. You said it yourself, it’s cheap to hold these beliefs, and when the behavior gets expensive the behavior gets ignored. There are benefits to believing things that aren’t true, so perhaps the better question to ask is whether the unseen costs of doctrinal belief outweighs the benefits of faith. According to you, and I agree, they are. It seems then that the reason people believe in faith based doctrines is because the unseen damages are prohibitively expensive to view and weigh. There are transaction costs associated with parsing credibility between philosophers, economists, your pastor and grandma. Maybe the better framing of the problem of religion is not a question of rationality, but a systemic scrutinization of why *rational* decision making in the credibility and evidence weighing marketplace led to this dysfunctional result. It looks like barriers to entry/transaction costs to me. Developing a universal standard of evidence takes work, and unless that work vertically integrates into your career or life style (scientists, engineers, academia in general), it may be an expensive effort that the rational religious thinker will avoid.
Similar to your observation that "[t]he gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low," I have offered a revised version of Pascal's Wager which incorporates time value to explain why (like Saint Augustine) a great many people happily sin in their youth but become religious later in their life when the discounted value of perpectual suffering in hell begins to exceed the present value of sinning. I also modify Pascal's Wager to include the greatly reduced risk of an untimely death in modern society - since it is difficult to implement the time-optimized strategy if death is highly unpredictable - to explain the secularizing trend in modern society and the "no atheists in a foxhole" phenomenon.
The whole point of a religious belief or a Faith,not necessarily an identical thing is that it has to work for you,enhance your life boost your self-esteem and give you perceived status in society,in your community or even just to yourself. Everyone hates and despises you - that's because only you know THE TRUTH,the others are all materialstic profit seekers. You get lynched and killed,you are a Holy Martyr even if only to yourself,but often suddenly to a lot of other people. You suffer grinding poverty,it's the test your God puts you through,the refining fire,those others laughing at you from their swish cars they're all bound for hell fire. BUT, conversely,you got Jesus and next thing you know,you gotta job. You're marrying the bosses beautiful daughter. You now live in a big house in landscaped grounds just outside the city. That's the reward of Faith. Faith in the Christian God,in Allah,in that Laughing Buddha statuette,in THE UNIVERSE. Ask and you shall Receive. If you don't receive that's EXTRA STRONG PROOF that GOD LOVES YOU because he is keeping you unspotted from the World. Who wants to be a Millionaire? It's absolutely and logically rational to belong to a lot religion and have a Faith because it makes sense of your life.
I'm not convinced that (reasonable) believers hold their beliefs with certainty. In Christianity, for example, struggling with one's faith is almost perpetual (mimicking Jesus on the cross perhaps). When they describe certainty they instead seem to be signalling a decision to fully commit, for the moment, to their faith. The scientist wants preciseness regarding something like belief, but that's not how religious people conceptualise it.
Also religious beliefs are kinda only sorta beliefs. People who seem in one sen very sure of the afterlife don't act at all like they would if their relative was merely embarking on a journey of exploration that would prevent all contact for the rest of their life. And usually not when it is their term.
Some do, my point is that a belief is a multifaceted thing and you can have some but not all aspects of it.
You can't say that science doesn't disprove the resurrection and claim that it proves evolution or does disprove the theory that people used to ride dinosaurs [1]. All are claims about what happened in the past that can't be directly interogated but can be answered by assuming no targeted violations of natural law.
It is, after all, possible that the fossil record is all created by the devil to trick us. Ultimately, the *only* way science proves anything about the past is by applying the hypothesis that natural law worked as well then.
I think people get confused here because the only salient hypothesis with the resurrection is the one which assumes supernatural intervention while there were other non-supernatural potential views one could have had about the age of the earth and evolution that we could falsify. But as long as you are concerned about the overall probability the cases are identical.
---
1: Here prove is used in the informal sense of provide overwhelming evidence.
Bryan, you would enjoy this: https://youtu.be/lcXfmbvG3YA?si=ud6lK8ib6LjD9-jY
I am pretty sure that over the nearly 50 years of IVF, there has been at least one virgin birth.
Of course I think there is plenty of evidence, tho not decisive, for Christianity. It is "a convenient hypothesis" as some mathematician said. But most people aren't very good at thinking. They do believe based on small evidence. But they are still being rational-- it is their best explanation. Ghosts are rational in that sense too-- if you don't investigate mch, ghosts are not unreasonable, thoif you do and are smart, ghosts are clearly a false belief.