What If Atheism Kills Religion?

Or, A Nostalgic Look Back on the Usefulness of Religion

An atheist should not think of spirituality as useless any more than a capitalist should think of agriculture as useless. There are evolutionary reasons why religion developed. If religion and spirituality were biologically disadvantageous, shouldn’t they have been selected out? If there were no or little advantage, then should we have reason to think that religion would have developed at all? To some extent, I’m sure we could imagine religion developing without benefit; after all, reality television has developed without any obvious advantage to our species.

Whether any given sect is important, or even whether certain beliefs were material or immaterial, I’m sure is highly debatable. Consider that humans have ranged from worshipping nature and parts of nature to incarnate deities to invisible all-powerful sky beings to space aliens. What is consistent is probably not the content of the beliefs, but the plain fact of or existence of beliefs among our species in the first place.

I am not arguing that modern society does or doesn’t need religion. I have no answer to that question. But the fact of our historical and biological record is that religion has been useful to us—at least as a whole, if not to all individuals.

Let me recall a brief tale of wisdom by Zhuangzi (as translated by Brian Bruya):

The Tatooed Yue People

One day, a man from Song went to the southern state of Yue to sell hats and shirts, thinking he could make lots of money [selling these useful wares].

What he didn’t know was that the Yue people had a custom of cutting their hair short and not wearing shirts because they tattooed their bodies.

[The Yue people found the merchants wares to be useless.]

Useful and useless, achievement and failure, are all relative, and none are necessarily consistent over time. … Nothing is for sure.

This illustrates the point that, while atheists may recognize (some or all) religions as useless now, it would seem disingenuous to say that religion has never been useful.¹

By analogy, democracy is a benefit to the whole, but not to all individuals. We sacrifice the benefit to some individuals to bring the greatest benefit to the most people. As an example, the democratic process can result in military conscription where an individual can be drafted into service and compelled to fight for his country or be sent to prison. As a democratic society, we can see the need to protect our collective selves and implement a plan to do so. This exercise of democracy² is not beneficial to the conscripted person who does not want to fight for his society, but it is probably good for the whole of society.

Another example is capitalism, which can arguably be boiled down to a system that rewards merit (and luck) rather than birthright or force. The system of capitalism (in many forms) is good for society as a whole, but not always for every individual. An orphan child with a disability, for example, is a likely

candidate for being a have-not in the capitalistic system. Without some type of welfare system, this individual would likely not benefit from full-frontal capitalism.

So too with religion, where any given individual might not benefit, but the whole of society probably has. A serious question with which many atheists currently seem to be wrestling is: Does society still need religion? Many intellectual atheists, including both modern thinkers and past philosophers, answer with a loud: No.

I wonder, though.

State Fair, Anyone?

Certainly, we do not need religion to understand and propagate morality. A moral framework can be devised from reason alone, experience alone, or some combination of reason and experience. Religion in moral terms is little more than a way for society to simplify the moral code into a legalistic system of reward and punishment, which is undeniably easier to manage than the sort of good-for-goodness’-sake that philosophical morality requires.³

However, even if we do not need religion for its morality aspects, might we still need religion or spirituality for its communal aspects? We are social animals. We are communal beings. We (most of us) do not like to be separated from the whole; we don’t like to be excluded. One role that religion still prominently plays is that of the aggregator of persons. It is this purpose, I think, that atheists are missing when they might say, “if we get rid of religion, then why do we need to replace it with anything?”

If religion were to die out, then I think it would need to be replaced with some regular communal organization. People like to be a part of something. Most people, I think, would be lost without religion.

I think an interesting question might be, assuming the above statements were true: If religion did die out, then what would, in evolutionary terms, be an acceptable replacement?

Certainly we would continue to be social animals. I think a fair point that atheists make is: We would not need to invent anything as a replacement. We already have replacements, in the form of nonreligious associations we already make with other people. There would be no need to engineer a replacement, because we already do, to some greater or lesser degree.

Plus, we could always revive the ice cream social. Or, State Fair, anyone?

Update: I don’t think that atheism will cause the end of religion, and certainly won’t bring about the end of theism. There will always be believers. Though, if there is an eventual religion-killer, I predict that online churches and the multitude of scams that will follow invariably therefrom will ultimately be the downfall of religion.

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1. I am not saying that no religion has been useless, and I am not saying that all religions have been useful. I am saying that, at least biologically and evolutionarily, we should probably recognize religion at least in general terms as having been advantageous to a greater number of people than to those whom it has been disadvantageous.
2. Whether or not military conscription is a legitimate function of democracy is perhaps debatable, but there can be little doubt that military service drafts take place in legitimate democracies, correct?
3. This is, obviously, a simplification. There are many more philosophical, non-religious justifications for morality than good-for-goodness’-sake. For example, there is the social contract model of morality that says that in order for society to operate, we necessarily must all agree to be moral people, along whatever standards we shall happen to agree upon.

Tags: atheism, religion

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.