Purpose of Religion

Most scientists, especially in the Western world, are atheists or agnostics. The history of the Church obviously contributes to that situation, the poster child for which is Galileo. But far more than that, I think it’s a philosophical clash between the approaches of science and religion that makes scientists pick the former over the latter. As Richard Feynman described it:

“How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know because the whole spirit (of science) is to understand.”

Feynman elaborated on what would happen when you applied the most basic of scientific principles (to doubt, to question) on religion:

“Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong.

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see. As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from and so on.”

While Richard Dawkins, one of the ‘Four Atheists of the Apocalypse’, acknowledges that religion does have some benefits for its believers, he reiterates the logical point that the “beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion’s claims”. Or to quote the caustic George Bernard Shaw:

‘The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is not more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

So why then does religion exist or survive? After all believers do throw that question back, “How can something have survived all these centuries if it is completely wrong? Why does it arise independently in every part of the world?”

I think Paul Troop nailed it when he described religion’s evolutionary advantage:

“Perhaps what is important is not whether religious beliefs are true, but that they are specific to that religion. That is, religious beliefs act as a ‘badge of identity’ for that religion that is difficult to fake. It would be easy for adherants to that religion to learn the weird and wonderful tenets of that religion, but difficult for outsiders. Thus beliefs could be the means of working out whether a person is safe to trust.”

Thus one prohibits eating pork; the other allows. One prohibits eating cows…you get the idea. Taken to its logical conclusion, the above argument means religions in fact have to be illogical:

“If this (badge of identity that is hard to fake) was their function, they would necessarily have to be arbitrary so that they could not be worked out through logic.”

Sounds like believing illogical is necessary for any faith! That point does align very well with how even believers act: people of one religion can pick holes in almost every other religion, can’t they?