Is Religion Good for Humanity?

A clue: no. (Plus: 'sophisticated theology', a friend who would kill me, and why Tom Holland is wrong.)

A little while ago, I was commissioned to produce a piece for Quillette’s roundtable feature, in which three people respond to a question, one in the affirmative, one in the negative, and one poor soul in the agnostic. In this case, the question was something like “is religion good for humanity?”. I couldn’t resist the bait to jam on my New Atheist hat and contributed the anti-religion piece of the triad. Unfortunately, the editors were unable to find anyone who would take the middle position, and so the feature was not published. I was given permission to reproduce my piece elsewhere, and you can find it below. Thank you to Bo Winegard for allowing this.

I have restored some aspects cut out or amended by the Quillette editors and added some things (the footnotes, for example, are all new). This isn’t a straight reproduction of the piece as accepted by Quillette, then, but my own version, albeit one greatly influenced by the Quillette editors’ treatment of it. Still, as you will be able to tell, it was written in the very particular context of the Quillette roundtable. There is much else I could and would say on the matter, and much I would expand on, but overall I think the following piece stands alone as a nice little expression of my unrepentant infidelity. New Atheism is dead, long live New Atheism!

UPDATE: Thank you to Jerry Coyne, who wrote about this piece on his website. See here.

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As a good old-fashioned New Atheist type, I have long been of the view that religion is most certainly not good for humanity. At best, it is irrelevant to the task of creating happy, free, and prosperous societies. At worst, it is an enemy of truth and a driver of hatred and conflict.

Let’s take truth first. The question at hand isn’t really about the veracity or otherwise of religion, but I think most people would consider truth, all else being equal, to be a good thing for humanity, as I do. This is by no means a given, I concede, and we shall have to skate over difficult metaphysical and epistemological questions about what exactly we mean by ‘truth’. But if we believe that truth (meaning, broadly, the accurate understanding of reality) is good, then religion, almost by definition, cannot be good for us.

I’m not one of those milquetoast atheists who hedges their bets, let alone a respectably stuffy agnostic. No, I think one can say, with great confidence, that Christianity, Islam, and the rest are utterly false. We know, and even believers have had to admit, that all the holy books are riddled with historical error, scientific illiteracy, and contradiction.

We know, for example, that they don’t provide a truthful cosmology, let alone cosmogony. The world did not come into being because an ancient Norse cow named Auðumbla was thirsty. Allah did not create man from clay. Yahweh Elohim did not bring about the universe in six days before retiring for cocktails on the seventh. In short, every single religion simply got it wrong. Their accounts of our origins are called creation myths for a reason—and the living religions are no less mythical than the dead ones.

If religion was our earliest, most feeble attempt to understand reality, it has long been superseded by the discoveries of science and the inquiries of philosophy. ‘Sophisticated theologians’, to employ Jerry Coyne’s deliciously condescending term, might be able to rescue their faith by making it so symbolic and abstract that their god might as well not exist (“the ground of all being” and all that), but this is hardly stirring or convincing stuff. Such theologians are as wrong, wrong, wrong as the most doltish of creationists, and the contortions of their attempts to salvage the unsalvageable simply reinscribe the falsehood of their starting point.¹ They make that which is merely wrong into something that is not even wrong. Worst of all, they make what could be enjoyable and (very occasionally) wise mythology into something tedious.

You might agree with all of this but reply that it hardly matters. So what if people believe bunk? Well, for a start, believing such nonsense isn’t harmless. It’s easy to consider belief in palpably false religious ideas as an eccentric holdover from a more primitive time. But let us not forget just how utterly corrosive religion was, when it had real power, to the pursuit of knowledge.

One example will suffice: the Dark Ages. Now, before you start furiously writing in to tell me that scholars do not, any longer, consider the medieval period to have been an era of unabated gloom, I am well aware of the fact. I know that scholars of the Middle Ages take it almost personally when this crude view is expressed. Undoubtedly, great scholars, literature, art, and architecture were produced in this period. But however much we might nuance our understanding of the Middle Ages, there remains one irrefutable kernel of truth in the old view: it took around a thousand years for modern science to emerge in Christian Europe.

Only with the fragmentation of the old order wrought by the Reformation could science and Enlightenment really take off. At the very least, we can say that Christianity didn’t help science in the slightest (indeed, science arose in many non-Christian times and places before and during the heyday of Christian domination), but there are serious scholars, like Richard Carrier and Andrew Bernstein, who lay the blame for this thousand-year gap squarely at the feet of Christianity. Elsewhere, the great flowering of inquiry and learning in the Muslim world, embodied by the advanced, multicultural civilisation of Al-Andalus, was killed in its cot by religious dogmatism. Islam eventually chose Al-Ghazali over Ibn Rushd, all but closing the Muslim mind—and we are still suffering for it.

What could have been, had the civilisations of antiquity, which were well along the path to modern science, not collapsed, had Christianity not put an end to the inquiries and methods of the ancients, had the spirit of Ibn Rushd triumphed over fundamentalism in the Muslim world? We will never know, thanks to religious bigotry.²

And all this without even taking into account modern religious idiocy! It wasn’t so long ago that schools across America were being hounded by cretinous creationists and their cheaply tuxedoed descendants in the Intelligent Design crowd who rejected Darwinism and opposed it being taught in classrooms. Even now, because of faith, millions upon millions of Americans disbelieve in the central theory of biology. How can the inculcation of such ignorance be good for humanity?

Questions of truth and knowledge aside, what of the social effects of religion? We live in a generally secular age, in which religion (or at least some religious sects, and mostly in the West) has been mostly defanged. I think this explains why so many people have a hard time understanding that genuinely held delusional beliefs can be a powerful motivator to action. This is why we find it hard to comprehend the cruelty of medieval inquisitors and the murderousness of modern jihadists. We rationalize their evils as being rooted in grievances or economics. But make no mistake: religion is an extraordinarily effective engine of evil.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that one could pick almost any conflict at random, historical or contemporary, and quickly see the poisonous influence of religion. Putin’s war on Ukraine, for example, like the missiles with which he slaughtered Syrians, has been blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin sees himself as the restorer of a pure Russianness, one based on a rejection of secular and liberal modernity and in search of an imperium over which to rule. For him, Russia is the last great hope of Christianity and traditional values, and Moscow is the “Third Rome”.

To head off another likely response: I am not saying that religion is the sole cause of every conflict. But it appears, one way or another, as motivation or motivator, in most of them, and makes them even harder to resolve. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his 2007 broadside against religion, god is not Great, “Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”

It is not so much that religion causes war (though it is very capable of that) as that it makes it worse. Take Israel/Palestine: here there is a perfectly fair and reasonable two-state solution. But religious fanaticism on both sides makes this solution impossible. Fighting over land is bad enough, but as soon as one or both sides declare said land to be theirs by divine right, the possibility of a peaceful solution vanishes.

In motivating people to action, religion is uniquely dangerous. If you believe you are doing the work of god, of the supreme ruler and moral arbiter of the universe, then almost nothing will convince you to stand down. Even when it isn’t the (or a) root cause of violence, once it is introduced into the equation, peace becomes much harder to achieve.

Now, to the question of morality. Is religion a guarantor of good action? I think what I have said shows that it clearly is not. But if religion can motivate people to great evil, surely it can also motivate great good?

No doubt many charitable people have been inspired by their faith. But there are many other reasons to be moral, and ethics has been a concern of philosophy for far longer than most modern religions have existed. Religion is simply unnecessary for morality while often being the cause of immorality. While the capacity for morality is the same whether one is afflicted with religion or not, religion’s unique power makes it particularly dangerous when it comes to inspiring evil. Humanism is quite enough to enkindle virtue; adding the divine makes no difference. In other words, moral actions are moral regardless of the supernatural, while evil can be made moral if you think god is on your side. Anything can be justified if you believe you are doing god’s work. (I have often thought that all religious morality, not just the subset of it so tellingly named ‘divine command theory’, is relativism dressed up as absolutism—and as hazardous as both.³)

Though we can’t re-run the tape to produce a definitive answer to the question of whether religion has overall been good or bad for humanity, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from the state of our existing societies. Put very broadly, and with the caveat that the causation/correlation relationships are complex, the data shows that more religious societies are poorer, less safe, and less happy while more secular societies are richer, happier, and more just. If religion is good for us, why should this be so?

I would also argue more directly that nobody with even a shred of dignity or decency would wish to live in an extremely religious society. We have seen, and can see even now, what such societies look like, and it is not pretty. One need only look at the Muslim world or pre-Enlightenment Europe to see that where religion rules, tyranny and poverty are the norms. If you think religion is good for you, I invite you to consider living in a society where it reigns supreme; I think you will be rushing back to the decadent, post-Enlightenment, secular West very quickly.

I know that the temptation to champion traditionalism and religion against the tide of Critical Social Justice (or, colloquially, and although it’s a term I’ve come to dislike, ‘wokeism’) is very strong. But consider: is championing another vile dogma really the solution? Of course it isn’t.⁴ (Besides, wokeism is hardly the greatest threat in the world today; jihadist Islam and the grotesque alliance of Trumpism with Christian nationalism in the U.S., are, I would argue, much graver ones.) The solution is to keep fighting for free, secular societies based upon reason and universalism and human rights. This fight, and the societies produced by it, count among humanity’s greatest achievements. Much better to go forward in this enterprise, rather than embracing religion (or wokeism).

One last thing remains. There is the question of meaning. Without religion, without the supernatural, how can humans even bear to get up in the morning? I think I have obliquely answered this already: secular societies are happier. But I’d like to add that this, to me, is an impoverished view of humanity. Without delusion, it essentially says, what’s the point?

Well, there is art, and literature, and science, and philosophy; there are friends and family; there is sex, and parties, and music, and love. What more meaning can you possibly need? If you need the supernatural to find the transcendent, I pity you.

In the end, I can make weaker and stronger versions of my argument. At its strongest, I can say that religion is not just harmless but harmful. At its weakest, I can say that religion is irrelevant. Either way, religion is not positively good for us. We have no need of it. Humanity is weak and foolish, yes, but it also contains what Saul Bellow in his great novel The Adventures of Augie March so beautifully called the “universal eligibility to be noble”.

I submit, finally, then, that the highest, noblest path that humanity can pursue is one without religion. We must face the uncaring universe with our chins up. Abandoning religion is not a guarantee of utopia (indeed, utopia is unattainable anyway), but it is a good start. We are mere apes, yes—but apes capable of art and science and love. Supernaturalism, which is the core of religion, is a distraction from, even a negation of, this most important and inspiring of truths.

So let’s reject the false, dangerous delusions of religion, and be worthy of humanity—that is, of ourselves.

1. There isn’t space to go into much detail on the arguments for and against the existence of a deity in this essay, including the more ‘sophisticated’ ones for, but I recommend Coyne’s book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (2015) for a robustly atheistic and utterly fatal recent overview, especially of the very silly attempts by the theological sophisticates to rescue their faith.

2. On the point about how advanced ancient civilisations were compared to what came after, I rely again on Richard Carrier—in particular, on his books Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (2016) and The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (2017). Outlines of Carrier’s views on this and related subjects can be found in numerous essays on his website, especially ‘The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece’ (April 27, 2017), ‘Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing’ (September 28, 2019), and ‘What Exactly Was the Scientific Revolution?’ (July 24, 2022).

As a bonus, I can’t help but mention that Carrier has expertly dismantled Tom Holland’s view that Christianity is unique and essential to Western civilisation in ‘No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West’ (April 28, 2019). This piece was written in response to a Spectator essay by Holland, which appeared before Holland published his book-length exposition of his thesis, yet Carrier’s refutation of the article is as destructive to the then-unpublished Dominion as it is to the Spectator piece. I only mention this because a particular brand of Christian, and some non-believing but Christianity-friendly conservatives, seem to think that Holland’s view is an original, profound, irrefutable knockdown of secularism.

3. An anecdote on this point. A few years ago, recording a podcast with a religious friend in which we were arguing over religion and morality and so on, I tested divine command theory out on him (at about 38:50 onward). Would you obey, I asked, if you truly believed God was speaking to you right now, telling you to go through to the kitchen and pick up a knife and stick it into my throat? After some prevarication, he confirmed that yes, he would obey this command. So much for absolutist morality, then—thrown to the wind on the whim of a celestial being, whose might makes right! Relativism dressed up as absolutism, indeed. Humans are so much better than the gods we have invented.

4. On April 29 of this year, Angel Eduardo wrote a very good piece for the Center for Inquiry blog on this very topic: ‘No, We Don’t Need to Go Back to Church’. In it, he puts the point very well: “Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.”