Greg Paul has an article up today on the WaPo blog titled Atheism on the upswing in America which includes this interesting bit:
According to the tabulations of the World Christian Encyclopedia, the globe was fairly consistently religious circa 1900. It no longer is. The WCE concludes that atheists from committed to agnostic currently number about a billion. Pew calculates that some 1st world countries are only a quarter or a third as religious as are the most pious 2nd and 3rd world nations. In some of the secularized democracies large pluralities and even strong majorities qualify at atheists–including agnostics, while the devoutly religious are small minorities, and those churches that are not nearly empty on most Sundays have been converted to other uses.
I can understand why people were religious in times past, for one thing they lived in a world surrounded by inexplicable miracles and the science that would one day resolve them as natural events was in its infancy. What I don’t get is how or why religion persisted beyond that point. Is religion replicating itself in the menome like parasitic DNA, does it offer cultural adaptive value or is it a consequence of some other behavior which has adaptive value, is it running on social inertia and near the end of the road?
I sure as hell can’t figure it out. Anyone want to take a crack at it?
Perhaps it’s as simple as:
If you want to get rich and to be able to exert undue control over other people, run a religion.
I imagine it’s due to the real social benefits people accrue from being members of moral communities, as attested by studies such as those which formed the foundation for the recent book “American Grace”. I think there’s a tendency in our community to assume religion is primarily or even significantly about providing explanations for events or a framework for understanding. I think this is wrong – I think the primary attraction, especially now, is sharing time with people who think like you do and doing awesome things with them. There are churches I’ve studied I’d actually quite like to be a member of because of all the cool-looking people who go there and the fun they seem to be having!
Dawkins muses a bit about this in “The Greatest Show On Earth.” He suggests that there might be an evolutionary explanation, and I tend to agree; we are better able to survive if we follow the strongest pack. If we don’t believe in a deity, it would behoove us to follow religious leaders, because we would be elevated in society. If we did believe, we would have a maxed-out sort of “follow the Alpha dog” attitude, because you can’t follow a more alpha dog than the deity what created the universe.
But we don’t need those things anymore. We have the capability to manipulate and control nature, rather than be subjected to it. We don’t need pack mentality or invisible alpha dogs. We, as a species, are growing up.
The times, they are a-changin’.
I think it is much simpler than that.
The vast majority of people who believe in a particular version of religion were usually born to parents who were already believers. It’s hard to switch your world view from what you learned as a child. And that’s even assuming you’ve got a motive in the first place.
Lorax did you say manipulate and control nature? That some funny stuff, as a victim off Hurricane Katrina I wish on of you manipulators of nature would have saved New Orleans, as well as the other natural diaster of the past and the ones to come!
Life is dependent on finding and exploiting needed resources. The most valuable of all possible resources would therefore be the ability to barter and gain favor with the gods. From the sky all resources flow.
The second most valuable resource is the ability to convince people that you are in possession of the first. Religion now comes into existence. Religion is the condensate of endless futile efforts to negotiate favor with the gods.
Lacking a disproof of gods these efforts will endure forever.
I suspect the reason why people still believe in gods is the fear of death and the realization that many events in your life are beyond your control. Scientific advancements while providing explanation for things previously attributed to gods does not provide a solution for these fears. Religion on the other hand provides a nice story for your afterlife and through prayers a way to control your life. Religion is a placebo for the masses.
There is evidence that religion makes people living in economically unequal societies happier. Oddly, the effect holds for both rich and poor members of those societies.
But in more equal, stable societies, religion doesn’t make people happier, and may make them less happy.
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2011/08/if-religion-makes-you-happy-why-are.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BhaScienceGroup+%28Epiphenom%29
There’s likely more than one reason for this. For example, religions provide services, like help for the poor, that more equal societies provide through the government. And religion helps keep people “in their place”, making insurrection less likely and thus easing anxieties.
Most people believe what they were raised to believe. The evidence is not just that religion survives, but that specific religions continue in their own areas: Saudi Arabia is still Islamic, Poland still Catholic, etc.
An atheist has to accept responsibility for his own actions. If things go well, he can take all the credit, but if things go wrong, well there’s no one to blame but himself.
A Christian,however, will pray before making any decision.
If things go well, the Christian is required to “give the glory to god,” but the payoff comes when things go badly: The Christian does not have to accept responsibility for his actions. He can say “God has other plans for me” … or this current debacle is “for the greater good.”
That’s a perfect excuse for someone with a fragile ego who cannot admit (even to himself) that sometimes he makes mistakes.
To expand on what Stacy said, take a look at religious trends in western societies compared with health measures:
Paul, G. (2005). Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. Journal of Religion and Society, 7(1), 1–17.
As societies provide a social safety net, religion seems to loose its potency.
But if you’re looking for a biological/evolutionary answer, you might want to take a look at:
Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2005). Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(06), 713–730.
Here’s the abstract:
Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained also looks at the psychological biases that people bring to the table when it comes to supernatural explanations. Plenty more where these came from – you might want to take a look through the last several issues of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, though it is more psychological than biological.
Cheers!
Nate
Religion is not necessarily beneficial to humanity. I think of it as a meme, like a virus, existing for its own sake and not doing its host humanity any good most of the time.
Humans are biased toward agent-based explanations, and naturally teleological. So religion ‘fits’ with natural tendencies in human cognition. Add in the observed facility people have for rationalizing that ‘things work out for the best’, and see patterns whether or not they are there, and…
Religion isn’t inevitable, but it takes some training to think differently.