When you see a headline of a NewScientist (6 April 2019, paywall) article like this:
Is religion good or bad for humanity? Epic analysis delivers an answer
You can get a little interested. But I admit I was a little disappointed right from the get-go, because Professor Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford simply ignores the most profound interpretation of the fact that there is persistent, if not consistent, religion, and, instead, gets caught up in the entire weighing of each bit of evidence:
But first, what do we mean by “good” and “bad”? Should religion be considered good if it has inspired magnificent art but enslaved millions? Would it be judged bad if it ensured equality at the price of free expression? Such assessments risk miring us in moral quicksand. Besides, how could these intangibles be weighed against one another? A more empirical approach might tally lives lost or harmed against those saved or enhanced as a result of religion. But any attempt to estimate these numbers would be hopelessly subjective.
But he ignores the question in his own title, ending up in the brush, rather than looking at the forest, and thus forgets the two most important pieces of evidence, which are
- We still exist after quite a lot of time;
- Religion, as inconsistent as it is with each instance of itself, still exists.
From these two indisputable facts, and employing evolutionary theory in a sociological context, the inevitable conclusion is this:
Yes, religion has been good.
It has had survival value, in other words. That’s the answer to the question. But Whitehouse’s summary and analysis is not trivia.
But first, I selected the words in my response carefully. I used the past tense very deliberately, because one of the rules that comes out of observing evolution through the biological record is that today’s feature may be tomorrow’s bug. Your cheetah may be evolutionarily adapted to run down and feast on gazelle’s and similar critters, and the cheetahs may do very well while those gazelle’s are around to eat. But when their normal prey disappears, the adaptations which allowed them to take a gazelle down may actually work against them when they find themselves a water buffalo.
So, for those readers of an agnostic or atheistic bent who are wondering about my answer, please bear in mind that past performance is not a predictor of future performance. We may have ridden the horse of religion to success so far, but that horse is flea-ridden, full of false beliefs, easily manipulable by malign personalities, and never tested in an environment where scale has begun to matter, by which I mean a world already deep into overpopulation, where a pro-natalist, all life is sacred attitude is deeply at odds with the goal of keeping civilization going and not having it collapse into a heap of dust.
That’s where the work of Whitehouse and his colleagues does become important. As presented, it appears to be stripped of the overall context of population, carrying capacity, and the entire population dynamics question. That is the important part that, at least in this article, it missed. Just to reiterate, a pro-natalist policy is important when humanity is in separate groups and resources, in proportion to human population, seems unlimited.
That’s not the situation now, and how that interacts with religion seems to be the paramount question.
