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I haven’t noticed any treatment or social movement develop which shows the ability to mitigate social stress and drug use while reducing the risk of early life adversity like religion. And these are the big cofactors for psychosis. So the science-y things which increase wellbeing probably won’t help the demoniac as well as as Jesus.
But there are religious people at the forefront of science and technology. If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality. You also need to maximize for (1) social cooperation and trust, (2) honesty, (3) general prosperity, and (4) status-free interest. Atheism is hamful here. Religion is helpful. You want to know that the research you’re reading isn’t wholecloth invented by some status-obsessed person who does not engage in any prosocial ritual. This is necessary for science to progress. Perhaps someone can use AI to check the religious practices of the worst “science defectors” in recent memory; perhaps I am wrong. But religion uniquely reinforces intrinsically honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief. (Other rituals can plausibly do this, like Maoism, but they do not currently exist). And a fictive belief will always be stronger and recruit more of a person’s interest and commitment than an empirical belief.
But you win no extra points for doing so; all mortal flesh will be turned to dust and forgotten forever.
It is very beneficial for an atheist to be surrounded by theists who are +1 in the trustworthy, cooperative, industrious, selfless, and rule-following skill tree. In this sense, the atheist is a free-rider, because only the theist is sacrificing some % of his self-concern on the altar of civic beneficence. The atheist gets to self-benefit-maxx while making fun of the silly theist, but he doesn’t thank the theist when the cashier is particularly polite, or when the nurse shows more love when you’re hurt, or when you didn’t get into a car accident by a high driver. The Invisible God brings myriad invisible benefits to those with eyes to see them.
Denmark and Sweden are among Europe's least highly religious countries by Pew's 2018 typology, yet the Nordic countries continue to place near the top of global wellbeing rankings. That doesn't prove secularity causes better mental health. It does undercut any simple story that widespread disbelief is socially catastrophic.
"Religious people are at the forefront of science." Okay. Also, a Pew survey of AAAS scientists found 33% believe in God, 18% in a higher power, and 41% in neither, which is already substantially less religious than the general population. If you want the sharper number, Larson and Witham's survey of National Academy of Sciences members found roughly 92% rejected belief in God or a higher power. Individual religious scientists exist, obviously. Mendel was a friar, Collins ran the NIH. But that's the exception being abused to do the work of a rule.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
If being smarter and more scientifically capable makes you less religious, or vice versa, that is really not a point in favor.
More to the point: "religion uniquely reinforces honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief." I want you to sit with that sentence and poke at it for a bit. You have just identified the exact mechanism I object to - unquestioning belief - and presented it as a feature. That same cognitive substrate is what has driven documented obstruction of embryonic stem-cell research, explicit Catholic institutional opposition to IVF, and religiously motivated vaccine hesitancy in certain communities.
You can't neatly extract "unquestioning belief makes people cooperative and honest" while quarantining "unquestioning belief obstructs gene therapy trials." It's the same cognitive operation applied to different objects. To the extent that religious belief is not incompatible with leading a normal life, that is by virtue of the remarkable human ability to compartmentalize and ignore the annoying ramifications of their "sincere" beliefs.
The free-rider argument proves too much, and you've already spotted this. you mentioned Maoism in the same breath. Any sufficiently coercive ideology with strong ingroup enforcement produces cooperative, rule-following, trust-generating behavior. That's a point in favor of strong social institutions generally, not religion specifically. You're essentially arguing: "false beliefs that produce prosocial behavior are net positive." Fine. Then show me that religion is the uniquely optimal vehicle, not merely the incumbent with path-dependent lock-in. You haven't shown that. I doubt you can show that.
Give me a few tens of billions of dollars (that's pocket change), and I promise I will likely find a way to make humans more pro-social through merely physical interventions. Give me a few hundred billion (now we're talking about real money) and I'll stake my head on it.
I'm not collecting points. I'm trying to have accurate beliefs about the world. An epistemically broken tool is a broken tool regardless of whether using it feels good. If I'm wrong about something, I want to know. You're describing a pill that makes me feel better by making me systematically worse at determining what is true. I've already told you I wouldn't take that pill unless the tradeoff was very, very favorable. You have not demonstrated the tradeoff is favorable. What. You have done is demonstrated that the incumbent system has measurable benefits while largely declining to engage with the costs I enumerated.
Even in Nordic cohorts, there are gains from religious participation in the forms of charitable giving and civic engagement. There is also a twin study showing that prosociality is increased by religiosity in a US sample. It stands to reason that even the Nords benefit from religion. I don’t think we should extrapolate “humanity doesn’t need religion” from “Nords do quite well without religion”, because we ought to be concerned with maximizing the Good, not being comparatively better than peers, and there may be some other factor that leads to Nords having a high floor of prosociality. Perhaps both Nords and Namibians benefit from prosocial rituals, but starting from a different floor of behavior. (In the same way that the East Asian appears to have a low ceiling of violent criminality, while there is still likely some intervention that would either decrease or increase the rate).
It makes sense that the cohort who is hyper-selected for rational ability would have some reduction or deficiency in other kinds of social-cognitive processing. I imagine if you surveyed the best artists and musicians, you’d find that they make fewer rational decisions than their STEM peers. Would these scientists cease being rational about science if the state enforced religious belief? Probably not. If these scientists believed that they would be judged by how truthfully they relay findings, would they produce more trustworthy data? Probably. Should we change the fabric of society because of research scientists, who compose like 0.001% of all citizens? Probably not. Consider that there have been losses to the mathematical community due to antisocial behavior, like what caused Grigori Perelman to flee academia from a sense of injustice. This affects the very best at the very top of cutting-edge science.
It really is possible that religious social technology which reduces scientific fraud is the new frontier of science. We have National Academy of Science members causing billions of dollars in lost progress through fraud. The National Academy of Science itself believes that fraud is a serious issue that is increasingly rampant in the field.
We already have all this external stuff! The peer review process and academic accreditation system have “coercive ideology” and “ingroup enforcement” and “strong social institutions”. The problem is that it’s easy to fake through all this, and there is no supernatural motive to care about honesty. What’s missing is the internal stuff. Western religion does not really do in-group enforcement but is predicated on introducing intrinsic commitments to behavioral proscriptions. The reason you don’t fabricate results isn’t because you’ll get caught (this will only lead to more subtle fabrications), but because behaving honestly is supernaturally pleasant and honorable and supernaturally socially-reinforced through a supernatural peer, while dishonesty is detested as being cataclysmic. “My university mentor would be ashamed if he found out I committed fraud” is much weaker than “my universal mentor who perceives the most subtle movement of my heart as if it were an entire solar system is counting on me to be absurdly trustworthy”. It is really easy to get people to believe the second, if just requires forgetting rationality in favor of a God Delusion.
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Bouncing off of this idea, I'd also suggest that religion actually does a sort of neat trick when it comes to making science "work" because pure rationality has a hard time really getting out of the solipsism trap, but even if you manage that, science in particular is vulnerable to the problem of inductive reasoning. Having a (reasonable, not irrational) faith that the universe is created by an orderly Being really makes science fall into place easily, since it provides a reason why the universe would be ordered the way that it is.
Obviously that's not the only way to get to believing in an understandable universe, and I am not saying "science is impossible without God," but other ways to do this end up having to take something on faith. And even handwaving the problem of solipsism and assuming the observable world is in some sense real, using scientific reasoning to prove its own validity end up having to argue that we can adequately perceive truth because it's evolutionary advantageous for us to do so, or that "truth just means what works" – a pragmatic approach. Which is all very well and good, but seems (at least to me) mostly to lead back around to pointing towards religion, which "works," pragmatically speaking, and if humans evolved to seek out the truth because it is evolutionarily advantageous, and religion is both something humans have a natural instinct for and something that seems evolutionary advantageous...well, you can do the math.
On that note, I would suggest that freeing science and reason from the fairly tedious business of "proving that we exist and that reality is real" (which, it seems to me, has really bogged down philosophy for a few hundred years) really unleashes them to do their best work.
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