SCOTT ATRAN is a research director in anthropology at the CNRS (Cretre National de Recherche Scientifque) in Paris, visiting professor of psychology and public policy at the University of Michigan, and Presidential Scholar at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. He is the author of In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.
Religion, like mathematics, is an evolutionary byproduct of various mental faculties of the human brain that most people, in all known societies, intermittently converge on with differing degrees of intensity as they interact with the world. Whereas mathematics describes fundamental interactions with (nonintentional) objects (including objects of thought), religion manages fundamental interactions with (intentional) subjects, by establishing the moral foundations for existence, death, and key segments in the intervening life cycle. Like mathematics, it can be used and studied in many different ways, including from the vantage point of cognitive science. But the fact that it can be objectively studied by no means implies that its subjective importance to human life is any less.
I find it fascinating that brilliant scientists and philosophers have no clue about how to deal with the basic irrationality of human life and society other than to insist, against all reason and evidence, that things ought to be rational and evidence-based. Makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.
I find no historical evidence whatever that scientists have a keener or deeper appreciation than religious people of how to deal with personal or moral problems. Some scientists have some good and helpful insights into existential problems some of the time, but some good scientists have done more to harm others than most people are remotely capable of.
True, some people operating in the name of religion have been more explicitly savage and cruel toward others than most, but there are the likes of Lincoln, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, whose religion not only has given hope to so many but has thereby cumulatively enabled the lessening of human misery.
Ever since Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, scientists and secularly minded scholars have been predicting the ultimate demise of religion. But if anything, religious fervor is increasing across the world, including in the United States, the world’s most economically powerful and scientifically advanced society. An underlying reason is that science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well suited to deal with people’s existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness, or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people’s deepest emotional yearnings and society’s foundational moral needs, perhaps even more so in complex and mobile societies that are increasingly divorced from nurturing family settings and long-familiar environments.
From a scientific perspective of the overall structure and design of the physical universe:
Religion is the hope that is missing in science.
But doesn’t religion impede science, and vice versa? Not necessarily. Leaving aside the sociopolitical stakes in the opposition between science and religion (which vary widely and are not constitutive of science or religion per se: Calvin considered obedience to tyrants as exhibiting trust in God; Franklin wanted the motto of the American Republic to be “Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God”), a crucial difference between science and religion is that factual knowledge as such is not a principal aim of religious devotion but plays merely a supporting role. Only in the last decade has the Catholic Church reluctantly acknowledged the factual plausibility of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin. Earlier religious rejection of their theories stemmed from challenges posed to a cosmic order unifying the moral and material worlds. Separating out the core of the material world would be like draining the pond where a water lily grows. A long lag time was necessary to refurbish and remake the moral and material connections in such a way that would permit faith in a unified cosmology to survive.