The best argument I can think of against religion is simply that it is a social technology: it allows us to live together with people that are different from us without killing them, for example, and it teaches us moral lessons and constrains our behavior in ways that are socially beneficial.
One outgrowth of this belief is that, as Bryan Caplan has said, the dumber you are, the more you need religion. I am sufficiently smart to know that I am dumb, and so, I have elected to remain religion even if I decide that the metaphysics are all hogwash.
I need constraints on my behavior, as I think many do. It’s just that I’m willing to admit it—in part because I don’t think much of our societal tendency to elevate personal expression (anti-conformity) above all other virtues.
What is my response to this argument?
The only response I can think of is that religion is at least a social technology. I happen to believe that a 14-year-old saw a vision of an omnipotent God and His Savior Son; that said Son was previously born of a virgin, killed, and resurrected; and the list goes on. There is no shortage of absurd beliefs required of anyone who chooses to believe in religion of any kind. (Though I would argue that the absurdities faced by one who believes in no religion at all are at least as disconcerting.) No, the real argument against social technology is that the atheists who happily write off this social technology don’t act like they believe it.
Talk is cheap. It’s easy to claim something, it’s far harder to live up to it. When economists talk about “revealed preferences” this is what they mean: I don’t want to study what people say, I want to study what people actually do. Yes, there are plenty who talk about religion as social technology, but they only do it so they can write off religion altogether.
Recently, some Twitter friends of mine were complaining about how many members of my faith were unhappy. That’s true enough, but it obviously misses the bigger issue: religious people tend to be happier on average. I mentioned as much. It occurred to me that one can use about any study to confirm your priors. As such, I expected one of the following: religious people are treated worse when they step away, it’s harder to suffer as an irreligious minority in contemporary America, etc.
Instead, the reading I got was “religion helps people form communities and feel like they belong.” Religion, then, only helps people be happier because it provides side-benefits that are beneficial.
Now I don’t quite buy that story: my religion is far more than a social club to me. The importance of transcendence should not be missed here. My faith gives me purpose, meaning, context, and an ability to take life’s bitter cups without becoming bitter.
But let’s imagine it is just the constituent parts, and there’s no synergy here. (Let’s also ignore what for me is the far greater matter: whether religion is really there to make you happier in the short-run to begin with.)
So we know that basic moral laws are good for us (don’t drink, get exercise, no lying or cheating or stealing, and be faithful to your spouse). We also know that community is good, and religions provide those in spades. Finally, we know that finding purpose in life is profoundly good and important, and that comes from situating your story in a grand narrative of divinity, judgment, and moral drama.
So why aren’t more atheists teetotalers?
I’m not kidding. Why don’t more of them marry and stay married? Look, religious people have better sex lives, and that’s probably just about being married—but why aren’t more non-religious people getting married? Why is it that people who are religious just happen to do all those things that make them happy, and when you take away the religion but you don’t take away any of those constituent parts people still stop doing the things that seem to make the difference?
No one is perfect, of course—we religious types certainly don’t live up to all we know. As President Dallin H. Oaks has said, we are sometimes better at knowing than doing.
But the consistency of this one suggests to me there’s something deeper going on. The non-religious may know how to be happy, but they don’t achieve it in the same way—at least, not on average. That’s a challenge, by the way: I would love nothing more than to see my atheist friends try to build such a happiness machine. If they win, then the world has more happy people in it, including dear friends—so I still win.
And if not, maybe there is something harder to parse about religion—something more supernal and ethereal—that brings meaning and joy that goes beyond the parts that constitute the whole.