The Role of Intelligence, Part 3 = The Atheist Hypothesis

Many of the professed atheists I know would probably reduce this essay to a single sentence. "There is no god, therefor religious practices have no value." But our purpose here is to ask the "what if..." questions. In this case, that questions is: what if there is no deity or cosmic consciousness but there is still some usefulness or value in the practices of religion. So my task here is to ask haw can we take the atheist point of view and still consider how to apply reason and logic to the practices of religion. What role does religion play here?

The atheist point of view does not allow for the existence of any deities, nor does it admit of any external natural phenomenon that science has not yet discovered. This leaves us with only internal mental processes that can be affected by religious practice. Here then, we must turn to psychology and the other cognitive sciences.

So much for the internal processes of the individual, but we should also consider whether or not religion or religious practices have benefit to the overall functioning of society. Scott Atran & Joseph Henrich argue in their paper "The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Display, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions," that the rise of large-scale civilizations comes from the same by-products of adaptive cognitive mechanism that resulted in the evolution of religion. Would human kind be as advanced as we are today if religion had not also evolved?

When considering theism and the idea of a cosmic consciousness, skepticism is a helpful tool, though as we will see in a future essay, one that needs to be used judiciously. From the atheist point of view our skepticism gets in the way. We must be willing to allow that religious practices have some effect on the individual, rather than just toss all ideas of religious practice in the dustbin and superstition. If we start with the idea that we already know the answers, the journey is over before it's begun.

Curt Raney, an associate professor at St. Mary's College in Maryland, has an unattributed Acrobat file on the web that defines eight elements of religion. This list, with a minor modification, provides an excellent starting point for examining how the practices of religion affect the inner, mental and cognitive function of its practitioners. Each of these elements makes an excellent area of inquiry.   Raney also includes a list of positive and negative functions in religion that very much bear scrutiny. Here are the lists:

Elements of Religion

• Soteriological (having to do with salvation)
• Theological (rationalization of religion)
• Anthropological (nature and possibilities of human being)
• Epistemology (How do we know?)
• Ethics (Raney calls this "relations between human beings," but it more properly should concern the questions of values. For our purposes, we will include Morality in this element)
• Rituals/Cultic Practices (symbolic behavior)
• Temporal (having to do with the meaning of time.)
• Cosmology (having to do with the meaning of the universe.)

Persistent Functions of Religion

Positive Functions

• Close the gap between hope and reality
• Make virtue out of social necessity
• Support and console individuals & groups
• Enhance social stability through projecting sacredness upon social norms, etc.
• Promote social change through social criticism and prophesy.
• Provide a source of personal identity in pluralist societies
• Facilitate personal growth and maturation, as they are conceptualized by the relition.
• Adjust individuals to the life cycle of changing social status.
• Rationalize social, political and economic inequality, reducing conflict in stratified societies

Negative Functions

• Excessive guilt and repression
• Authoritarianism
• Self-mortification
• Ethnocentrism
• Rationalize social, political and economic inequality, preventing social change necessary to reduce social conflict.

So, the question we must pursue here is, if there is no deity, how does all of this stuff work?