Criticism of religion: why we should do it

Most of us were brought up in cultures where religion had an accepted presence.  As a child you will have been involved in Christmas or other religious ceremonies, you will have heard religious stories, and your parents will have encouraged you to believe in one or more deities.  At the same time, you will have been educated to think for yourself, learn something about the physical laws governing the universe, and distinguish between fact and opinion.  For many people, there is a clear contradiction between the way we are supposed to behave when assessing things in the world around us, and how we are expected to think about religion.

When we go to buy a car, we are expected to be skeptical.  The old joke "Would you buy a used car off this man?" implies that we ought to adopt a skeptical approach when we hear claims being made.  "It's a good runner," "never had a problem with it," "very reliable," are expressions we are taught to suspect.  The reason for the doubt is simply that without the evidence, these statements could simply be untrue, whether or not intentionally.  We'd feel better if we saw the service history, had a good look at the car, gave it a test drive.

And we are expected to question extraordinary claims too.  Is someone tried to sell you a TV which ran on a new kind of energy, you'd want to see it working before you did anything else.  Accepting it on trust, as a matter of faith, just doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to do.  Part of the reason is about probability.

Since we've never seen this new kind of energy before, there is a high probability that it doesn't exist.  The evidence we wanted would help move the probability in the other direction.  Any extraordinary claim requires some extraordinary evidence and so the more extreme the claim, generally the more exacting is the evidence we require.

So why is religion treated differently?

When we are growing up, there is a very important practical reason for us to believe what we are told by our parents.  It's often a matter of safety.  It is important that we do what we are told because otherwise we could be injured.  Parents tell their children what they need to know to remain safe.  But they also pass on their own personal beliefs and children cannot tell the difference.  They do not understand when they are being told something factual, and when it is the opinion or belief of their parents.  That ability to discriminate comes later.

But by the time that later point arrives, they will have had many years to become accustomed to the beliefs and in most cases, will no longer question them.  Religious ideas take on a cultural validity because they are widespread, not because they are necessarily right.  Once the ideas become ubiquitous, it is more difficult to criticise them.

Criticising someone's religious ideas is tantamount to asking them to break with the beliefs of their parents, to go against what they were taught and accepted from the earliest time of their lives.  This is a much bigger challenge than simply doubting the patter from a salesman.  It is, in a very real sense, challenging their parents.

But can religious ideas be examined critically?

Religious ideas are ideas nonetheless.  They express claims about the world and how it works, and just like any other such claims, some of them are testable.  For example, the claim that the world is only 6000 or so years old, is made by some fundamentalist Christians.  It is a claim about the age of the earth which can be tested by reference to the age of rocks, the fossil record, radioactive decay of isotopes, and a host of other methods.  It is a false claim.  The earth is in fact 4.64 billion years old to within an accuracy of 1%.  We can prove it.

But there are many other religious claims which are not subject to physical testing.  The notion of a soul, for example, that immaterial essence of a person which is said to live on after death, represents something undetectable.  How then is it possible to have a sensible discussion about it?

When we are trying to explain something, we start from observable reality.  Something happens, some phenomenon occurs, and we use that to establish the boundaries for our explanation.  Our explanation has to adequately explain the phenomenon, that real phenomenon that we have detected.  In the case of souls, we can't establish that first step so any account which claims to be an explanation, or a theory, isn't one.  It is at best, a description of what the believer would like to be the case.

How to we distinguish theories from beliefs?

Science abounds with phenomena crying out for adequate explanation.  We could simply write down an idea and say "that is how it is!"  That's the way with religious accounts of the soul.  But for science of course, that's entirely inadequate because we want to be sure we are right.  For that, we need to be able to make a prediction of some kind and test it.

When Newton worked on his theory of gravitation, we wanted to test it and used it to predict the motion of the planets.  Observing the actual motion of the planets enabled him to confirm his theory.  His evidence came from the real world, and it tested his theory.  If he could not make predictions, his theory would have remained at the level of a story, a simple account of how he thought things to be.  Anyone would have been free to come up with an equally plausible but different account.

In the same way, religion is at the level of a story and can be challenged by any equally plausible account.  Instead of claiming there is only one god, it is equally plausible to claim there are many, even an infinite number of gods.  Instead of claiming that the soul is an immaterial personal essence, we could claim it is a collective ghost.  Since we cannot distinguish between these equally plausible alternatives, there is no rational basis to believe any one of them.

So what about personal experience?

Most religious people describe some point in their lives when they decided on their belief.  They often have personal anecdotes which they found sufficient to persuade them.  But we often believe things that are shown to be incorrect.  Throughout our education we are disabused of incorrect beliefs, shown that our expectations were wrong, that what we thought was an explanation was in fact inadequate.  Knowledge progresses through precisely the process of discovering which ideas and explanations were wrongly believed.  Why should religious belief be any exception?

The personal epiphany is not a confirmation that religious belief is correct, merely that the individual found it to be sufficient to reinforce their existing belief.

What are the alternatives?

When a phenomenon is examined, we postulate different explanations, some of them incorrect.  We eliminate the incorrect ones by testing the predictions which arise as a consequence of accepting them.  In the end, we may have a number of alternatives and we can't decide between them.  But we don't just opt for the one we like.  We leave the question open until we have more evidence, or compelling reasons to drop some more of the explanations on offer.

It is perfectly acceptable to leave some questions unanswered or only partially answered.  That's how science progresses, by putting effort into answering some questions and leaving others for the moment unanswered.  What is the origin of the big bang?  We don't yet know enough to answer the question.  But we don't then jump to a mystical answer and assume it is correct.  We don't say God did it, because that's no explanation at all.  We simply acknowledge that more work needs to be done.

Religion explains nothing and accounts for nothing.  It is therefore not a reliable means of obtaining knowledge about the world.  But nor is it a reliable source of ethical values since all religions contain the whole spectrum of moral advice.  Holy books contain laudatory accounts of genocide and massacre along with entreaties to love and honour.  One has to be very selective indeed to obtain anything in the way of moral teachings from religious books.

The bottom line?

Religious ideas are ideas just the same, and we should evaluate and criticise them on the same rational basis as any other ideas.  Claims made by religions about how the world is are subject to test and they should be expected to provide evidence.  Religion is not a privileged area of human activity but it is unreasonably socially protected by custom.  As an explanation of human life and morality, it is only a collection of unsubstantiated ideas and therefore deserves no special respect.

Ideas do not deserve respect - people do.  And we should not feel any discomfort in subjecting religious ideas to the same scrutiny as any other ideas that seek to explain the world.