Religious Government

Various people have argued that religion is hardwired into the human psyche, that most of us can’t help but believe in something larger than ourselves. Sometimes people go a bit farther and argue that some sort of religion is actually necessary for a healthy society. (Sorry I don’t have useful references here, I’ve forgotten them.)

I’m an atheist myself, but I don’t really consider myself to be a counter-example. I consider myself to be a fairly religious atheist: for me, atheism is a matter of faith. The people who are counter-arguments to the argument are the dedicated agnostics: the ones who say that they simply don’t know, and moreover have no plans to think about it. If religion is necessary for society, then those people are trouble.

These ideas date back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said “no state has ever been founded without religion at its base.” Rousseau is most famous for writing about the social contract which forms the basis for a legitimate government, an idea that was of course also important to Hobbes.

So, is it true that we need to believe in something? I think it’s pretty clear that we tend to believe in something. I would describe this as an inborn tendency to see every action as caused by an agent. That is a specialization of our strong mental habit of looking for patterns. Seeing the world in terms of agents gives us a focused way to look for patterns. This is particularly important for children, who must learn enormous amounts about how the world works. It’s much safer, in general, to assume there is a pattern or an agent when there isn’t one, than to assume that there isn’t one when there really is.

Given this natural tendency, when we see events larger than ourselves, such as the weather, we tend to naturally look for larger agents who cause it. Thus we get thunder gods and the like. As people understand their world better, they transfer the agency to the entity which created the world and set it in motion, and thus we get omnipotent and omniscient creator gods.

Anyhow, other people have told that story better than I. The question I want to ask is: what happens if we deny that? What if we set aside god, and say that religion is simply irrelevant?

One reaction is to say that if there is no creator, then there is no design for life, and there is no purpose in it. Can we find a purpose within ourselves? I think that we can, and I think that many people do; people can lead a good life without being given a goal. Can we find a purpose for society? I believe that the goal of society is simply to provide a general happiness for its members, so, again, for me the answer is yes (note that many societies do have different goals).

Another reaction is to say that ethics depends on religion. With no god, we can not rely on any clear guidance as to what is good and what is evil. My answer to this is a bit subtle, and may indeed be wrong. I think that we have evolved such that certain types of behaviour are natural for us. That is, I agree with Socrates that we have a natural sense of the good. This leads to an ethical system which may not be truly universal, but may in general apply to humanity.

For example, my understanding is that in all human societies the murder of another member of society is forbidden. Murder of members of other societies may be permitted, and some societies practice ritual sacrifice, but murder is forbidden. Similarly, young children are always to be protected, and it requires special explanations to harm the children of non-members of the society (e.g., the other children are subhuman, etc.). Newborn babies, on the other hand, have no such special rights, and some cultures practice routine infanticide (some would argue that our culture does as well); however, while killing your own baby is acceptable in some cultures, killing another person’s baby is always wrong.

I believe that these sorts of rules are universal in the sense that that all societies subscribe to them. That said, some societies do become decadent, and permit any rule to be broken. Even then, though, breaking the rules is, in fact, considered to be breaking the rules. It is not considered to be normal even by members of the decadent societies.

Now, obviously, these sorts of evolved guidelines to human behaviour do not truly constrain our behaviour: there are many murderers. And they are very incomplete, in that many ethical issues have completely different answers in different cultures.

So I’m going to argue that we don’t need religion to build a society. But I’m going to do it by saying that we are born with the parts of religion that we need: enough shared ideas to hold a society together. The rest of the ideas come from growing up within the society.

This is obviously an error-prone sort of argument. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what is true today is always true. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, to think that if you can find a nice explanation of some sort of behaviour that you have found the true explanation. So I don’t know how confident I am that what I am saying is right.

If I am right, though, it is interesting to consider what may happen as we encounter nonhuman intelligences. I’m not thinking so much about aliens from the stars, although that would be nice, as I am about robot intelligence, or the farfetched idea of copying human minds into computers. Without the shared evolution of culture, what will those minds be like? Why should they see things as we do?