To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible.
If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place.
We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem. But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their religion.
Consider this thought experiment—what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions? In fact—imagine that we're going to go and survey all your students five years later, and see how many of them have lost their religions compared to a control group; if you make the slightest move at fighting religion directly, you will invalidate the experiment. You may not make a single mention of religion or any religious belief in your classroom, you may not even hint at it in any obvious way. All your examples must center about real-world cases that have nothing to do with religion.
If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater?
Here are some such topics I've already covered—not avoiding all mention of religion, but it could be done:
- Affective Death Spirals—plenty of non-supernaturalist examples.
- How to avoid cached thoughts and fake wisdom; the pressure of conformity.
- Evidence and Occam's Razor—the rules of probability.
- The Bottom Line / Engines of Cognition—the causal reasons why Reason works.
- Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions—and the whole associated sequence, like making beliefs pay rent and curiosity-stoppers—have excellent historical examples in vitalism and phlogiston.
- Non-existence of ontologically fundamental mental things—apply the Mind Projection Fallacy to probability, move on to reductionism versus holism, then brains and cognitive science.
- The many sub-arts of Crisis of Faith—though you'd better find something else to call this ultimate high master-level technique of actually updating on evidence.
- Dark Side Epistemology—teaching this with no mention of religion would be hard, but perhaps you could videotape the interrogation of some snake-oil sales agent as your real-world example.
- Fun Theory—teach as a literary theory of utopian fiction, without the direct application to theodicy.
- Joy in the Merely Real, naturalistic metaethics, etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on.
But to look at it another way—
Suppose we have a scientist who's still religious, either full-blown scriptural-religion, or in the sense of tossing around vague casual endorsements of "spirituality".
We now know this person is not applying any technical, explicit understanding of...
- ...what constitutes evidence and why;
- ...Occam's Razor;
- ...how the above two rules derive from the lawful and causal operation of minds as mapping engines, and do not switch off when you talk about tooth fairies;
- ...how to tell the difference between a real answer and a curiosity-stopper;
- ...how to rethink matters for themselves instead of just repeating things they heard;
- ...certain general trends of science over the last three thousand years;
- ...the difficult arts of actually updating on new evidence and relinquishing old beliefs;
- ...epistemology 101;
- ...self-honesty 201;
- ...etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on.
When you consider it—these are all rather basic matters of study, as such things go. A quick introduction to all of them (well, except naturalistic metaethics) would be... a four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites?
But there are Nobel laureates who haven't taken that course! Richard Smalley if you're looking for a cheap shot, or Robert Aumann if you're looking for a scary shot.
And they can't be isolated exceptions. If all of their professional compatriots had taken that course, then Smalley or Aumann would either have been corrected (as their colleagues kindly took them aside and explained the bare fundamentals) or else regarded with too much pity and concern to win a Nobel Prize. Could you—realistically speaking, regardless of fairness—win a Nobel while advocating the existence of Santa Claus?
That's what the dead canary, religion, is telling us: that the general sanity waterline is currently really ridiculously low. Even in the highest halls of science.
If we throw out that dead and rotting canary, then our mine may stink a bit less, but the sanity waterline may not rise much higher.
This is not to criticize the neo-atheist movement. The harm done by religion is clear and present danger, or rather, current and ongoing disaster. Fighting religion's directly harmful effects takes precedence over its use as a canary or experimental indicator. But even if Dawkins, and Dennett, and Harris, and Hitchens should somehow win utterly and absolutely to the last corner of the human sphere, the real work of rationalists will be only just beginning.
Excellent description. Reminds me a little of Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion," explaining how otherwise useful brain hardware 'misfires' and leads to religious belief.
You mention agency detection as one of the potential modules that misfire to bring about religious belief. I think we can generalize that a little more and say fairly conclusively that the ability to discern cause-and-effect was favored by natural selection, and given limited mental resources, it certainly favored errors where cause was perceived even if there was none, rather than the opposite. In the simplest scenario, imagine hearing a rustling in the bushes: you're better off always assuming there's a cause and checking for predators and enemies. If you wrote it off as nothing, you'd soon be removed from the gene pool.
Relatedly, there is evidence that the parts of the brain responsible for our ability to picture absent or fictional people are the same ones used in religious thought. It's understandable why these were selected for: if you come back to your cave to find it destroyed or stolen, it helps to imagine the neighboring tribe raiding it.
These two mechanisms seem to apply to religion: people see a cause behind the most mundane events, especially rare or unusual events. Of course they disregard the giant sample size of times such events failed to happen, but those are of course less salient. It's a quick hop to imagining an absent/hidden/fictional person -and agent - responsible for causing these events.
Undermining religion on rational grounds must thus begin with destroying the idea that there is necessarily an agent intentionally causing every effect. This should get easier: market economies are famously results of human action, but not of human design - any given result may be the effect of an agent's action, but not necessarily its intended cause. Thus, such results are not fundamentally different from, say, storms: effects of physical causes but with no intent behind them.
It would probably also help to remind people of sample size. I recently heard a story by a religious believer who based her faith on her grandfather's survival in the Korean war, which happened against very high odds. Someone like that must be reminded that many people did not survive similar incidents, and that there is likely no force behind it but random chance, much like, if life is possible on 0.000000001% of planets, and exists on the same percentage of those, given enough planets you will have life.
The conspiracy theory of economics remains prevalent, however, and very difficult to disabuse people of. So I'm not sure this is that helpful a handle to disabuse people of religion.