Why we Need Religion
by Stephen T. Asma (Oxford University Press, £20.00)
Christopher Moriarty
The dramatic increase in secularism and fall in numbers of professed adherents to religion has been a feature of the past few generations in the western world.
Its roots lie in the application of the scientific method which began to explode in the 17th Century and the thinking of the Wnlightenment which has been gathering strength since about 100 years later. A refusal to accept the authority of the Bible and of religious dogma together with an insistence, in science and medicine, to reject theories that could not be proved by experiment led to a widely spread questioning of all past knowledge.
In matters of science and technology the result has been an incalculable improvement in the health, comfort and longevity of individuals throughout the world. An intellectual parallel was a belief that, ultimately, science and rational thought would explain all aspects of creation.
Many writers in recent decades have questioned some elements in this godless belief system. They have put forward a number of important principles, all supported by experimental observation or carefully applied logic. These include the fact that, although scientists aim to be wholly dispassionate and objective in their approach, few have ever fully succeeded.
Realisation
Another realisation is that humans, even the most advanced intellectuals, are controlled at least as much by their emotions as by logic.
A third, perhaps the most comforting to people of religion, is that the concept that all will eventually be explained by science and logic is in itself questionable. Above all is the observation that, while science may explain what and how, it provides little or no insight as to why.
Remarkably, the author of Why We Need Religion is an agnostic, having moved that way since his primary school days when he was a Catholic altar boy. Now Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College, Chicago, he has worked also in Cambodia and Beijing. His earlier books were ‘strenuously critical of religion’ and his approach in this one remains agnostic – though he as had occasional lapses into belief at times of extreme personal stress.
As a teacher of philosophy he has an impressive background of erudition and as a traveller, particularly in eastern countries, many encounters with followers of faiths other than Christianity. Asma is a gifted communicator and this book brings together a very remarkable spectrum of knowledge in praise of and support for religion.
It presents and analyses a rich assemblage of information on philosophy ancient and modern, on the beliefs and practices of the major religions of the world and also of the survival and significance of animism. Such concepts have been part of human thought for thousands of years, but scientific work of the past 100 years or so has added an important dimension. Neuroscience is revealing unimagined details of the very mechanism of thought, rational and emotional.
The examples of religious and non-religious thoughts and practices presented by the author vary from horrific through shocking to benign and inspiring. There is the horror of the religion-based slaughter of human beings carried out by zealots of most of the major religions since the dawn of history and still with us at the hands of adherents of ISIS and other groups.
Christian fundamentalism too has its strange and darker sides. On the brighter side is the fact that the vast majority of religious people enjoy a peaceful existence, rearing their children, and caring for each other at all levels.
Religion, in Asma’s view and very well supported by the examples he gives, has been an essential factor in enabling humanity to thrive in increasingly large and settled populations rather than in its earliest manifestation as very small tribes of hunter-gatherers.
Success
He makes the point that a major factor in the evolution and colossal success of human communities has an element of Darwinian theory with its basis of ‘survival of the fittest’.
Religion has come about in part from emotional rather than rational mental processes, whose origins now can be traced to different regions of the brain. But religion not only serves to enable communities to survive, it is the source of comfort and stability, especially in situations, such as the death of a close companion, which demand something more than mere rationalisation to enable the survival of the bereaved.
“Those who target religion and wish to abolish it – such as Marxists and the New Atheists – seek to pull away the life preserver, mistakenly blaming the flotation device for the drowning.”
