Is Religion Best Understood as a Theory About Reality?

By Robin Marie on August 23, 2012

Richard Dawkins, easily the most well-known leader of the atheist movement, loves to define religion as a scientific theory. Religion makes claims about how the world actually works, Dawkins argues, and is therefore making scientific claims that can be scrutinized in the light of reason and available evidence.

By and large, this is the definition of religion that the atheist community likes to work with. And undoubtedly, Dawkins is correct that religion is a theory about reality.

But it is a mistake to assume that this is all religion is. Now, nearly no one in the atheist community makes this argument explicitly – the vast majority of us acknowledge that religion is a lot of other things as well, such as an identity, a political tool, an aesthetic choice and a cultural critique. Nonetheless, there is a disjuncture between what we claim to understand about religion and the way in which we tend to talk about religion. For if most of us understand that religion is not merely a theory about reality, in our own writings and preoccupations we usually ignore all the other things it is.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons we do this is that it makes our own task much simpler. Sure, Sam Harris likes to superficially concede, the terrorism of radical Islamist groups is connected to the political and social histories of the societies that they come from – but since they were flying planes into buildings in the name of Allah, Harris prefers to focus almost entirely on the religious element instead. And sure, New Age whoo is a supplementary response to the modern day break down of family and community based spirituality – but hey, it’s crazy, right?, so no need to delve into its social and historical roots too deeply.

And indeed, framing the discussion within these parameters makes it remarkably easy for us to win the argument – because the Koran does say some very violent things about infidels, and New Age whoo is certifiably bonkers. But there is a limit to how much one can focus on this one element of the larger matrix of religion until it starts to appear a little masturbatory. Yes, religion is a theory about how the world works and a set of truth claims about reality, and a lot of devoted believers understand it in just this way. But if we want to have a full understanding of how religion actually works in the world, and how its influence and tentacles touch and are touched by the social, political, and economic realms, we need to go further. We need, in other words, to concede through our own writings and our own concerns that religion is much, much more than merely a theory about how the world works.

Let’s return to Radical Islamic terrorism to furnish ourselves with a concrete example. You can draw a straight line, some atheists might say, from passages in the Koran recommending the death of infidels to planes being flown into buildings on 9/11. That you can draw a line between the Koran and Islamic terrorism is indisputably true; that it is a straight one is very doubtful indeed. First, if the relationship was so direct, you would see this correlation much more frequently than you actually do – turns out, the vast majority of the earth’s millions of Muslims are not in the habit of blowing themselves up. Second, historically it is obvious that the line between passages in the Koran and the terrorism they are blamed for passed through so much cultural, social, political, and economic baggage that it is the task of specifically trained scholars just to figure out how these dynamics interact with the particular tenets of a religion. And because these lines intersect with Koran passages differently in different places, sometimes we see these passages highlighted and used as justification for mass murder, and sometimes we see Muslims ignoring them entirely and insisting that they are products of the ancient world they were written in.

Atheists of the ilk we are arguing with here would likely respond, yes but, wouldn’t it be that much harder for these people to justify their behavior without books like the Koran, and religions like Islam? Wouldn’t the world in general be a better place? Common sense responds to the first question with a probable affirmation – sure, they might have to work a little bit harder. But I’m not very confident they couldn’t come up with some sort of ideology or another to justify their killing. Violence is an expression of social conflict, and social conflict has to get produced by multiple ingredients coming together to bake that particular cake. Religion can be one of those ingredients, for sure, but where it is used to justify violence, you almost always see the presence of other ingredients which are elsewhere happily churning out violence without the inclusion of religion – in short, political and social conflict.

For example, in the United States, as we in the atheist community are sadly well aware, there exists a substantial minority of people who believe the Bible to be literately true. And yet even these people tend to ignore the suggestions of the Bible to stone women who have sex out of wedlock or people who take the Lord’s name in vain, and very rarely (although it does happen) are they willing to engage in actual terrorist violence at the behest of Bible passages. Why not? I would argue that America enjoys much more social, economic and political stability than most nations with an Islamic terrorism problem enjoy, and consequently while you might have some people drinking in one ingredient for violence (religious fundamentalism), you are mostly missing the other even more fundamental factors.

I’m arguing, in short, that ideas are not as powerful as many atheists like to believe they are. They have some agency, for sure, but it is limited and dependent on a surrounding context to give it wings. Once they’ve taken flight, ideas can prove to be impressively productive and flexible; but they don’t just come out of nowhere, and they certainly don’t arrive on the scene either because of a series of cognitive errors that are uniform across historical time and space or because someone with a Genuine Love for Truth woke up one day and decided they were going to view the world without blinders or biases.

Which brings me to the second problem with our fixation on defining religion mostly as a theory about the world. Not only does it blind us to the complex nature of historical and social reality, but it makes us less able to deal with human beings as human beings. The atheist strategy by and large in spreading irreligion is to make the case on a logical, rational level – both by breaking down the absurd claims of religion and showing them to be nonsense, and displaying how science provides us with the tools to discern reality, supplying us with much better explanations for several Big Questions than religion does. And undoubtedly, making rational arguments is overwhelmingly a good thing, and should continue to be done. But to a certain degree, it also misses the point.

Because, as we should know as well as anyone, Truth is not everyone’s primary concern. And that’s usually not an intellectual decision, either – it’s a predilection, a way of being, a cultural inheritance. Perhaps, if we want to talk to more people about religion, we should start thinking more about which social forces and conditions tend to produce religion, and what types of religion are produced by these conditions varying. Thinking about religious conviction as a set of discreet, concrete beliefs that people take to be literately true, for example, is a very Western, Christian way of thinking about religion. (Of course we’re not the only ones who think about religion in this way.) In Judaism, religiosity is not so much about beliefs as about practice – what one “believes” is not nearly so central to your Jewish identity as Christians might assume. Judaism is a religion of ceremony and the practice of laws – and as weird as it may seem to us, a lot of people follow those laws, to lesser or greater degrees, without believing in the scripture that commands them. Now surely for the more Orthodox Jews, this isn’t the case. However, I think it is important to note that here, for many people, religion isn’t operating primarily as a theory of the world – for so many people who call themselves Jewish, it’s operating as an identity, and its existence is reproduced over the generations largely on that basis.

So, then, do we approach questions of the impact of this style of Judaism the same as we approach the impact of belief in say, fundamental Christianity in the US? I don’t think we should. And should we treat these two different religions, these two different modes of participating in religion, as equally good, or equally damaging? I don’t think we should do this either. And if we wanted to think about how to reduce various forms of religiosity – and what that even means to us, exactly – what other ways might we do this other than pounding on the ‘yes!, but this doesn’t make sense!’ table ad nauseam? My point is that to parse all those problems out means we need to start talking about cultural causes and consequences, which means we need to become good historians, good political scientists, good sociologists, and so on. It means we need to step out of our comfort box and recognize the limits, in many cases, of focusing so narrowly on whether or not a belief is literately true, for this is not always the most important dynamic in play. To insist we approach all questions with this framework nonetheless, because we as atheists are So Into Truth and what is or is not literately true is the Only Way to Think About This is, weirdly, to ultimately end up distorting truth: the historical truth that no individual embraces ideas or practices in a cultural, social vacuum. Thus, in the end, thinking about religion narrowly as a theory about how the world works ends up telling us, ironically, very little about how the world actually works.