Does religion do more harm than good? That’s the question being posed at the British Academy’s debate on faith in Newcastle on 16th February. The question needs unpacking. As it stands, it’s impossible to answer.

We might see this if we substitute another word for religion. Does politics do more harm than good? Does sex do more harm than good? The reason why politics, sex and religion are supposedly banned from polite conversation is that they are deeply connected to our desires and values. They arouse strong passions. Attempting to evaluate them in terms of harm or good risks denying the extent to which they are intrinsic to the kind of creatures we are. Few people in modern society would pretend that we can or should get rid of politics or sex (though religious and philosophical ascetics have tried to get rid of both), but secular modernity still labours under the delusion that if society could get rid of religion we would become a more rational and moral species as a result.

Let me begin by pointing out that religion cannot “do” anything. Only people can act in harmful or good ways. Religious faith has a significant influence on why people act as they do, but if we want to ask about the nature of that influence, we have to define what we mean by “religion.” Scholars have spent the last half century acknowledging the difficulty of that task.

With the rise of modern science in the 19th century, religion became a quasi-scientific category within which the cultures and ideas that the British encountered in their imperial adventures could be studied objectively, free from what were perceived to be the contaminating influences of Christian theology. Early anthropologists such as EB Tylor and James Frazer regarded men like themselves as being at the top of the evolutionary ladder. They advocated the eradication of religions—particularly non-Christian religions—in the name of bringing civilisation to lesser-evolved “savages.” A similar attitude lurks within the writings of some modern atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, especially when they write about Islam.

The attempt to separate religion from its historical, cultural and political contexts, and to identify it as the greatest enemy of science, reason and progress, is itself irrational and unscientific, for it allows no empirical concerns to intrude on its anti-religious ideology. Religions cannot be understood without reference to their material contexts and cultures. For example, to understand radical Islamism and its violent offshoots, it would be more profitable to study the history of western imperialism, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of geopolitics than to study the Qur’an. Similarly, one will learn more about Northern Ireland by studying post-Reformation British history and politics than by studying the Catechism or the Bible.

Another problem with evaluating the influence of religions for good or ill is that religious violence tends to attract more attention than religious altruism. Those who harm others in the name of God need the oxygen of publicity to promote their cause. Those whose faith inspires acts of justice, compassion and peace-making often avoid publicity, inspired by variations on the biblical injunction to “not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). Yet if all faith-inspired activity ceased tomorrow, millions of the world’s poorest people would have little or no access to education, health care and social and pastoral support. Whether the world would become less violent is open to doubt. The genocidal regimes of the 20th century emerged with the collapse or repression of religious traditions and their substitution by political ideologies, including Nazism and various forms of atheist communism. Western citizens today no longer kill others in the name of God, but we still wage war in the name of the nation state.

However, it is reductive to judge religions only according to their moral influence, for they are containers of humankind’s deepest questions, giving collective expression to those formless yearnings that draw our species towards some eternal mystery. Science can offer us factual knowledge, it can give us unprecedented power to do good and evil to one another and our planet—but it cannot scratch the existential itch. The religious quest for meaning has inspired some of humanity’s greatest creative achievements, and that is the point of studying not only the scriptures but also the philosophical, theological and artistic endeavours of different religions. If we stripped away all Christian art, music and literature from western culture, we would be pared down to the bare bones of a secular modernity that has yet to show itself capable of reaching the heights of aesthetic expression. We might also ask how future generations will interpret that religious heritage, when they have less and less access to good religious education in our schools.

Yet for many people in the west today, the sacred canopy of faith no longer provides a sheltering home, and various forms of atheism hold more appeal. Some of these seem superficial, as with the slogan that briefly appeared on London buses a few years ago, sponsored by the British Humanist Association: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” It is a strange kind of humanism that can be so trite about the nature of suffering and its causes. I wonder if parents mourning the loss of a child or refugees fleeing from war would find wisdom in that humanist message?

A different form of atheism is associated with post-Holocaust European literature and philosophy, by a generation of intellectuals who peered into the abyss and refused to look away. Some such as Albert Camus drew inspiration from Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, a character who became the epitome of the case against religion not because of doubts about the existence of God, but because of a refusal to believe in the goodness of God in a world of such suffering and cruelty. Ivan’s brother, the monk Alyosha, is the character in whom Dostoyevsky allows faith to defend itself and answer back to Ivan, but he does so not by argument or persuasion but by wordless acts of compassion and kindness as a response to suffering. Personally, I find it more fruitful to discuss faith and atheism in these searching literary and philosophical contexts, than in the posturing rhetoric of a Dawkins.

The challenge is not to decide whether religion is good or bad, for that is a meaningless question. One must rather ask what helps each of us to deal with our own conflicted desires in order to have hope, to do good and avoid doing harm, and to ensure that our political, religious and economic institutions sustain us in that quest individually and collectively.

Tina Beattie will be speaking at the British Academy Debate “Does Religion Do More Harm Than Good?” on Tuesday 16th February. Click here for details.