Paul Troop has a short essay at the University of Oxford’s Practical Ethics site: “What do do with the redundant churches after the demise of religion?” Troop starting thinking about stuff after he heard Dan Dennett lecture at Oxford, where he said that after atheism’s triumph the abandoned places of worship could be used as secular gathering places. (He didn’t go so far as Alain de Botton and suggest they be turned in to secular churches. But then Troop takes up a question we’ve all considered: how bad is religion if it makes people feel good, or gives them hope or consolation? After all, they’ll never know that they were wrong since death brings (to the atheist mind) total extinction of consciousness. Here’s Troop’s musings:

I started me thinking as I wondered whether a belief in religion might be better than atheism for attaining this, or any other, goal. Some, such as Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind (2012)) have suggested that religion is a particularly effective force for bringing people together.

I would like to ask a broader question, which is whether religion is better than atheism for attaining any particular normative goal. The reason for this is that confining the question to which is best for promoting cohesion begs the question as to why cohesion is important. To attempt to avoid this problem, one could pose the question more broadly: given any chosen normative goal, is religion or atheism more condusive to attaining it?

I should probably add that I am an atheist myself, a great fan of Dennett, and very sceptical of religion. As such, I would suggest that I do not have an axe to grind, or at least the type of axe that Dennett worries about (Breaking the Spell (2006) p 32). Nonetheless, I struggle with the reasons behind the proposition that atheism is better than religion for attaining normative goals.

One consideration could be that religion causes people to believe things that are not true. Richard Dawkins, another of the ‘Four Atheists of the Apocalypse’, points out that the ‘beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion’s claims.’ (The God Delusion (2007) p 194). Dawkins then quotes George Bernard Shaw: ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is not more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.’ But I’m not convinced: it seems possible that a believer could be more likely to attain [insert your chosen normative goal here] than a sceptic, even if he believed things that were not true.

Believing things that are true rather than things that are not true could have some value. But the topics on which beliefs diverge seem quite peripheral: how much difference does it actually make to a person’s behaviour whether they believe that the life was created by a god rather than by a process of evolution by natural selection? Equally a belief in tenets of religion that cannot be true (talking snakes, virgin births, resurrection, etc) may have little actual impact on how people live their lives.