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WillowOne's Positions

The human need for religion

My Positions

  1. I do not believe there is an underlying human need for religion.
  2. There are underlying human needs which religion has historically been used to address.
  3. Those needs can, and should, be addressed more effectively by non-religious means; that address the issues without the additional contaminants of irrational belief.
  4. I don't think it is the case that there are some people who can't cope with life without religion; however it maybe the case that for some people their emancipation comes with too heavy a withdrawal cost; and insufficient access to or awareness of better alternatives.

Elaboration

Posted in response to the question: "Hey Will, do you think humans have a need for religion/spirituality?"

If I have a headache, my underlying need is relief from pain. I may believe that a particular medication is the best means of obtaining that relief and say that I “need” it. Yet this identifies a proposed remedy rather than the need itself. Whether that medication is necessary depends on the available alternatives.

I draw a similar distinction when considering religion and spirituality. I do not regard either as an innate human need in itself. Rather, I see them as possible responses to more fundamental concerns: suffering, uncertainty, belonging, meaning and mortality. If “spirituality” simply names experiences such as awe or connection, calling these spiritual does not establish a need for supernatural belief.

Some psychological accounts help explain the appeal of religious ideas. Research on anthropomorphism examines our tendency to attribute human characteristics and intentions to non-human agents. This offers one possible explanation for the intelligibility of gods imagined as purposeful beings, although it does not establish a complete account of religious belief.

The relationship between religion and anxiety about death also requires care. A meta-analysis of 100 studies found a weak association between greater religiosity and lower death anxiety, with substantial variation across studies. These findings do not establish that religion reliably resolves such anxiety, or that religious belief is necessary to manage it.

Even where religion provides comfort, its usefulness does not establish its indispensability, any more than relief from a particular medicine establishes that no alternative could work. Equally, explaining why a belief is psychologically attractive does not, by itself, establish whether it is true.

My contention is that we should address these underlying needs through non-religious approaches that remain open to evidence and revision. I favour developing secular sources of community, meaning and support, and judging their adequacy by how well they serve people. Where they offer better responses, we should prefer them. The case for doing so rests on their merits; it does not require us to mistake a familiar remedy for a fundamental human need.

Further notes:

  1. The needs that religion addresses can be listed fairly precisely:
  • Explanation: why does the world behave as it does? This need is now met, far better, by science.
  • Community and belonging: met by any shared enterprise, from sports clubs to volunteer organisations to the secular congregations that have sprung up in several countries.
  • Ritual and the marking of life events: met by secular ceremonies, which are now the majority of weddings and a growing share of funerals in the UK.
  • Meaning and purpose: see Meaning and Existentialism. Meaning is made, not found, and religion is one way of making it, not the only way.
  • Consolation in the face of death: see Life After Death. The religious consolation is a false one, and a false consolation has costs.
  • Moral guidance: see Morality. Moral behaviour predates religion and is observed in species that have none.
    2. The empirical evidence counts against a need. The least religious societies on Earth (the Nordic countries, the Czech Republic, Japan) are among the most stable, trusting, and content. If religion were a need, its absence should produce visible deprivation. It does not.
    3. The claim that religion is a human need is frequently made by people who do not themselves believe the religion is true. This is the Appeal to Consequences in a soft form: religion is useful, therefore we should keep it. Whether it is useful is a separate question from whether it is true, and I think it is overstated on both counts.
    4. This is why I regard the Argument from Desire as a misattribution. The desire is real; the inference that it points to a transcendent object is not.

Also see