Has science made religion useless?

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Theology and religion are useless in that endeavor (even when trying to know about whether God exists and what He/She/It is like). Science is the only game in town when your aim is to find out what’s true about the universe.

That’s Jerry coynes take on the subject. The idea that Science is the only game in town to tell us what’s true about the universe can be true only in a tautological sense (by defining the universe as a set of things that science can investigate).
The fact is that science does not give any reason to believe that human investigations of reality will come up with the truth. In fact, if evolution is true, then our brain is optimised for survival, not finding and understanding ultimate or even immediate truths.

I am not even going to comment on the arrogance of saying that theology is useless when it comes to understanding if God exists and what God is like.

How is being deluded conducive to survival?

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Lets assume a materialist like Jerry coyne is not deluded. Are you suggesting that being a materialist would increase reproductive fitness?

If you look at data, birth rates are higher for religious people. Can I use that data to say that religious people are not deluded?

Reproductive fitness is not connected to what a person believes about ultimate reality, what metaphysical position one holds etc.

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I would agree about metaphysics, but reproductive fitness is clearly connected with ascertaining truth as concerns your opponent’s relative strength, seasonal agricultural regularities, which plants are wholesome and which are poisonous, who is lying to you, and a few truths that I probably would have done well to learn at a younger age. It seems to me that it would be expected that selection is pretty strong for truth recognition in general, and this would lay the groundwork for rational extrapolation.

Certainly to have a rational mind is beneficial in order to figure out the most efficient way to farm, build society, and similar things. Thus, it is beneficial for a mind to be truth-tracking to some extent. But it is unclear whether being able to ascertain the truth about everything including metaphysical and complex scientific matters is the best strategy for reproductive fitness. Perhaps religion provide a higher level of social cohesion that makes society more stable and cooperative, and thus optimized for continued survival and growth.

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Agree on this, but eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil did not seem to much help our ultimate truth recognition either. I’ve just never been keen on an apologetic that essentially states that the law of the jungle imposes an inability to stake a claim on reason. Can a mind evolve that can prove the Pythagorean theorem even if that has no direct bearing on survival? I do not see why not.

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I agree with you upto this point.

There is no evidence showing that gullible people have fewer children than skeptics.
I dont know to what extent ones level of gullibility or skepticism helps in having families and children.

I dont know if this is true either… cockroaches are selected for too… and I am sure that the "truth recognition capabilities of cockroaches are fairly limited.
Truth recognition in general need not guarantee arriving at the truth by “rational extrapolation”.
Again, the concept of “rational” is more theological than scientific. It assumes there is a "reason for everything.
And it also assumes that human beings are rational… why should they be? Maybe human beings only need to think they are rational.

That’s an interesting observation. Where I live there is an atheist Meetup group that meets at Starbucks on Sunday mornings - or at least they did before COVID-19. I imagine in some ways it is very similar to going to church.

I dont see why it should either. Which means that
a) There is a reason beyond natural selection for us being able to derive the pythogorus theorem…

b) this ability is an accidental byproduct of some thing else being selected for.

Even if option b is true, it means that the human brain is not optimised to find or recognize truth. This "ability is an accident… If we have a strong ability to discern truth, then it’s a very strange “accident”.

Well, as you have pointed out, it hasn’t for cockroaches. So far, only humans can prove the Pythagorean theorem, there has not been selective pressure for any sort of convergent evolution for this ability in any other species.

I think possible. While many species are social, humans take it to another level, with extraordinary levels of coordination and complexity. That could well put a premium on human cognitive function, including truth recognition.

Yes… so there is no reason to think that some kind of optimisation find truth has happened.

As per the bible, it didn’t… it in fact increased the tendency towards self deception.

In fact, the bible freely accepts that human beings are prone to self deception. This is a condition inherent in man which is a direct consequence of the fall.

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As most things in biology, optimized does not mean perfect, just good enough. It is manifest that truth detection is far from all-embracing among humans. Also as in most things in biology, there is considerable variation between specimens of the species.

I agree… the point is that truth recognition is not optimised… it’s at best an accidental byproduct of something else that was optimised.
That’s the option b I presented.
So, there is no question of being good enough… The explanation amounts to saying It’s just something that is there to some extent because things just happened that way…

That’s not a very “rational” explanation for rationality.

I agree.

But it may be a true explanation for rationality.

This is not a scientific claim. As such, per your own standard, it is a self-defeating claim.

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True, but only science has a proven trackrecord. If you want to find out how to best handle a global pandemic then thoughts and prayers don’t seem to do a good job.

If something other than the way we currently do science worked as well as science, it would be part of science. There’s a good reason it isn’t, which is that it just doesn’t seem to work.

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To answer the question posed in the OP, you have to first answer what the “use” of religion is. In the way the question is phrased it seems to be treated like a sort of tool that has some practical utility in people’s lives.

Perhaps in it’s more moderate forms it has an overall positive influence on the mental health of it’s practitioners. I do think there’s some good evidence that religious practices has a positive impact on stress levels by providing, among other things, a sense of community and belonging, and the feeling that you’re never really truly alone. That makes sense to me both from my own experiences of having been religious myself, and from observations of religious traditions even across cultures. I was at my nephew’s baptism about a year ago, and what really stood out to me is how after the usual Sunday services were over, the gathering outside the church was most pensioners and elderly people who were all talking together and mingling.

It is so obvious to me how this aspect of religious traditions is just not easily replaced, and how beneficial it can be to get out of your boring old house, especially at that age, when friends and spouses and people around you seem to disappear one by one.

What else could take the place of religion for these people? Quite possibly many things could, in principle. There just doesn’t seem to be anyone who takes up that mantle, and there doesn’t seem to be the same incentive to participate. There might even be things people could do that could fulffill those roles, but people generally don’t know about them. Everyone knows, for historical and traditional reasons, that there’s a church, and people have been going there for reasons of tradition and upbringing.
The “use” of religion in this sense might in the end simply be a product of historical traditions, not that the supernatural beliefs are what provide people the most important aspects of these benefits. Getting outside and talking to people, conversing about children and grandchildren and good old times, the human interaction, seems to me what really matters here.

In that sense I think the answer is clearly no, science hasn’t made that aspect of religious culture useless, since it doesn’t seem to have provided anything with which to replace those aspects of religion in society that have become well known in that same way. It may be that science can be used to study and determine what could take the place of religion in principle, there just doesn’t seem to have emerged any such systematic set of traditions and practices that fulfill those roles in society. It obviously can’t be science itself that does this, that wouldn’t make sense. What would these people be doing, gathering in a laboratory on sundays to do titrations or count cells?

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Exactly, which is why, as Coyne points out, theology is not only useless for most of its ancillary functions but is actually useless on its primary subject: gods. It cannot offer anything helpful to anyone who would like to know whether gods exist or what they are like.

Theology does, more than any other discipline I can think of, consist principally of the study of itself.

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What do you mean by this?