Measuring religion

[Very odd essay] in the Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that we should not measure the effects of religious practice scientifically even though we could. Why this is oddest is that it assumes that no such measurements of religious practice are ever made by the religious themselves. OK, they are not always scientific. But all religious tout their own worldly benefits, and some of these are due, not just to the co-operative qualities of shared religious endeavour, but to the particular practices of competing religions.[1]

%(sane) Religion and science are independent approaches to knowledge, and neither can be reduced to the other. Religion and science are fundamentally different, with the former relying on faith as a source of wisdom and the latter demanding evidence. Religious truths generally are considered to be enduring and not subject to change,[2] % writes Sloan, and this seems to me importantly untrue. It’s another example of the Pharyngular error that what distinguishes “religion” from “science” is that “religion” is untrue and its belief unwarranted by the evidence. No: what distinguishes science from everything else, including religion, politics, love, history and everything else, is that it deals with numerically measurable, repeatable phenomena. But science as a social activity obviously has all sorts of myths taken on authority; and self-conscious modern religious organisations spend a lot of time researching the effectiveness of their own efforts. The Alpha course is shaped by a great deal of self-conscious trial and error, and so are its competitors.

But Sloan goes on to use an argument I found at first quite mystifying and later (unintentionally) extremely illuminating because of what he takes for granted. Here goes:

Without a doubt, we could conduct a study contrasting the health effects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for example. It could be done in precisely the same way that researchers have examined the effects of higher versus lower frequency of attendance at religious services, or greater or lower frequency of private prayer or reading the Bible or listening to religious radio programming. From the scientific perspective, there is no fundamental difference between using religious denomination or religious attendance as the predictor variable.
Although science allows us to conduct such a study, ethics and religion ought to tell us how ridiculous such a comparison would be. In today’s world (and in the past as well), we have ample evidence of religious strife. This should not diminish the value that religion has for many people, but no one can dismiss the fact that religious factionalism has been responsible for conflict at the societal and familial level for thousands of years. Even if we could, hypothetically, demonstrate that Protestant prayer is better for one’s health than Catholic prayer, why would we ever want to do so?

Well, for start, to get rid of all the Catholics. More generally, if it could be shown that some kinds of religious practice are better for you than others (and, I repeat, it is not atheist scientists who will decide whether that research is carried out) then people would naturally switch to the ones that did work. Even on the level where “better for you” means only “more comforting” we can see this happening in the spread of prayers for the dead among Anglicans after the First World War. Or, I suppose, in the adoption of women clergy by middle class protestant denominations.

It seems to me obvious that if there were a single set of religious technologies which could be shown to work better than all others, in terms of bringing measurable benefits to their practitioners, then we should urge everyone to take them up—and even if we (wise and benevolent guardians of society) omitted to do so, they would spread through the market. How could this not be a good thing?

Up to now, his argument looks really confused. But there is one assumption that makes sense of it: he assumes that half the purpose of religious belief is that there should be unbelievers. If there were unequivocal proof of the truth (benefits) of any particular belief system, then everyone would adopt it and in that case it would be necessary to invent new heresies, and new untestabilities.

Now, the idea that there is an intellectual, or moral, merit to the unprovability of religious belief makes no sense at all. It seems to me a completely blatant rationalisation. But a rationalisation for what? And the answer to that is that it is a rationalisation for the political advantages of undecidability. Arguing about the kinds of things that cannot by their nature be decided or susceptible to proof is much the best way to ensure that what is really being measured is something else: political power, debating skill, or determination. All these are important cues for establishing status, as well as important skills or attributes in their own right for the contestants.

This view has the merit of explaining why religion (as opposed to superstition, which may remain more or less constant) is spreading in the modern world.

fn1. [Note that this is another example of the way in which conversion, and the possibility of conversion, completely alter “religion” from its primal state as a kind of shamanism]

fn2. acb adds “except by anyone who has thought about them and studied how their propositional content does in fact change a great deal.”