Oscar A. Rudenstam | Reconsidering religion in society, part II

The Idealistic Pragmatist | Religion, while susceptible to criticism, must not necessarily be at odds with rationalized society

By Oscar A. Rudenstam 04/06/15 10:02pm

Two weeks ago, I made the argument that religion, much like any other force in the world, should not be exempt from our critical judgment in terms of the effects it has on society — we cannot, I argued, simply divorce religion from the real world and think of it in isolation or only in an individualized sense. As an example of this, I discussed activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s criticism of Islam and argued that these kinds of arguments, even for all the sanctity we attach to religion, deserve space and attention in the public discourse if they bear merit.

There are two sides to this coin, however. Just like religion can be criticized for any detrimental effects it has on society, it can likewise be rightly endorsed for its benefits.

In the recently published CNN piece “The Friendly Atheists Next Door,” we get to follow the family of Harry Shaughnessy, a regular American who tossed Catholicism aside for atheism after struggling with reconciling his own views with the faith with which he was brought up.

For many like Harry and his family, the atheist social movement that has received increasing attention in the last decade has been a source of comfort and empowerment. Figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris — known for their public engagement in speaking out against religion in various forms — have, to many, represented the vanguards of this movement.

“If you take your God too seriously,” Harry noted about the British biologist, “Dawkins will piss you off.”

Indeed he might; Dawkins, perhaps more than his peers among the public faces of “New Atheism,” has been relentless in his crusade against religion. His criticism, most famously outlined in “The God Delusion,” is anchored in the bare scientific infeasibility of many of the supernatural premises common to religions, like the existence of God and miracles.

What he and many other proponents of the New Atheism movement often lend too little attention to, however, is the intricate role of religion to society. His view on religion, as it appears, implies that since religion contains components which cannot be forced under a microscope for hard scientific scrutiny, it would do best to be ripped away from the world and eradicated. A secular world, it is all too obvious, is preferable. He himself, he often asserts, is perfectly fine without religion — but does this apply to everyone?

Émile Durkheim, often dubbed one of the three founding fathers of sociology along with Weber and Marx, would argue otherwise. Indeed, to the contrary of popular projections at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that religion would succumb to an increasingly rationalized society, religion remains pervading and vigorous today. Durkheim believed that the track record of religion speaks for its merits to human societies, functioning like a moral and social unifier; a kind of glue, the loss of which could actually result in a far greater degree of damage to social society than the negatives of its preservation would. On an individual level, religion often also has a spiritual importance to a person’s own conception of who they are and how they understand the world.

Even if some of the supernatural properties of religion do not stand the test of science, does this mean that we are right to reject religion without further ado? This is where Dawkins, and many of his peers, makes a mistake by assuming that scientific truth must necessarily guide all spheres of life.

Certainly, many of us do not need religion to get along in life, but the kind of evangelical atheism where Dawkins and others impose irreligion on others often only replicates some of the practices in religion they go after themselves. Ironically, large parts of the atheist movement associated with Dawkins and the New Atheists are surprisingly faith based, taking the leap of faith that science holds all the answers.

Far from arguing whether or not religion is necessary to society, I have tried to argue that claiming it to have no place in society needs to go far beyond arguing for its scientific infeasibility, but is an argument that requires us to take into account both its benefits and detriments.

OSCAR A. RUDENSTAM is a visiting junior from Tokyo, studying economics, sociology and business. His email address is osru@sas.upenn.edu. “The Idealistic Pragmatist” appears every other Tuesday.

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