The Science of the Benefits of Religion

Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.

> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.

If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?

Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.

> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.

Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.

What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.

Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.

I agree with him, but suggest a few further considerations. Wouldn't a truly open minded scientist be forced to consider that the real world impact of religious practice is evidence (not necessarily proof) for the causal effect of something that is outside of empirical measurement? Only a mind that has the improvable a-priori belief in physicalism could reject this possibility. A commitment to physicalism is not itself provable by science, and therefore is merely a religious belief, although it is disguised and subconscious most of the time so we don't notice.

And how does he think that we can decouple the "theology" of the religion from the practices? Could a hall full of strangers start swaying together like in the Jewish Shuckle, feel the same unity felt by the synagogue? What came first, the theology or the swaying? This sounds like a cargo cult mentality, where by imitating the behavior of the rich, you, too can become rich. Even if it worked a little bit, it's hard to imagine that it could become popular or last. I think team sports played in Stadiums is the best imitation we have so far, and even that is only sustained by a narrative ("your" team "battling" an "enemy" team).

It would be interesting to see if an idiosyncratic hodge-podge of different rituals cobbled together from various religions could ever work. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what New Age religion is, and that is far from impressive.

The way forward is to stop and re-think the blind philosophical pre-commitments of our day, which are a slowly eroding set of modernist beliefs from the Enlightenment era. This gave us a dualistic world view, with the complete separation of a "spiritual" and "physical" realm. As science is built to only examine the physical, it naturally produces confirmation bias that there is no "spiritual" and gradually we went from dualism to believing only in the "physical". It is this erroneous background assumption which leads us to misunderstand what scripture even means when it talks about heaven/earth and angels and other "spiritual" beings.

https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/how-the-scientific-rev...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOdlIXDsr8&t=0s