Has science made religion useless? | Robert Sapolsky, Reza Aslan, Pete Holmes & more | Big Think

Has science made religion useless?
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Science and religion (fact versus faith) are often seen as two incongruous groups. When you consider the purpose of each and the questions that they seek to answer, the comparison becomes less black and white.

This video features religious scholars, a primatologist, a neuroendocrinologist, a comedian, and other brilliant minds considering, among other things, the evolutionary function that religion serves, the power of symbols, and the human need to learn, explore, and know the world around us so that it becomes a less scary place.

"I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it's not the whole story and there's a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy," says Francis Collins, American geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "But that harmony perspective doesn't get as much attention. Nobody is as interested in harmony as they are in conflict."
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TRANSCRIPT:

FRANS DE WAAL: Well, religion is an interesting topic because religion is universal. All human societies believe in the supernatural. All human societies have a religion one way or another.

REZA ASLAN: Religion has been a part of the human experience from the beginning. In fact, we can trace the origin of religious experience to before homo sapiens. We can trace it with some measure of confidence to Neanderthals. We can measure it with a little less confidence all the way to homo erectus. So we're talking hundreds of thousands of years before our species even existed.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Essentially there has been no culture on Earth that has not invented some form of what could be termed meta-magical thinking, attributing things that cannot be seen, faith-based belief systems, things of that sort. It's universal.

ASLAN: Religious thinking is embedded in our cognitive processes. It is a mode of knowing. We're born with it. It's part of our DNA. The question then becomes why. There must be some evolutionary reason for it. There must be a reason, some adaptive advantage to having religious experience or faith experience. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.

SAPOLSKY: It makes perfect sense why they've evolved because they're wonderful mechanisms for reducing stress. It is an awful, terrifying world out there where bad things happen and we're all going to die eventually. And believing that there is something, someone responsible for it at least gives some stress reducing attributes built around understanding causality.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Religion starts from the view that we are torn between good and evil. There is definitely a good core, but it's permanently tempted. And so what the individual needs is a structure which will constantly try and tug a person back towards the best of themselves.

DE WAAL: Our current religions are just 2,000 or 3,000 years old which is very young and our species is much older. And I cannot imagine that, for example, 100,000 years or 200,000 years our ancestors did not have some type of morality. Of course the had rules about how you should behave, what is fair, what is unfair, caring for others. All of these tendencies were in place already so they had a moral system. And then at some point we developed these present day religions which I think were sort of tacked onto the morality that we had. In societies with 1,000 or several thousand or millions of people we cannot all keep an eye on each other and that's maybe why we installed religions in these large scale societies where a god kept watch over everybody and maybe they served to codify them or to enforce them or to steer morality in a particular direction that we prefer. And so instead of saying morality comes from god or religion gave us morality, for me that's a big no-no.

PENN JILLETTE: People are good. If you look at the seven billion people on this planet just about seven billion of them are really good. We can really trust them. Can we please learn something from Las Vegas. Learn something about gambling, right. We know how the odds work. We know the house always wins. In this case the odds are always on someone being good.

BILL NYE: When it comes to ethics and morals and religion to see if there's anything different between what religions want you to do and what you feel you should do...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/has-science-made-religion-useless