Why Religious Beliefs Are Irrational, and Why Economists Should Care
Opening statement for my 2005 debate with Larry Iannaccone
In 2005, I debated my then-colleague Larry Iannaccone on the economics of religion. The turnout — around 300 people at GMU back when it was clearly a commuter school — surprised me and totally shocked Larry. I still remember his eyes bugging out when he entered the auditorium! Though perhaps he was just astounded to see me wearing a suit.
We tried recording using an early-gen iPod, but that failed. All that remains of the debate is the following opening statement and this supplementary webpage, though I’d obviously be happy to run any response Larry cared to write. Enjoy!
Larry Iannaccone and his co-author Rodney Stark once wrote that the belief that society is getting less religious says "less about empirical fact than it does about secularization faith — a faith that, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, sustains the conviction of many social scientists that religious institutions must soon decay..." In short, belief in secularization is just a religion.
Larry's critics were, unsurprisingly, not pleased. To tell people that their non-religious beliefs are just a religion is an insult. Why is it an insult? There isn't any nice way to answer, so I'll be blunt. It is an insult because the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false. People:
accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence
accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence
accept religious beliefs without studying competing views
are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best, and
accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting.
Forming non-religious beliefs in a religious way is irrational because forming any beliefs in a religious way is irrational.
Now I am not one of those people who says that modern science has disproven religion. If I said that, it would imply that two thousand years ago, there was not solid evidence against the claims that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. But the counter-evidence has always been overwhelming. Everyone else is born of a non-virgin and stays dead. It is absurd to recognize an exception without overwhelming evidence, but all we have is the testimony of a few of his disciples. And yet not only do Christians believe these things; they often claim to know them with certainty, and get angry if you disagree. Christianity has always been irrational, and of course the same goes for Judaism, Islam, Greek mythology, Satanism, and belief in Santa Claus.
Larry has won a great deal of attention for his rational choice theory of religion. But if you look closely, he doesn't really have a rational choice theory of religion; he has a rational choice theory of group membership. As Larry occasionally admits, virtually everything that he says about religion applies just as well to fraternities, chess clubs, and football teams. Yes, belonging to a fraternity has costs and benefits; yes, competition between fraternities leads to more efficient outcomes. And both religions and fraternities have been known to use what Larry calls "bizarre" rules — such as "You can't drink any alcohol," or "You can only drink alcohol," to exclude half-hearted members.
What Larry's research strangely neglects – or, to use his word, "sidesteps" - is the differences between religions and fraternities. The most obvious of these, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, is doctrine. Fraternities don't have much of a doctrine; religions do. To ignore doctrine is to ignore the very thing that makes religion special — and the main reason why critics of religion consider it irrational. Furthermore, to ignore doctrine is to sidestep the deepest objection to Larry's rational choice view of religion: How can you have a rational choice theory of irrational belief?
Larry's neglect of irrational beliefs is glaring because in the last decade economists have started to take irrationality seriously. Behavioral economists emphasize, for example, that people overestimate the riskiness of air travel because plane crashes are vivid and memorable. But if that's irrational, how much more irrational is it to believe that someone rose from the dead because one old book says so? Economists who study religion know enough about irrationality to send Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler back to the minors. But — presumably out of respect for religion — they refuse to swing their bats.
What would economists learn if they started paying attention to the doctrinal side of religion? Now is my time for shameless self-promotion. In a series of papers on what I call "rational irrationality," I try to handle the deep objection that Larry sidesteps. I defend a rational choice theory of irrational belief. The gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low. In terms of daily life, what difference does it make if the earth is 6000 years old or 6 billion? So it's not surprising how readily people shut their eyes to the geological evidence. In contrast, when the cost of irrationality is high, believers conveniently forget the teachings of their religion. Lots of religions promise paradise to martyrs, but adherents eager to die for their beliefs are one-in-a-million.
Is religion rational? In an important sense, NO. The doctrines of every religion are at best extremely improbable, but adherents are still very certain about them. Religious beliefs and standard economic models don't fit together. However, rather than ignoring or denying this incompatibility, economists should deal with it. If I'm right, it's not hard. Yes, religious beliefs are irrational, but they are so divorced from reality that they are rarely costly. When they do become costly, a few fanatics lay down their lives, but the overwhelming majority of the faithful open their eyes and face the fact that it's crazy to bet your life on fairy tales.
It’s hard to imagine a more irrational, utterly non-empirical (sorry, anti-empirical) faith than scientism:
1. Out of utter nothingness, stuff happened (or to put it more crudely, as the foundational catechism of this supernaturalist religion, “sh*t happens). Out of pure chaos, order arises. As Richard Dawkins put it, in a purely chance based random occurrence, order happens.
Ok, so maybe 1 in a quadrillion changes against it, something orderly occurs.
AND IT KEEPS OCCURING. What keeps it in place?
“The laws of nature.”
What do you mean, ‘laws of nature?”
“Oh, that’s the phrase we use to describe the orderly occurrences, and in particular, our mathematical measurements, of the orderly occurrences that we observe.”
Can you say “tautology?”
Ok, so these end up with all these brilliantly lit stars and red suns and all that?
Oh no, there’s no light or color anywhere, that’s just a construction of our brains?
And how do these brains end up creating this experience of light and color and sound and so on?
Well, according to philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, not only do we not have any idea how purely material brains create experience, we don’t have any idea how to have an idea on how purely material brains create experience……”So much for the philosophy of mind,” he concludes.
Ok, let’s go on. Nowadays, despite the alleged overcoming of the “elan vital” some time around 1840, there seems to be increasing agreement that we can’t explain life in purely material terms.
Oh no, we have that covered.
Really/. You can explain how life emerges?
Absolutely.
Well, how?
Through emergence.
I’m sorry, what?
Yes, we have a wonderful theory. It even covers the laws of nature. How did they emerge? By means of a complex set of equations related to complexity and chaos theory. It explains everything:
Order emerges from nothingness
Life emerges
Sentience emerges
Emotion emerges
Rationality emerges
Self awareness emerges.
Ok, so things emerge by means of emergence. I’m not sure how different that is from the Catholic catechism where we celebrate Christ bringing all things into being; well, no, Christ, rather than being a “belief” (philosophers nowadays seem to think even the mystics were like early versions of Ryle, trying to come up with rational analyses of how the world works), was referring to an experience; well actually, referring to a particular gnostic apprehension of the cosmos which does not seem even remotely accessible to modern philosophers.
But anyway, it seems that one of the areas where religions and science might meet is in your vaunted science of parapsychology. I understand as long as 15 or possibly 25 years ago, the psi researchers had conducted a sufficient number of experiments - well over 1000 - that met all the criteria that skeptics had been asking for since the late 1800s.
Scientist/“philosopher” - yes that’s true. By 1996, every request we had EVER made was met. Perfect methodology, statistics, replication, effect size, etc. That could have been a good meeting place. Except for one thing.
Sane person: “oh, really, what is that?”
Scientist philosopher: we were never even remotely sincere about our requests. We have been terrified of psi since scientists started offering valid proof for it back in the late 1800s. WE were absolutely committed, much like the most extreme fundamentalists, to the creed that psi is impossible (it violates the laws of nature!). So we simply changed tactics. Experiments conducted in the last 25 years continue to be as good or better than those in most areas of physics, biology, etc. So we just say, “We don’t care if you’ve met all the criteria we set out. We have new ones. You have to do BETTER than any other science.” And if they do, we’ll just find a new excuse. And in fact, one of the high priests of scientism has one. Arthur Reber, in a response to an American Psychological Association article summarizing decades of valid psi research, replied, in essence, “I didn’t even bother to read the article” (yep, the APA actually published this). “I don’t have to because we know psi violates the laws of nature. Therefore ANY scientific experiment of any kind, no matter how large the effect size, no matter how often it’s replicated, has to be wrong.”
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If you think about it, if you resort strictly to the third person method of most science, you wouldn’t even have evidence that the unvierse as we experience it exists. A psychiatrist once said to Huston Smith, the writer on world religions, that from a strict DSM point of view, scientism would qualify as a delusional disorder.
And that’s an insult to people with delusional disorders!
Religious beliefs are not irrational, but necessary to human society, because humans as a group have an ineradicable religious streak. When not channeled into religion this impulse simply resurfaces in another, usually deleterious, form such as dialectical materialism or climate fanaticism. Human nature doesn’t change, at least over the time scale of human history (a few hundred thousand years). Those who have thought deeply about the problem going back thousands of years conclude that religion is essential to human society. If it addresses, and is indeed the product of, a deep human need while helping to preserve society then it is not irrational.