Isn't religion hundreds of years out of date?

Dear Isabel,

We humans have made such progress in understanding the world since the major religions were founded. It’s understandable why people living millennia ago would have given supernatural explanations for things that we now explain with science, like saying a rainbow appears in the sky because God puts it there, or that people get leprosy because they sinned. I’m not knocking them. But now that we can explain a rainbow as the refraction of light through water, leprosy as the result of organisms too small to be seen without a microscope, etc., what is the use of religion?

It causes so many problems, and its whole reason for existing is out of date. Why even follow books written hundreds and thousands of years ago?

Modern Man

Dear Modern Man,

It is absolutely true that science has given us much better explanations for things that were once attributed to supernatural forces. There are still mysteries to be solved, but that doesn’t mean the only solutions to them are supernatural. It could just as easily be the case that science will eventually progress to finding these solutions (and most people would probably say that this is far more likely than a supernatural solution). Discoveries such as refraction and germ theory, to use your examples, didn’t happen at the same time. In fact, such discoveries are often made, forgotten, and re-proven—and in different parts of the world—before finally becoming widely accepted by scientists and finally the rest of humanity. So yes, we remain ignorant on some points, but science continues to shine a light.

But that doesn’t mean religion has no purpose. In fact, it’s a deep misunderstanding of religion to think that its only, main, or original purpose was to explain physical phenomena. Religion has its share of “Just-So Stories,” stories that explain the world, but it has many other purposes as well—for good and ill. Through rituals that occur regularly, it brings people together (good). It assembles us into different peoples who sometimes go to war against each other (bad). It offers a bigger perspective for our troubles. It collects the writings of long-ago people. It seeks to answer the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Whether it does all of these things to your satisfaction is something I can’t answer for you. But it is not the case that religion is simply a primitive form of science.

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I certainly wouldn’t disagree that religion has a role in some of our biggest problems. That isn’t about science, though. Neither is the question of why we should pay attention to things people wrote a long time ago. Genesis is a poor scientific text, but it’s an excellent compilation of legends. And like anything written long before our time, it is a guide to . . . what people were like long before our time.

Modern people can gain great insight into how to live, now, by observing how people lived long ago. So there isn’t a contradiction between being modern and reading religious texts—as long as one doesn’t try to use them as guides to physics, biology, astronomy, and other sciences.

Wishing you well,

Isabel

Next time: Why do we need hell and heaven?