Religious Spillover

Religious Spillover
by Joseph Rowlands

Talking to a religious friend one day, he asked me what was the harm in believing in God. He presented a view of religious that was compartmentalized from the rest of your life. Sure, you believe in a god that created the universe and decides what kind of afterlife you'll live, but it doesn't have to dominate your life. It could be isolated from day-to-day routines. So given that, he asked what the harm was.

I started to answer, but didn't get very far. So here is a more detailed answer.

One of the most obvious issues is that there is something we can call "content spillover". Religious beliefs do not limit themselves to otherworldly phenomena. It isn't just a belief about what an afterlife might look like, or what a supernatural being might think or feel. There are usually claims about this world, like how old the earth is or whether evolution is real.

His response would likely be that the best religious beliefs don't have this issue, so it isn't a necessary problem, even if it is an obviously common problem. Perhaps it is possible to avoid this. But there's another way that this can manifest.

Religion is always tied to morality. They always need some story for how to appease their gods, and whatever form of afterlife they accept inevitably has rules in this world that affect the outcome. Without morality, religion would be a set of fables or myths, easily rejected when confronted with better ideas or evidence. But with morality, religious beliefs become ends in themselves. They require you to believe in them in order to be moral.

This "moral spillover" is a kind of "content spillover". It tells you how you should live your life, what kinds of things you should value, what means are appropriate to use, and so on. It demands that you act or behave in a manner consistent with the religious beliefs.

This isn't easy to keep isolated from the rest of your life. If you believe in an afterlife and that your actions here on earth determine what kind of afterlife you will receive, those beliefs will not stay isolated. Religious morality connects religious beliefs with you choices. You can't believe and not want to act on those beliefs.

The idea that you can compartmentalize your religion from your everyday life might sound possible when it comes to scientific facts, but morality shows how little isolation there is.

A different kind of spillover is what I call "methodological spillover", and it is a little more subtle. The idea is that the methods you need to accept in order to be religious can't be rationally compartmentalized.

For instance, religion is based on faith. It doesn't matter if your religious beliefs are limited to a supernatural world so that there is no content conflicts with the natural world. The content is only one problem. The other is the method. And to accept these religious views, you have to have a method that is flawed. It involves accepting conclusions based on no data or confirmation.

Imagine what would happen if you accepted that kind of methodology. Any time someone says something that you can't prove is wrong, you'd have to accept as true. Your mind would become overwhelmed with groundless beliefs. And you would actually believe them. As new data or new ideas were found, you could easily end up dismissing those because of your groundless beliefs.

Or perhaps you decide that it is acceptable to believe something because it will make you feel better about life. Or because many other people believe it. Or because you just want to. Now apply these practices to the rest of your life? Your mind would be full of groundless assertions, unable to know what was true or false because you have so many beliefs that you can't make sense of any of it.

One possible rebuttal is that these methods are indeed flawed and would have a major impact on your life if you applied them to the natural world and your daily decisions. But what if you only use them for religious belief?

Even here there is a problem. You would be taking a position that these techniques are flawed and shouldn't be practiced when it comes to the natural world. But how could you justify using those methods in religion? If one is bad, so is the other.

You can escape this conundrum in one of two ways. First, you can evade the contradiction. If you don't notice it, you don't need to address it. The problem here is that the solution requires a new method. The new method is to evade unpleasant facts or logical deductions. This provides another opportunity for spillover.

The second way of escaping the consequences of the contradiction is to simply say that you'll do it in this one case. You'll accept that the method is bad in general, but use it anyway when it comes to religious. But note that here also you have created a new method. Be inconsistent and ignore contradictions when you feel like it. And this also would spillover.

Trying to compartmentalize religion and treat that approach as rational just doesn't work. You can't really keep it isolated. You may minimize certain kinds of spillover, like content concerning the natural world. But the moral and methodological positions still spill over.

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