Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)

Plenty of good things are done in the name of religion, and plenty of bad things too. But what is religion, exactly — is it good or bad, in and of itself? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a generous, surprising view.

People say things about religion all the time.

(Laughter)

The late, great Christopher Hitchens

wrote a book called "God Is Not Great"

whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything."

(Laughter)

But last month, in Time magazine,

Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather
is referred to as America's rabbi,

said, to balance that against
that negative characterization,

that no important form of social change

can be brought about except through organized religion.

Now, remarks of this sort on the negative

and the positive side are very old.

I have one in my pocket here

from the first century BCE by Lucretius,

the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said,

"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" --

I should have been able to learn that by heart —

which is, that's how much religion

is able to persuade people to do evil,

and he was talking about the fact

of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter

Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice

in order to preserve the prospects of his army.

So there have been these long debates

over the centuries, in that case, actually,

we can say over the millennia, about religion.

People have talked about it a lot,

and they've said good and bad

and indifferent things about it.

What I want to persuade you of today

is of a very simple claim,

which is that these debates are

in a certain sense preposterous,

because there is no such thing as religion

about which to make these claims.

There isn't a thing called religion,

and so it can't be good or bad.

It can't even be indifferent.

And if you think about claims

about the nonexistence of things,

one obvious way to try and establish

the nonexistence of a purported thing

would be to offer a definition of that thing

and then to see whether anything satisfied it.

I'm going to start out on that little route

to begin with.

So if you look in the dictionaries

and if you think about it,

one very natural definition of religion

is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings.

As I say, this is in many dictionaries,

but you'll also find it actually

in the work of Sir Edward Tylor,

who was the first professor
of anthropology at Oxford,

one of the first modern anthropologists.

In his book on primitive culture,

he says the heart of religion
is what he called animism,

that is, the belief in spiritual agency,

belief in spirits.

The first problem for that definition

is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff."

There's a guy talking to a rabbi.

The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God.

The guy says, "You're a rabbi,
how can you not believe in God?"

And the reply is, "It's what's
so great about being Jewish.

You don't have to believe in a God per se,

just in being Jewish." (Laughter)

So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi,

and if you have to believe in
God in order to be religious,

then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion

that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi

without believing in God,

Judaism isn't a religion.

That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.

Here's another argument against this view.

A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine,

went to his grandfather when he was very young,

a child, and said to him,

"I want to talk to you about religion,"

and his grandfather said, "You're too young.

Come back when you're a teenager."

So he came back when he was a teenager,

and he said to his grandfather,

"It may be a bit late now

because I've discovered that
I don't believe in the gods."

And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said,

"Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch

of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)

And finally, there's this guy,

who famously doesn't believe in God.

His name is the Dalai Lama.

He often jokes that he's one
of the world's leading atheists.

But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion

does not involve belief in God.

Now you might think this just shows

that I've given you the wrong definition

and that I should come up with some other definition

and test it against these cases

and try and find something that captures

atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism,

and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity,

but I actually think that that's a bad idea,

and the reason I think it's a bad idea

is that I don't think that's how

our concept of religion works.

I think the way our concept of religion works

is that we actually have, we have a list

of paradigm religions

and their sub-parts, right,

and if something new comes along

that purports to be a religion,

what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?"

Right?

And I think that's not only
how we think about religion,

and that's, as it were,

so from our point of view,

anything on that list had better be a religion,

which is why I don't think an account of religion

that excludes Buddhism and Judaism

has a chance of being a good starter,

because they're on our list.

But why do we have such a list?

What's going on? How did it come about

that we have this list?

I think the answer is a pretty simple one

and therefore crude and contentious.

I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it,

but here's my story,

and true or not, it's a story that I think

gives you a good sense of how

the list might have come about,

and therefore helps you to think about

what use the list might be.

I think the answer is, European travelers,

starting roughly about the time of Columbus,

started going around the world.

They came from a Christian culture,

and when they arrived in a new place,

they noticed that some people
didn't have Christianity,

and so they asked themselves
the following question:

what have they got instead of Christianity?

And that list was essentially constructed.

It consists of the things that other people had

instead of Christianity.

Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way,

which is that Christianity is extremely,

even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition.

It has all kinds of things in it

that are very, very particular

that are the results of the specifics

of Christian history,

and one thing that's at the heart of it,

one thing that's at the heart of
most understandings of Christianity,

which is the result of the
specific history of Christianity,

is that it's an extremely creedal religion.

It's a religion in which people are really concerned

about whether you believe the right things.

The history of Christianity, the
internal history of Christianity,

is largely the history of people killing each other

because they believed the wrong thing,

and it's also involved in

struggles with other religions,

obviously starting in the Middle Ages,

a struggle with Islam,

in which, again, it was the infidelity,

the fact that they didn't believe the right things,

that seemed so offensive to the Christian world.

Now that's a very specific and particular history

that Christianity has,

and not everywhere is everything

that has ever been put on this sort of list like it.

Here's another problem, I think.

A very specific thing happened.

It was actually adverted to earlier,

but a very specific thing happened

in the history of the kind of Christianity

that we see around us

mostly in the United States today,

and it happened in the late 19th century,

and that specific thing that happened

in the late 19th century

was a kind of deal that was cut

between science,

this new way of organizing intellectual authority,

and religion.

If you think about the 18th century, say,

if you think about intellectual life

before the late 19th century,

anything you did, anything you thought about,

whether it was the physical world,

the human world,

the natural world apart from the human world,

or morality, anything you did

would have been framed against the background

of a set of assumptions that were religious,

Christian assumptions.

You couldn't give an account

of the natural world

that didn't say something about its relationship,

for example, to the creation story

in the Abrahamic tradition,

the creation story in the first book of the Torah.

So everything was framed in that way.

But this changes in the late 19th century,

and for the first time, it's possible for people

to develop serious intellectual careers

as natural historians like Darwin.

Darwin worried about the relationship between

what he said and the truths of religion,

but he could proceed, he could write books

about his subject

without having to say what the relationship was

to the religious claims,

and similarly, geologists
increasingly could talk about it.

In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist

and made a claim about the age of the Earth,

you had to explain whether that was consistent

or how it was or wasn't consistent

with the age of the Earth implied

by the account in Genesis.

By the end of the 19th century,

you can just write a geology textbook

in which you make arguments
about how old the Earth is.

So there's a big change, and that division,

that intellectual division of
labor occurs as I say, I think,

and it sort of solidifies so that by the end

of the 19th century in Europe,

there's a real intellectual division of labor,

and you can do all sorts of serious things,

including, increasingly, even philosophy,

without being constrained by the thought,

"Well, what I have to say has to be consistent

with the deep truths that are given to me

by our religious tradition."

So imagine someone who's coming out

of that world, that late-19th-century world,

coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana,

the society that I grew up in, Asante,

coming into that world

at the turn of the 20th century

with this question that made the list:

what have they got instead of Christianity?

Well, here's one thing he would have noticed,

and by the way, there was a
person who actually did this.

His name was Captain Rattray,

he was sent as the British
government anthropologist,

and he wrote a book about Asante religion.

This is a soul disc.

There are many of them in the British Museum.

I could give you an interesting, different history

of how it comes about that many of the things

from my society ended up in the British Museum,

but we don't have time for that.

So this object is a soul disc.

What is a soul disc?

It was worn around the necks

of the soul-washers of the Asante king.

What was their job? To wash the king's soul.

It would take a long while

to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing

that could be washed,

but Rattray knew that this was religion

because souls were in play.

And similarly,

there were many other things, many other practices.

For example, every time anybody
had a drink, more or less,

they poured a little bit on the ground

in what's called the libation,

and they gave some to the ancestors.

My father did this. Every time
he opened a bottle of whiskey,

which I'm glad to say was very often,

he would take the top off and
pour off just a little on the ground,

and he would talk to,

he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line,

or Yao Antony, my great uncle,

he would talk to them,

offer them a little bit of this.

And finally, there were these
huge public ceremonials.

This is an early-19th-century drawing

by another British military officer

of such a ceremonial,

where the king was involved,

and the king's job,

one of the large parts of his job,

apart from organizing warfare and things like that,

was to look after the tombs of his ancestors,

and when a king died,

the stool that he sat on was blackened

and put in the royal ancestral temple,

and every 40 days,

the King of Asante has to go and do cult

for his ancestors.

That's a large part of his job,

and people think that if he doesn't do it,

things will fall apart.

So he's a religious figure,

as Rattray would have said,

as well as a political figure.

So all this would count as religion for Rattray,

but my point is that when you look

into the lives of those people,

you also find that every time they do anything,

they're conscious of the ancestors.

Every morning at breakfast,

you can go outside the front of the house

and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua

outside your house,

and again, you'll talk to the gods

and the high gods and the low gods

and the ancestors and so on.

This is not a world

in which the separation between religion and science

has occurred.

Religion has not being separated

from any other areas of life,

and in particular,

what's crucial to understand about this world

is that it's a world in which the job

that science does for us

is done by what Rattray is going to call religion,

because if they want an explanation of something,

if they want to know why the crop just failed,

if they want to know why it's raining

or not raining, if they need rain,

if they want to know why

their grandfather has died,

they are going to appeal to the very same entities,

the very same language,

talk to the very same gods about that.

This great separation, in other words,

between religion and science hasn't happened.

Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity,

except that in large parts of the world,

this is still the truth.

I had the privilege of going to a wedding

the other day in northern Namibia,

20 miles or so south of the Angolan border

in a village of 200 people.

These were modern people.

We had with us Oona Chaplin,

who some of you may have heard of,

and one of the people from
this village came up to her,

and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'"

So these were not people who
were isolated from our world,

but nevertheless, for them,

the gods and the spirits are still very much there,

and when we were on the bus going back and forth

to the various parts of the [ceremony],

they prayed not just in a generic way

but for the safety of the journey,

and they meant it,

and when they said to me that my mother,

the bridegroom's [grandmother],

was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively.

They meant, even though she was a dead person,

they meant that she was still around.

So in large parts of the world today,

that separation between science and religion

hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today,

and as I say, these are not --

This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank.

These are fellow citizens of the world with you,

but they come from a place in which religion

is occupying a very different role.

So what I want you to think about
next time somebody wants

to make some vast generalization about religion

is that maybe there isn't such a thing

as a religion, such a thing as religion,

and that therefore what they say

cannot possibly be true.

(Applause)