Scientific proof of the good that religions provide

Andrew Sullivan points to The Economist suggestion that Religious diversity may be caused by disease:

SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things.

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

The hypothesis is the more disease the less mixing we do, so fewer religions:

Proving the point involved collating a lot of previous research.

Even defining what constitutes a religion is fraught with difficulty. But using accepted definitions of uniqueness, exclusivity, autonomy and superiority to other religions they calculated that the average number of religions per country is 31. The range, though, is enormous—from 3 to 643. Côte d’Ivoire, for example, has 76 while Norway has 13, and Brazil has 159 while Canada has 15. They then did the same thing for the number of parasitic diseases found in each country. The average here was 200, with a range from 178 to 248.

In a Fresh Air discussion last month on Mapping The Mysteries Of The Brain’s Two Halves, Terry Gross interviewed neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. In his book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us, Gazzaniga says we’re wired for religion. If all the religions went away, we’d invent new ones. And that’s good:

Dr. GAZZANIGA: We are belief-making machines. We believe in all kinds of crazy things… we want to invent something that gives an explanation for what this all means, what is the meaning of life, how do we want to deal with sorrow, how do we want to deal with hurt… And once you understand that, you realize there have been some terrific stories and rules and all the rest of it that come down through history. And they play an very important function and social role to billions of people.

Gazzaniga, an atheist, believes that. And this too:

Dr. GAZZANIGA: I’m one of those people that looks at the good that religions provide and comfort religions provide people. I have no interest in zealotry in religion, and that’s where it interferes with advancements. As you may know, I serve on the president’s bioethic counsel, and the people who religiously based and resisted stem cell research were annoying to me, but that’s such a small part of it. The larger part of it is, for instance, who’s the largest health provider in the world? It’s the Catholic Church. And anybody going to take up that cause? I don’t think so. So if you go down and look at all the social goods that religions do, it’s why they get so established in a culture and are passed down, because if you probably look at the total good and comfort vs. the times when they’re just dead wrong and obstructionist, the comfort time wins. So it’s just a question of managing the other stuff.

For the record, I am an atheist. Still I pray and find comfort in God even as I remain a non-believer. I believe like Gazzaniga that on balance religion is good. And God is good for my mental health.