Religion is too varied to carry a single verdict

The argument

This argument questions whether the question can be answered as posed. Proponents point out that religion is not one thing. It covers traditions with gods and without, with scripture and without, with clergy and hierarchy and with neither; it covers private contemplative practice, village custom, vast bureaucratic institutions and state ideologies. These share so little in structure and content that a judgement true of one is routinely false of another. The same variety holds within any single tradition across time and place. Proponents argue that a verdict on religion would have to cover a monastery that preserved manuscripts and an institution that burned them, a pacifist sect and a crusading order, a congregation feeding its neighbourhood and a hierarchy shielding abusers. Averaging over such a range does not produce a finding; it produces a number with no referent. Nor can the weighing be done in practice, since the goods and harms are incommensurable and the counterfactual — what would have happened without religion — is unavailable. Proponents argue that the honest conclusion is not agnosticism about the facts but precision about the question. Particular religious institutions, doctrines and practices can be assessed, and often with clear results; it is the aggregate that resists judgement. Treating religion as a single entity with a moral balance to be struck is, on this view, what generates an argument neither side can win. Because religion names an enormously varied set of practices and institutions whose effects run in every direction, this argument concludes, no single verdict of good or evil applies to it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics on both sides reply that the point proves too much, since every large human phenomenon is internally varied and we nonetheless make judgements about nationalism, colonialism and medicine. They argue that the question asks about the balance of effects, which is answerable in approximate terms even where precision is impossible, and that declining to answer on grounds of variety functions as a refusal to weigh evidence that does in fact point somewhere.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Internal variation does not prevent general judgement, as it does not for nationalism, markets or medicine, all of which differ fundamentally across instances and are still assessed. The premise sets a standard of uniformity that no large human institution meets. [Rejecting P2] Variation within a tradition across periods and institutions is real, and the premise treats it as a reason not to judge rather than as material for judgement, when a pattern across time is itself a finding. [Rejecting P3] Incommensurability and the missing counterfactual would, if accepted, block the evaluation of any institution whatever. A verdict of neither good nor evil is also a verdict, and on this premise's own reasoning it could not be reached either.