Religion teaches obedience over inquiry, holding back knowledge and dissent

The argument

This argument concerns religion's effect on how people think. Critics hold that religions characteristically treat certain claims as settled by authority — revealed, traditional, not open to revision — and treat doubt about them as a fault rather than a virtue. Faith is commended precisely where evidence is absent. Critics argue that this inverts the disposition that produces knowledge, which is the willingness to abandon a belief when the evidence runs against it. The consequences, on this view, have been concrete. Religious authorities have censored books, suppressed findings about the natural world, and punished those who published them; they have obstructed medical and educational provision that conflicted with doctrine, and in some settings continue to resist what is taught about human origins, sexuality and reproduction. Critics argue that the pattern is predictable rather than accidental: an institution whose authority rests on claims not subject to evidence has a standing interest in limiting the reach of evidence. Critics extend the point to moral reasoning. Where right and wrong are taken to be matters of command, the question of why something is wrong need not be asked, and a practice can be defended on the ground that it is prescribed. This, critics argue, is how harmful norms persist long after the harm is evident, and why reform has so often had to come from outside religious authority and against its resistance. Because religion cultivates obedience to authority in place of inquiry, and has used institutional power to suppress knowledge and dissent, this argument concludes, it has been a force for evil.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders reply that religious institutions founded and sustained the universities, preserved classical learning through periods when nothing else would, and that many of the figures who established the modern sciences were themselves devout and understood their work as religious. They add that theological traditions contain extensive argument, dispute and reasoning rather than bare command, and that censorship and the suppression of dissent have been practised by secular authorities with equal vigour.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This describes some traditions in some periods, and the premise generalises to religion as such. Several traditions maintain developed argumentative and interpretive disciplines in which doubt is a method rather than a fault, and the premise does not say how it accommodates them. [Rejecting P2] Censorship and punishment by religious authorities are matters of record, but the premise attributes them to religious teaching rather than to institutions holding state power, and comparable suppression by secular authorities holding the same power is not considered. [Rejecting P3] Treating morality as obedience does not remove the question why a practice is harmful; it relocates it, and reform movements within religious traditions have pressed that question from within their own texts. The premise rules out at the start the mechanism by which such reform has actually occurred.