Religion, A Curable Illness

[Angrboda]

I think that perhaps Taylor is more putting the idea out there as food for thought, and to stir interest in her book, than endorsing a specific hypothesis. I personally believe the opposite, that religious belief is perfectly normal, and it's stubborn persistence is a consequence of standard psychological and social mechanisms that are at work in all people. It may be similar to political ideologies or, say, vegetarianism, in that it preferentially attracts people with certain qualities, but those qualities are well within the range of normal human variation, to my uneducated view.

It does bring up an interesting question though, given that advances in brain science may deliver control over things which we don't currently have ethical or philosophical frameworks for deciding clearly and responsibly, how do we respond to such possibilities? If religious belief could be "cured" would it be ethical to do so involuntarily? Voluntarily? TEGH created a thread recently about whether or not we would or should cure homosexuality if there were an intervention prior to birth which could prevent it. I think the abortion debate is similar in that it pushes our normal, fuzzy conception of things into a place where our comfortable certainties are not as clear or certain. (I just watched the movie "180" comparing "killing babies" in the womb to the Nazi holocaust. To me, one of the issues it raised is how, in order to defend the right of women to decide, people can be drawn to exaggerated positions, not because they reflect the way they feel so much as they are seen as necessary distortions in order for them not to have any ambivalence or ambiguity available to be used against them by people who want things that they don't [the outlawing of abortion].) Anyway, our technology is tending to advance faster than our understanding of ethics is, and that creates problems at the boundary, such as the one suggested by Taylor. What if tomorrow (or some future tomorrow), neuroscience proved that free will is a myth — what would we change and why? What wouldn't we change and why? And how would we decide?

(Similar examples of where technology advances faster than our ability to deal practically or philosophically with it are copyright and the internet, the case of digitally created "child pornography", and many ethical dilemmas in medicine.)