How would religion be different if it were actually true?

Some scattered thoughts.

Here’s a famous anecdote:

[Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis? I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’ [G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 151.]¹

I got to thinking about this anecdote after watching two videos from Andrew Henry on, respectively, ‘Why Fictional Religions Feel So Fake’ and ‘Why Fictional Magic Systems Feel So Fake’.

The former video came out earlier, and was well-received. Henry basically argues that the reason fictional religions feel fake is because they don’t actually resemble real-life religions all that much. His basic objection was that fictional creators (especially fantasy writers, highly invested in ‘worldbuilding’) spend a lot of time on complex cosmological myths, which are often actually absent in real-life religions, or at least only a small part of them;² and basically no time at all on making the actual religious practice of their world realistic to the richness of human religious practice.³

Clearly the success of the video about religion encouraged Henry to make the follow-up about magic. There, he made the isomorphic argument: the problem with fictional magical systems is that they don’t reflect the actual way magic has been practiced in human history, and so feel fake. For example, often in fiction, magic is done by specialised practitioners, but Henry argues that throughout most of history magic was something that everyday people did and there wasn’t really a job of ‘magic user’.⁴

When I first watched this video, it was getting a noticeably chillier reception than Henry’s earlier video about fictional religion. (This seems to have regressed to the mean in the intervening time.) And the critical comments were mostly making variants on the same, quite insightful, argument. Here’s a few of those comments:

I think the fundamental difference here is that magic in fictional worlds works. So if it was a skill based thing, I could easily imagine it becoming professionalized or only accessible to a few if it is hard enough to use, like any skill or ability. Real world magic doesn’t have the burden of needing to work, so anybody can pretend to do it. [@ggbeefcafe]

I feel like a major distinction between real world magical practices and fantasy ones is one actually works and that’s a massive difference. It makes sense for magic to be exclusive. If it’s actually capable of altering reality such power would not make sense to be in the hands of a random dude[. A]lso, if it was real, it would make sense for there to be actual professions about it although I do think such professions would likely be mixed with religious positions. It wouldn’t surprise me if a fictional culture in a world where magic worked would associate it with the divine. [@sebdragonholste2404]

I suspect a large part of why real-world magic feels so mundane to us now is actually the result of its nonexistence.

If writing a curse onto a piece of lead and staking it into the ground could reliably ruin a rival’s business or recover a lost cloak, that action would likely be treated with a lot more gravity and specialized regulation than it was.

If magic were a real, functioning force, it would probably follow the same talent distribution we see in other skills, like driving. To someone from a world without cars, the act of driving would seem fantastical or magical. For us, it’s a mundane task in service of a goal. However, if we make a movie about drivers, we don’t focus on the commute; we make it about race car drivers, people with a level of skill and mastery that the vast majority of people don’t possess.

Fantasy ‘wizards’ are essentially the ‘race car drivers’ of magic. Because magic isn’t a real-world force, no one can actually reach that high-skill, ‘exceptional’ tier. We’re left only with the ‘mundane’ historical records of people trying to use ritual technology to navigate everyday life. Without the ‘race car drivers’ to prove the peak of the skill, the mundane version just feels like a technology that never quite ‘synced’ with reality. [@michaelroberts9587]

This is, of course, correct! The economics, social role, and political importance of magic would just be fundamentally different in a world where magic actually worked.⁵ For example: if magic works, and there are returns to investing in your magical human capital, then maybe it really does pay to specialise in being a wizard! A fictional magic system that ‘feels real’ shouldn’t resemble real-life magical practices, because those practices are adapted to a world where belief in magic is basically a delusion.

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But—and many of you probably see where I’m going with this—the same thing is true of religion! One of the most important features of real-world religion is that it has evolved in a world where gods don’t actually exist! In an alternate reality where gods really existed, would religion not look just as different?

Western culture generally has fully internalised ‘magic is fake’ as an obvious, sensible conclusion that all reasonable people accept; but, despite secularisation, it is nowhere near fully internalising ‘religion is fake’. It shouldn’t be surprising that Henry’s viewers, even those who personally are atheists, weren’t able to make the next step of ‘and all religious practice has been shaped by the fact that religion is fake’, even though they could take the corresponding step for magic.

But we can and should take that next step. In a world where gods really existed, human religious practices would almost certainly be very very different. How would they be different? I think this question is interesting for two reasons: one, pure literary speculation; but secondarily, if we can get a handle on what religion would look like in a world that actually had gods, then we might be able to see more clearly which features of real-world religion are adapted to a world where there are no gods.⁶

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I don’t have a grand thesis of what The Big Difference would be. But here are a few scattered thoughts I have had:

1. How and why would gods interact with institutions like priestly hierarchies, temples, courts, etc.? One answer is ‘they wouldn’t, why would a superhumanly powerful entity bother dealing with puny mortals?’; but, if taken fully seriously, this leads you down a Lovecraftian avenue.⁷ A better answer for our purposes is: these institutions can serve as a commitment mechanism to bind the gods, and self-binding can be a source of power. We know (from e.g. Hayek, Elster, North and Weingast) that agents often benefit when they limit their options and make themselves weaker—even agents orders of magnitude more powerful than any individual human, like the state. The gods might be the same! So I imagine the covenantal structure most familiar to we moderns from the Old Testament might well be an even more central part of religion in the gods-world.

   
   Of course, there’s a difference. The state can be genuinely hurt or even destroyed by mere humans (e.g., through a coup); a god can’t be. At most, humans have the power to deny gods certain benefits they would otherwise enjoy (prayers, sacrifices, honour, etc.). So maybe the state isn’t the best analogy. A better one might be: humans are to gods as various Indian rulers and producers were to the East India Company, subordinate partners in a threat-backed trading relationship.

   
   In the actual world, religions are deeply shaped by their need to compete for adherents. But when there’s a dominant external partner whose demands are almost hard constraints, religions have less room for manoeuvre, and so are less able to mutate to better accomodate adherents’ needs. Instead, religion begins to look like the case law of repeated dealings with a stronger and higher-leverage agent.
   

2. Human religious institutions might also be attractive to the gods in a different way: they could serve as suitably-neutral fora in which to resolve disputes between the gods themselves.

   
   In the actual world, there’s an interesting phenomenon whereby a small number of institutions (think England and Delaware) have managed to situate themselves as disproportionately attractive venues for resolving disputes between superhuman agents (= corporations), whereas disputes between individual humans tend to be more spread out across the places where humans live.
   
   So, while point 1 suggests that most religions would exist to serve so the gods can make credible commitments to their human worshippers, a few special ones might have comparative advantage in dispute resolution between the gods themselves. By ensuring decisions are not made by divine parties, you avoid the situation you have in the Eumenides where the dispute between Apollo and the Erinyes ends up being decided by Athena, who is not a neutral and predictable judge and who makes a decision on the basis of ‘I’m not like other girls, I’m one of the boys’.
   
   Of course, relying on human judges has various disadvantages for the gods (‘to err is human’, so we can expect human judges will fuck up a bunch). Probably going to the priests of the Exoteric Order of Blackstone⁸ for dispute resolution would be a last-resort kind of thing, and gods would start by trying e.g. sneakily acting while your adversary is on holiday in Ethiopia. But that mirrors the situation we have in real life with corporations, where mostly disputes are resolved by inter-corporate arbitration and negotiation, and only when all other avenues have failed do you ask a judge in England or a chancellor in Delaware to decide.
   

3. Here’s a fact about the actual world: premodern medicine was pretty bad!

   
   This fact makes me sad, because some documents of premodern medicine are extremely inspirational and are part of my intellectual heritage. On the Sacred Disease, for example, is an amazingly complete and insightful statement of the causal closure of the physical. It would feel just and worthy to me if these doctors were able to translate their deep philosophical insight into practical success. But history doesn’t care about my sense of epistemic justice: medical interventions beyond the obvious generally succeeded at a rate no higher than chance, and many were actually negative expected value. It’s basically a completely contingent fact that the good and reliable and scientific parts of modern Western medicine are considered part of the tradition of ‘Western medicine’ at all.

   In the hypothetical world where gods exist, I don’t think there’s any obvious reason why medicine would work any better. But in this world, prayer or ritual probably would work quite reliably—certainly better than chance.

   
   This makes me wonder: how would the existence of effective prayer affect medicine? Would it straightforwardly outcompete it, and so there’s just no such thing as ‘medicine’? This is more plausible than it might seem. Medical interventions have often been completely ineffective, and (before effective modern medicine) the profession was kept afloat only because emotional and terrified people are liable to reason ‘we should do something, and this is something’. The existence of ineffective or unreliable alternatives (like prayer in the real world) generally doesn’t slow down this reasoning, but the existence of actually-effective alternatives does. Even quite crunchy or MAHA-pilled people generally get chemo for cancer—not all of them, to be sure, but many of them.
   
   Indeed, this makes me think that even if medicine existed in this world, all medicine would be ‘alternative medicine’. The epistemically-responsible people rely on prayer and ritual and sacrifice; a large number of people commit the minor epistemic sin of going to a doctor for minor ailments (just like lots of people go to a chiropractor or acupuncturist for sports injuries in the real world); and a smaller number of especially crunchy people rely on medicine for their cancer treatment against the pleas of their families, or loudly announce that the Eleusinian Mysteries will give your children autism.
   

4. Think about the classic Old Testament pattern of ‘Israelites turn away from YHWH → they are punished; Israelites worship YHWH faithfully → they are rewarded’.
   
   In the actual Old Testament this is a a barely-even-plausible attempt to impose some order on random patterns of events. But if gods actually engage in covenants or agreements with states, and offer benefits to those who uphold the covenant, then the pattern becomes real: societal piety begins to provide an actual geopolitical advantage!

   
   If no society ever quite internalises this pattern, or if they internalise it but can’t quite achieve stable piety, then you get a version of the ibn Khaldun cycle with asabiyah replaced by divine favour:⁹ one society gets pious, wins, achieves dominance, loses piety, and gets outcompeted, rinse and repeat.

   
   But, if the feedback loop is short enough, and a society is able to develop social technologies to stabilise piety across many generations, it could achieve a crucial geopolitical advantage.

   
   This would be an extremely different world: in the real world, sometimes people attribute a fertility advantage to highly pious groups like the Amish, but rarely a geopolitical advantage. These forces in the gods-world could seriously change geopolitics, and probably also contribute to some major cultural evolution in favour of theocracy.
   

5. The spirit of liberty would still exist, and would even more perfectly be represented by Milton’s Satan:

… Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

1. Anscombe’s answer, which Wittgenstein endorsed, is not usually relayed when this anecdote is told, but it’s delightful (and slightly undermines the use I make of the anecdote): ‘My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. “Exactly!” he said.’

2. Think about how simple Genesis 1 is!

3. You can partly blame Tolkien for this, who deliberately ensured his human characters never did anything vaguely resembling religious practice, because he was an extremely devout Catholic and so didn’t want to write about non-Catholic religious practices.

4. An aside: as a historical claim, this doesn’t seem clearly true? Lots of societies have ‘service magicians’ / witch-doctors / etc. I wonder if Henry is making a rather narrow and technical (true) point unclearly, so it seems to many of us viewer that he is actually making a broader (false) point.

5. You might object: no, it doesn’t matter if magic works, what matters is whether people believe it works. This is incorrect.

This is easiest to see in terms of the economic effects (although it’s also true of sociological and political effects): even in a world where everyone sincerely believed magic worked, demand for magic would be substantially lower than in a world where it actually worked.

Why? Well, in a no-magic world, given that magic doesn’t work, there will come times when e.g. you curse someone and they are still happy afterwards. Or even happier (just by chance)!

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you come to conclude that magic doesn’t work. If you believe in magic, probably you rationalise it away: ‘oh, well, clearly I didn’t have the right magic ingredients’; ‘a god must be protecting them’; ‘they must have more powerful magic than mine’.

But still, that means that for any given magic spell that you might consider casting or that someone might offer to cast for you, you will have a relatively high credence that it will fail. You won’t ascribe that failure to ‘magic is bullshit’, you will ascribe it to other magical reasons you can’t predict ahead of time, but the economic result is the same: your willingness-to-pay will be lower. If you expect that there’s only a 60% chance of your spell actually working as intended, you will only be willing to pay ~60% of the value of a successful spell.

Of course, in a world with real magic, spells would still probably fail occasionally. But ex hypothesi, they will succeed more often than chance; whereas in a world where magic simply does not work, then they could only ever succeed at the rate of chance.

So in the magic-isn’t-real world, even if everyone universally believes in magic, people’s willingness-to-pay for magic will be less. That is to say, there will be less demand for magic.

In the limit, the market for magic in this world will essentially be a ‘market for lemons except there aren’t actually any peaches, they’re all lemons, peaches are just a myth, and the value of a lemon is £0’ situation; and so in the limit willingness-to-pay should drop to the value of a lemon, i.e. zero. Clearly human irrationality can prevent this market going to the limit. But if we posit a human propensity for wishful thinking and self-delusion in the no-magic world, then we should also posit it in the magic-is-real world: if delusional hope gives a +40pp boost to people’s credence in any given spell working, and in the no-magic world it takes it from 0% to 40%, then in the magic-is-real world it takes it from 50% to 90%. So demand for magic would still be higher in the magic-is-real world.

6. One way to approach this question—a good way!—is the Lovecraftian one:

There’s an inherent contradiction in people’s conceptions of ‘gods’.

At the level of theology, gods are supposed to be a different kind of being, non-human on a fundamental level, ‘above’ us in a meaningful way.

But at the level of depiction and behaviour, gods are obviously extremely human. They are anthropomorphised to shit, they are often portrayed as human or humanoid, they have human-like belief-desire psychology, their values often reflect idealised human values, and (as Cosma Shalizi observes) almost every god is ‘so transparently a product of human hopes and fears as to have a sex’.

If you’re going to depict gods in a coherent manner, you can’t have both. And of course, while technically you can have ‘gods’ who are just strong and smart humans, that’s not really religion.

If you want to have gods who are genuinely non-human or pre-human, they will be horrifying, precisely because of their distance from humanity; they ought much more to resemble Yog-Sothoth or Shub-Niggurath than Yahweh or Zeus.

This is a respectable line of thought. But the end result of it is that you begin thinking about, not what it would be like if gods existed, but rather what it would be like if terrifying aliens existed. (A perfectly interesting topic, to be sure, but not the one I’m asking about.) The idea of a ‘god’ is pretty inherently anthropomorphic; if you throw out the anthropomorphism completely, you’re essentially just writing off the idea of ‘god’ altogether, and trying instead to write about an adjacent idea.

I’m not completely against the argument that our idea of ‘god’ is hopelessly incoherent. But even if it is, it might be worth trying to see how far you can take the incoherent idea before explosion kicks in.

7. See footnote 6 above.

8. I will be sad if nobody likes this joke.

9. My understanding is that ibn Khaldun thought that the one group of conquerors who had God’s favour, viz. Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphs, totally broke the patterns of his cyclical history. Thus my invocation of ibn Khaldun here is just gesturing, I’m not trying to make a claim about his actual views.