So yes, religion is no separate magisterium, and has no monopoly on ethics. Insofar as it approaches questions of human society, politics, ethics and material reality, religion must be subject to the rigors of logic and rationality. And by that yardstick, there is a heck of a lot of bad religion out there in both history and the present.
However, there are some elements within religion—and indeed, within literature, art and other domains—that are not disprovable. For example, belief in an omnipotent God that is unknowable in its essence is not really provable or disprovable. That’s not to say that there isn’t evidence that we might find more or less persuasive—cognitive dissonances between observed reality and teachings that purport to come from God; mystical experiences; the literary quality and apparently spontaneous composition of texts such as the Qur’an; the commonalities in the lives of the founders of the major religious traditions; the ethical inconsistency or absurdity we might perceive in certain laws or teachings; the psychological and physiological efficacy of practices such as prayer and fasting. Still, none of these matters can really demonstrate, beyond a shadow of doubt, that there is or is not an omnipotent, unknowable God whose essence exists outside of the material world.
We can disprove some specific, naive conceptions of God, and indeed religious figures like Muhammad and Abraham are reported to have spent a fair bit of time and effort doing this proto-rationalist work. In fact, there are reasons to believe that, in the case of Muhammad, this work cleared the explanatory landscape, so that instead of a whole raft of Gods that each explain specific phenomena, Muslims were left with a single God and a big explanatory gap to fill with science, history, mathematics, philosophy et cetera.
I think it’s quite possible to be both devoutly religious and quite Bayesian in one’s thinking. I’m very comfortable working under the assumption there is a God, because the more I try to live as if a God exists, the more I find myself able to make sense of the world, grow as a person and be of benefit to those around me. The difference between the days when I remember my belief in God and forget it is like standing in the sun versus a cold, dark room. Yet it feels intellectually arrogant to me, having been raised as an agnostic leaning towards atheism, to assign a 100% probability to the existence of God. I cannot rule out the possibility that the founder of my faith may just have been a madman who happened to have incredibly insightful and useful ideas about humanity; he could have been an enlightened liar, using humanity’s native tendency towards theism to dupe us into realising our best selves. It seems unlikely, but I am very confident in one thing at least: it is a very strange world we live in, where many seemingly improbable things have happened.
So yes, religion is no separate magisterium, and has no monopoly on ethics. Insofar as it approaches questions of human society, politics, ethics and material reality, religion must be subject to the rigors of logic and rationality. And by that yardstick, there is a heck of a lot of bad religion out there in both history and the present.
However, there are some elements within religion—and indeed, within literature, art and other domains—that are not disprovable. For example, belief in an omnipotent God that is unknowable in its essence is not really provable or disprovable. That’s not to say that there isn’t evidence that we might find more or less persuasive—cognitive dissonances between observed reality and teachings that purport to come from God; mystical experiences; the literary quality and apparently spontaneous composition of texts such as the Qur’an; the commonalities in the lives of the founders of the major religious traditions; the ethical inconsistency or absurdity we might perceive in certain laws or teachings; the psychological and physiological efficacy of practices such as prayer and fasting. Still, none of these matters can really demonstrate, beyond a shadow of doubt, that there is or is not an omnipotent, unknowable God whose essence exists outside of the material world.
We can disprove some specific, naive conceptions of God, and indeed religious figures like Muhammad and Abraham are reported to have spent a fair bit of time and effort doing this proto-rationalist work. In fact, there are reasons to believe that, in the case of Muhammad, this work cleared the explanatory landscape, so that instead of a whole raft of Gods that each explain specific phenomena, Muslims were left with a single God and a big explanatory gap to fill with science, history, mathematics, philosophy et cetera.
I think it’s quite possible to be both devoutly religious and quite Bayesian in one’s thinking. I’m very comfortable working under the assumption there is a God, because the more I try to live as if a God exists, the more I find myself able to make sense of the world, grow as a person and be of benefit to those around me. The difference between the days when I remember my belief in God and forget it is like standing in the sun versus a cold, dark room. Yet it feels intellectually arrogant to me, having been raised as an agnostic leaning towards atheism, to assign a 100% probability to the existence of God. I cannot rule out the possibility that the founder of my faith may just have been a madman who happened to have incredibly insightful and useful ideas about humanity; he could have been an enlightened liar, using humanity’s native tendency towards theism to dupe us into realising our best selves. It seems unlikely, but I am very confident in one thing at least: it is a very strange world we live in, where many seemingly improbable things have happened.