Does Society Need God?

Source: Does Society Need God?, Unsolicited advice, 25:16, uploaded 2024-06-01, category Society / Culture, playlist index 1019.

The question is whether religion can remain useful after belief in God has gone. Many atheists now ask whether religious stories and institutions still give people meaning, moral guidance, and social cohesion. The video finds an earlier version of the same debate in Arthur Schopenhauer’s dialogue on religion, where two atheists argue over the place religion should have in a society that assumes God does not exist.

The presenter approaches the question as an agnostic who leans towards atheism and warns that the video is not a complete account of either the debate or Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His route runs through pessimism, existential comfort, moral education, and the idea that a story can contain a truth without being literally true. The final problem remains uncomfortable: if religious belief helps people, should an atheist teach something they think is false?

Schopenhauer’s pessimism

Schopenhauer’s pessimism describes more than a gloomy temperament. He thinks each person has a will, the part of the mind that generates desires, often without reason. When the will fails to get what it wants, suffering follows. Hunger and thirst are simple cases. The will also promises that a new car, a lover, or sexual success will finally remove the feeling of lack. Satisfaction arrives for a short time, then the will selects another object and begins the same process again.

Schopenhauer calls this the will to life because it ultimately serves continued existence and reproduction. Human beings remain caught in a cycle of desire, temporary relief, and fresh desire. The promise of a final satisfaction keeps the cycle going even though the will never fulfils it for long.

He also sees an asymmetry between suffering and happiness. Pain feels like a positive fact that demands attention. Happiness appears as relief when pain has stopped, so people often notice it only after it has gone. The video connects this idea with negativity bias. Missing a line in the bushes could kill us, whilst mistaking a branch for a predator costs very little. Evolution therefore gives bad possibilities a louder voice than good ones. The good periods pass quietly and the bad ones leave a mark.

Self-reflection adds another layer. A small child or a dog can suffer an immediate pain without judging the experience or predicting how it will develop. An adult can suffer the pain, become angry about suffering, blame themselves for it, and imagine a future in which the pain never ends. The same reflective ability that allows human beings to plan and dominate their environment also lets them turn an ordinary misfortune into a verdict on their whole life. Hope can end in disappointment, whilst hopelessness can make every future effort feel pointless.

Schopenhauer therefore presents human consciousness as a source of misery as well as a source of power. If life consists of unending desire, if suffering weighs more heavily than happiness, and if reflection multiplies every wound, then a person may need a reason to continue. Religion enters at that point. It gives suffering a place in a larger account of existence and can make a terrible experience bearable by giving it a meaning.

Religion as existential support

The video names Demopheles as the character who defends religion in Schopenhauer’s dialogue. Many people face existential problems without having the time or inclination to read philosophy. They can become nihilistic, lose their motivation, or decide that life is no longer worth the effort. A secular philosophy of meaning can answer those problems, yet it often demands years of reading and reflection. Religion offers a ready-made metaphysical structure that people can inhabit without having to build one from scratch.

The argument concerns more than comfort in the narrow sense. If somebody suffers a blow whilst trying to save their mother, the physical pain remains, yet the person can understand why it happened and regard it as worth bearing. Religion can give ordinary suffering that same kind of shape. It can turn illness, sacrifice, and death into parts of a story that remains comprehensible to the person living through them. The video connects this claim with prison writing, including Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, where a larger account of justice and fortune helps a prisoner endure his situation.

Religious martyrdom supplies the most extreme example. People have endured torture and death for a faith that made those experiences meaningful. The presenter treats the willingness to face lions or other horrific deaths as evidence of religion’s practical power. The belief could offer that power even under the assumption that its supernatural claims are false.

Demopheles therefore asks whether atheists are entitled to make existential life harder for everyone else. Philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus describe the work required to find meaning without God or metaphysics. A person with little time, education, or interest in philosophy may have enough difficulty managing ordinary life. Religion can shield that person from an unfiltered encounter with the bleakest parts of Schopenhauer’s picture.

Philalethes answers that the benefit remains an empirical question. Religion has supported endurance and care, yet it has also accompanied war, oppression, persecution, and witch hunts. The world might be better with religion than without it, although that conclusion needs evidence. Religious belief also sits inside a web of other causes. A person may value family, friends, or a hobby and add God to that life as a secondary explanation. A war may use religious language whilst its real causes lie in political or economic interests. The video leaves both causal questions open.

Philalethes then makes a different objection. The effects of belief should not decide whether people promote it. People should believe what they take to be true, even when falsehood would comfort them more. Once a society accepts a useful religious fiction, where does the rule stop? It might start altering historical records, presenting sanitised versions of art, or telling people that they already live in the best possible world because those stories make them happier. Truth would become subordinate to comfort.

The video places this dispute beside current arguments about nihilism and the New Atheist movement. Some former atheists have converted to Christianity, whilst others argue that Christian belief still has a social function without accepting its theology. The old dialogue remains recognisable because the question has changed very little: a person can reject God and still worry about what follows from that rejection.

Moral stories and their uses

The next issue is the relation between religion and morality. C. S. Lewis is mentioned as a stronger defender of the view that losing religion could leave people in moral relativism, without the firmness needed to resist selfish pleasure. Demopheles takes a narrower position. Religion can pass moral knowledge between generations through stories, and those stories can guide action more effectively than abstract rules.

The Good Samaritan illustrates the point. A person from an enemy community stops to help somebody who has been attacked. The story gives a concrete form to the demand that people love their neighbours across national and cultural divisions. Its image is easier to remember and more likely to move a person than the sentence “help people from groups you distrust”. Religious tales can therefore carry moral information through time whilst making the listener feel the force of the lesson.

The presenter applies the same idea to the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path and Christ’s command to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Shared images and commands can bind a society together and restrain the violence human beings have repeatedly shown themselves capable of. Richard Dawkins’s identification as a cultural Christian supplies a contemporary example. He rejects Christian theology yet accepts that Christianity contains moral and social messages worth keeping.

Philalethes repeats the earlier warning. Religious faith has inspired compassion and restraint, although it has also driven invasions, wars, persecution, and violent fervour. If religion can produce the best and worst in people, its motivational power is considerable. That observation could support a programme of selecting and spreading the religious beliefs that produce the best conduct. It could also suggest that faith in absolute morality itself makes people authoritarian. The video treats both possibilities as empirical questions that the dialogue does not settle.

The debate then returns to deception. Even a belief that improves social behaviour might leave atheists facing a choice between truth and a deliberate campaign of falsehood. The answer depends on whether the moral force of a religious story survives once people know that it is a story.

Allegorical truth

Demopheles’s answer is the idea of allegorical truth. Fiction can teach something true about human life even when its events never happened. A novel can show how people respond under pressure. A war story can make the horror of war intelligible. 1984 can sharpen a reader’s sense of why freedom matters. The account remains fictional at the literal level whilst carrying a truth that a straightforward proposition may communicate less forcefully.

Schopenhauer’s character applies this model to religion. The major religions may be reaching towards similar underlying ideas, even though their supernatural narratives differ. The presenter describes this as a loose form of syncretism. The Christian story of the Fall, for example, gives a narrative form to the pessimistic claim that human beings are flawed and that the world will make them suffer. The story softens the bare fact by placing it inside a framework that explains why the world has this shape.

Jordan Peterson is named as a modern defender of a similar view. Religious stories can contain deep truths whether or not a person accepts them as literal history. The video then turns to religious asceticism. Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian monastic practices all express, in different forms, the idea that desire causes suffering and that a person can find relief by restraining the will. Schopenhauer’s own answer is severe. People should learn to want as little as possible rather than keep grasping for the next source of satisfaction.

The comparison reaches Theravada Buddhist teaching on detachment from material objects and from egoistic identities. It also reaches the Rule of Saint Benedict, which asks monks to keep their desires under control and turn towards God for fulfilment. Schopenhauer rejects the religious metaphysics, yet he recognises the same practical instruction: the will causes suffering, and asceticism offers a way to loosen its hold.

This gives religion a double function. Its stories reveal enough of the truth about suffering to orient a person’s life, whilst their metaphysical form keeps the full bleakness of that truth at a distance. A religious narrative can make an unbearable idea livable.

The model raises its own problem. How can anyone tell allegorical truth from allegorical falsehood? Literal truth is difficult to establish in many cases. Allegorical interpretation adds the way the story is told, the listener’s understanding, and the surrounding context. A reader who finishes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the lesson “you cannot get away with murder in Saint Petersburg” has found a literal rule that misses the novel’s larger questions about guilt, conscience, and redemption.

The same danger appears inside theology. The video uses prosperity gospel as an example, along with a friend’s joke about needing a bigger needle. Christian themes of restraint and spiritual transformation can be twisted into a promise that faithful people will receive earthly riches. Schopenhauer would reject that promise as an allegorical falsehood. The line between a useful interpretation and a convenient invention remains hard to draw.

Philalethes proposes teaching religious stories openly as fables. Demopheles replies that literal belief is part of their power. A story that openly announces itself as fiction can move a reader, yet the conviction that it really happened can make the same story more persuasive and more comforting. Under this view, literal religious belief becomes a noble lie. The narrative carries a deeper truth, while its believers receive the motivational force of treating it as fact.

The unresolved bargain

The video does not decide whether atheists should make that bargain. It asks us to grant Demopheles’s whole case for a moment: religion helps many people endure suffering, it can guide moral behaviour and social cohesion, and its stories communicate truths that people might otherwise miss. Even then, an atheist who teaches literal belief says something they think is false.

That final problem separates the social usefulness of religion from the truth of its theology. A story can give shape to a life, carry moral knowledge, and preserve a view of human limitation. Its usefulness still leaves open whether people should believe it as history or doctrine. Schopenhauer’s dialogue earns its place in the present because it keeps both sides of that question visible. It asks what a society loses when religion disappears, whilst requiring anyone who wants to preserve it to explain what truth can survive inside a useful fiction.

Limits

This note follows a 25-minute video that introduces Schopenhauer’s dialogue rather than providing a complete account of the text, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, or the history of atheism and religion. The presenter makes the causal claims about religion’s existential and moral effects as part of the argument. The video supplies no underlying studies for those claims, so they remain open questions rather than established findings here. The references to Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, C. S. Lewis, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and the religious traditions are also presented in compressed form.

Further reading / references

• Arthur Schopenhauer’s dialogue on religion, discussed throughout the video.
• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy.
• C. S. Lewis on religion, morality, and moral relativism.
• Jordan Peterson on the value of religious stories apart from their literal truth.
• Richard Dawkins on Christianity’s cultural and moral inheritance.
• The Good Samaritan, the Noble Eightfold Path, the command to love one’s neighbour, and the Rule of Saint Benedict.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.