Adieu to God: Why Psychology Leads to Atheism

by Mick Power

Adieu to God examines atheism from a psychological perspective and reveals how religious phenomena and beliefs are psychological rather than supernatural in origin.
Answers the psychological question of why, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, do religions continue to prosper? Looks at atheism and religion using a fair and balanced approach based on the latest work in psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychiatry and medicine Acknowledges the many psychological benefits of religion while still questioning the validity of its supernatural belief systems and providing atheist alternatives to a fulfilling life

Genres: Religion, Psychology, Nonfiction, Atheism, Audiobook, Brain, Philosophy

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is weirdly mistitled because it is really about why psychology leads to theism. Reason may rescue us from the foibles of our psychology and safely redirect us to atheism--so it is from an atheist's point of view.

To someone familiar with the literature, most of the indictments of religious literalism have been heard before. Religious history is syncretic (this is described in Chapter 1). People have "confirmation bias" and hear what they want to hear. Religious concepts about God's authority often derive from a person's lifelong assumptions about parental authority. Religious experiences may be connected to sexual pleasure or simply delusion, which comes in various forms. This is all described in Chapter 2, the best chapter in the book, titled "The Psychology of Religion: The Varieties of Normal Experience," which opens with quotes from Mark Twain and William James.

In Chapter 5, a section called "Sin and Celibacy" begins: "the definitions of good and evil within religions normally include laws, commandments or prohibitions on certain actions that would be generally agreed to be evil, such as perhaps some universally agreed acts of evil, for example, murder, theft and rape...[yet] many religions condone these actions under particular circumstances. However, religions also produce laws and prohibitions against actions considered bad or sinful that are completely arbitrary and religion-specific. To other people, these arbitrary rules often become defining characteristics of the religion because of the unique but arbitrary nature of the rules." This is a significant observation because it reveals that when religion says "yes" or "no" to something, it may be a major ethical rule basic to decent human behavior, but on the other hand it may just be some arbitrary ritual, and in any case there may be a legalistic exception to compliance with the rule. This raises a serious challenge to the idea that religion is needed to promote and enforce consistently decent behavior.

In Chapter 7, "How to Be a Healthy Atheist," he writes, "the Soviet Union collapsed not because of its atheism but because of its internal economic and political instability. To argue that life becomes empty if you take away God is equivalent to saying that life becomes meaningless for children if you take away Santa Claus." That is a good introduction to many of the "good without God" arguments.

Overall, this book is a good summary of a series of many related arguments, building a convincing case. It doesn't cover much new ground, but it might persuade someone inclined toward religious literalism to take a more humanist perspective. That's an important achievement, as many other books about atheism are addressed only to other atheists and sound cranky and hostile; this one just makes good arguments.

If, however, you assume, based on the title, that it's going to be about something like "what it feels like to be an atheist," that's not what it does. This is an atheist psychoanalyzing theists and explaining why they should modify their positions.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adieu to God: Why Psychology Leads to Atheism (2012) by Mick Power might be more correctly if awkwardly subtitled "Why the Study of Psychology Leads Perceptive Psychologists to Atheism while Psychological Factors Lead Unwitting People to Theism". As it stands, the word "Psychology" in the actual subtitle could mean either the study of psychology (the discipline and its discoveries), or the psychology of the individual (as in his/her mental workings). Since atheism and theism are beliefs, and beliefs are mental processes that result from mental processes, "psychology" (as in the whole of our mental processes) both causes and constitutes every belief. (And yes, atheism is a belief, not the mere absence of belief, as the negation of any claim is itself a claim. For example, "I lack a belief that it is raining" is logically equivalent to "I believe it is not raining." To doubt the rain is to harbor a belief about rain. For some reason quite a few people in the atheist community parrot an odd bit of always unsourced folklore that atheism is somehow not a belief, or that atheists hold no beliefs, including - apparently - the belief that atheists hold no beliefs. Fortunately Power avoids falling into that pit. For anyone still confused, Richard Carrier tries to straigthen this out in an essay entitled Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof.)

In any case, Power takes a nice tour around the psychology of religion. Readers who have read similar books, especially some of the books that Power cites, will find much that is familiar. But even a fairly veteran reader of the atheist literature will probably find something new here. I'm not sure why the book is so unpopular, judging by the low number of ratings and reviews on Goodreads relative to many other atheist books. The quality isn't any lower than that of more popular atheist books I've read. Maybe Power hasn't been hawking it at atheist conventions or on social media.

As to how convincing (or disconfirming) any of this might be to a religious believer, I cannot guess. But I would imagine most religious believers haven't read very far into the irreligion literature. You probably won't hear too much about the psychology of religion in a pastor's sermons! So who knows. Writers of atheist books claim they receive emails from formerly religious people who deconverted as a result of reading their books. People are diverse, so this book may very well "work" on somebody. The main barrier, of course, is that reading substantive books requires effort, and few religious people will make the effort for this one or any book like it.

In sympathy to the book's title, psychology offers plausible, testable, and purely natural reasons why people believe in gods, despite there being no evidence for any god. While this doesn't, in itself, rule out the possible existence of some god (for that we need the existence of science, a point that Power makes but could have made better; see another review I wrote for more details), it does make gods both unnecessary and far less probable. That is, gods don't need to exist for people to believe in gods, any more than the Earth needs to be flat for there to be a Flat Earth movement. The Earth only needs to look flat, and it does, when you're standing on it. Similarly, a religion may look true if you're standing immersed in it. As Power states several times, the falsity of religions becomes obvious from the multitude of mutually contradictory religions, just as the round Earth becomes obvious as you rise above it. (Wikipedia calls this the Argument from inconsistent revelations although Power does not use that name.) However, Power slightly overclaims when he argues that because thousands of existing religions contradict each other, none of them can be true. In fact, their mutual inconsistency only supports the conclusion that at most one of them could be true. We know for a fact that all but one are false, but we'll need more to refute that last one (and we don't even know which one is that last one). By analogy, if you have 500 clocks each showing a different time, you know at least 499 are wrong. One might be correct, but you don't know which one.

I found no typos in the book, which is unusual for its length. So kudos to Power and/or his proofreader for that. However, the writing could be better in spots, with dead words like "in order to" when "to" suffices, and referring to himself in the third person.

The book is a decade old as I write this, and that's a long time in our modern world of constant (and perhaps accelerating) change. One casualty is Power's claim that religion is gaining in the USA:

At the same time the United States shows increasing levels of religiosity, as witnessed in indices such as church attendance, use of prayer, belief in intelligent design, and so on, in contrast to western European countries such as the United Kingdom, which has been witnessing a steady decline across recent generations in the same indices of religiosity.

Fast forward to 2022 and it seems the USA is following the UK with a several-decade delay. See for example The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going (2021). However, the religious decline trend was already apparent in Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (2011), which came out before Power's book. Perhaps when Power wrote he was conflating the increasing noise levels of religious pressure groups with increasing religiosity, when it may have merely reflected an increasing political turn from previously apolitical religious groups. In any case, the geographic center of growth for Christianity has shifted to the global south, where education is lower and poverty higher, making people both easier to fool and hungrier for hope. See In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.

Chapter 6: Religion and Health is interesting but could be better. For starters, it's not clear whether the studies cited used physically active subjects for their control groups. (See Booth, Frank W., and Simon J. Lees. "Physically active subjects should be the control group." Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 38, no. 3 (2006): 405-406.) If you compare sedentary religious people to sedentary irreligious people, it shouldn't be surprising if the sedentary religious group has better health outcomes. But the real question is whether they're doing better than physically active subjects. (See: Mandsager, Kyle, Serge Harb, Paul Cremer, Dermot Phelan, Steven E. Nissen, and Wael Jaber. "Association of cardiorespiratory fitness with long-term mortality among adults undergoing exercise treadmill testing." JAMA network open 1, no. 6 (2018): e183605-e183605. For a lay summary see Not Exercising May Be Worse for Your Health Than Smoking, Study Says.) A major take-away is that the Mansager et al. study found no upper limit on benefit from aerobic fitness, suggesting that the more you can exercise, the longer you will live (on average).

That matters because religion is generally a sedentary activity. At least in the USA where I live, churchgoers tend to drive cars to church and spend most of their time relaxing. A glance around a typical American church crowd will show quite a few overweight and obese people. Since regular church attendance devours a substantial portion of a working person's free time, it competes directly with exercise for the same limited time. Indeed, my own deconversion from religion was driven in part by my discovery of bicycling. While I know some people who manage to juggle both activities, it may be hard for many to serve both the God of sedentary sloth and the mammon of hard exercise, as it were. Religion can be a major hobby which displaces other hobbies. Power doesn't consider this opportunity cost of religion, perhaps because he's a psychologist and not an economist (economists tend to ask not just whether this thing we are doing is good, but whether it is better than anything else we could be doing). Does Power really think three hours spent sitting on a combination of car seat and church pew beats three hours of bicycling?

I found it odd when Power writes:

As we saw in Chapter 6, religions generally discourage drug and alcohol abuse, smoking and gluttony, and encourage a balanced lifestyle with exercise and respect for oneself and one’s body.

From my merely anecdotal perspective, I'll agree that religions generally discourage recreational drug use, with glaring exceptions such as Catholics and their drinking, but a glance around a typical American church shows broad tolerance for gluttony (defined as maintaining the chronic caloric surplus necessary to become obese and remain so). And not only did I not experience any religious messaging toward exercise, to speak of, but I found the time sink of churchgoing to actively compete against it.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of Chapter 6 is Power's silence on cognitive epidemiology, a general body of findings that shows IQ correlates with longevity (the smarter you are, the longer you are likely to live). Power alludes to it when citing a study that found lower mortality among nuns who had earned college degrees vs. nuns who had not. Since educational attainment correlates positively with IQ, then both the educational level and the lifespan could be consequences of the same cause (being more intelligent, a personality trait that emerges early in life).

Studies that try to identify the impact of religiosity on various life outcomes need to control for IQ, which can also affect many life outcomes.

Power also doesn't explore the links between IQ and religiosity (or irreligiosity, as the correlation is negative - the smarter you are, the less likely you are to be religious). This would also go a long way toward clearing up the puzzle Power poses for himself early in the book - how to explain the persistence of religion long after science cut the evidentiary legs out from under it. I'm surprised that a psychologist fails to cite even a lay summary of the science of human intelligence differences, such as:

Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
Intelligence: All That Matters
In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
The Neuroscience of Intelligence
Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are

An important finding from those book, that Power also fails to mention, is that twin studies and GWAS show genetic influence on religiosity. While the overall level of religiosity in a culture may vary with time (as Power reports for the UK), the variation in individual levels of religiosity persists and is in part due to our genetic differences. By analogy, the average height of a population can increase or decrease with time, for example if the nutrition available to growing children improves or deteriorates. But individuals will always vary in height around whatever the average height happens to be at a given time, and a lot of that height variation is down to genetic variation.

Thus the question of when we might see the end of religion might depend more on genetic engineering than on social changes. See for example Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming. As Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, religiosity among the smartest of the smart among scientists (fellows of prestigious science academies) is the mirror opposite of the general population, with rates of theism being down in the single percents. Within a generation or two, science may become able to confer similar or greater intelligence on every newborn. When that happens, I suspect religion may plummet to the status of an odd hobby, like stamp collecting.

[Antonio Margal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Más que una descripción y/o ensayo detallado de porque la psicología como ciencia lleva a algún tipo de ateísmo el autor toma una posición ateísta desde el principio del libro y nos narra y se pregunta como (en la ausencia de dioses) y con los horrendos casos de pederastia de la iglesia católica, suicidios fundamentados en el islam, cultos de ciencia ficción y avances en la humanidad las personas siguen creyendo en la religión.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prob 3.5 stars. Better than three, not sure if four is warranted, some bits are ok, some bits good, some bits very good. Strangely light on psychology, some good overviews at times, and in places, some new ( to me ) perspectives.