Contrary to the forceful assertions of some prominent atheist authors (e.g., Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006), however, the data consistently point to a negative association between religiosity and criminal behavior and a positive association between religiosity and prosocial behavior. Both relations are modest in magnitude and ambiguous with respect to causation. At the same time, they cannot be ignored by partisans on either side of the discussion.

What would the world be like with no religion? While this is a question we’ll probably never comprehensively answer, it is an interesting one. Does religion contribute, on balance, to human well-being or to oppression and misery? Most people already have their minds made up on this question, but generally for ideological reasons: religious believers tend (unsurprisingly) to argue that religion does a lot of good for the world, while the vast majority of folks critical of religion come from Marxist and anti-theistic perspectives. Fortunately, ideology isn’t all we have to go on. Two researchers summarized a vast body of quantitative literature for the most recent issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, and found that claims for religion’s wholesale moral decrepitude are notably exaggerated.

The article’s title is “Would the World Be Better Off Without Religion? A Skeptic’s Guide to the Debate.” What’s key is that the venue it’s published in isn’t exactly a platform for pro-religious cheerleading. The Skeptical Inquirer is probably the world’s best-known periodical for challenging unscientific or pseudoscientific claims – from UFOs to homeopathy to spirit healing. Its list of fellows include such famous atheists as Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence Krauss. The two authors of the article in question, Scott O. Lilienfeld and Rachel Ammirati, are both researchers at Emory University and both self-confessed atheists. Whatever angle a review of the scientific literature on religion is likely to take in such a magazine, it isn’t going to err on the side of religion-boosting.

Which makes Lilienfeld’s and Ammirati’s conclusions – couched as they are in the cool, almost irritatingly self-distancing language of professional skeptics – all the more remarkable. They certainly don’t make religion look like the summum bonum of all human affairs, a panacea that can cure all. But they’re very adamant that it’s not the opposite, either. According to the wide-ranging literature they survey, there’s a regular but modest positive correlation between religiosity and prosocial behavior, and a negative correlation between religious practice and antisocial behaviors. These correlations persist across a wide range of study designs and methods, suggesting pretty strongly that there’s a there there – that these effects are genuine.

Lilienfeld and Ammirati were inspired to carry out their investigation by the self-assurance and vociferousness with which people on all sides of the debate typically broadcast their claims. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett confidently proclaim that there are few or no social benefits of religion, despite devoting virtually no space in their books to objective examination of the research. Meanwhile, pro-religion voices, such as pastor and author Rick Henderson, baldly state that atheism leads to immorality, despite extensive demographic and research evidence to the contrary. So with all these loud voices and little actual data, what’s a skeptic supposed to do?

The answer is clear, as it should be for the rest of us: go look at the hard research. Lilienfeld and Ammirati dived headfirst into the sprawling body of quantitative studies, meta-analyses, and experimental evidence to determine whether religion was, in fact, a net negative for humanity – as so many public atheists fiercely assert. The researchers operationalized “goodness” as prosocial behaviors,* in the assumption that when writers claim we’d be “better off” with or without religion, they’re implicitly referring to a more humane world in which people treat each other more kindly. So the question becomes, does religion make the world a more or less humane place?

Technically, of course, the question is pretty much unanswerable. How could you conduct a controlled, double-blind experiment, with one planet Earth sans religion and another otherwise identical planet Earth a secular paradise?† The answer is, you don’t. But what you can do is look at real people who claim to be religious and look at other people who claim the opposite, and see whether there are quantifiable differences in the ways they behave. Surveying dozens of published research studies tackling exactly this question, the skeptics found that a consistent effect emerged: across studies, religious believers were slightly less likely to do antisocial things than their completely secular counterparts.

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