Has science made religion useless? | Robert Sapolsky, Reza Aslan, Pete Holmes & more | Big Think

FRANS DE WAAL: Well, religion is an interesting topic because religion is universal. All human societies believe in the supernatural. All human societies have a religion one way or another.

REZA ASLAN: Religion has been a part of the human experience from the beginning. In fact, we can trace the origin of religious experience to before homo sapiens. We can trace it with some measure of confidence to Neanderthals. We can measure it with a little less confidence all the way to homo erectus. So we're talking hundreds of thousands of years before our species even existed.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY: Essentially there has been no culture on Earth that has not invented some form of what could be termed meta-magical thinking, attributing things that cannot be seen, faith-based belief systems, things of that sort. It's universal.

ASLAN: Religious thinking is embedded in our cognitive processes. It is a mode of knowing. We're born with it. It's part of our DNA. The question then becomes why. There must be some evolutionary reason for it. There must be a reason, some adaptive advantage to having religious experience or faith experience. Otherwise it wouldn't exist.

SAPOLSKY: It makes perfect sense why they've evolved because they're wonderful mechanisms for reducing stress. It is an awful, terrifying world out there where bad things happen and we're all going to die eventually. And believing that there is something, someone responsible for it at least gives some stress reducing attributes built around understanding causality.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Religion starts from the view that we are torn between good and evil. There is definitely a good core, but it's permanently tempted. And so what the individual needs is a structure which will constantly try and tug a person back towards the best of themselves.

DE WAAL: Our current religions are just 2,000 or 3,000 years old which is very young and our species is much older. And I cannot imagine that, for example, 100,000 years or 200,000 years our ancestors did not have some type of morality. Of course they had rules about how you should behave, what is fair, what is unfair, caring for others. All of these tendencies were in place already so they had a moral system. And then at some point we developed these present day religions which I think were sort of tacked onto the morality that we had. In societies with 1,000 or several thousand or millions of people we cannot all keep an eye on each other and that's maybe why we installed religions in these large scale societies where a god kept watch over everybody and maybe they served to codify them or to enforce them or to steer morality in a particular direction that we prefer. And so instead of saying morality comes from god or religion gave us morality, for me that's a big no-no.

PENN JILLETTE: People are good. If you look at the seven billion people on this planet just about seven billion of them are really good. We can really trust them. Can we please learn something from Las Vegas? Learn something about gambling, right. We know how the odds work. We know the house always wins. In this case, the odds are always on someone being good.

BILL NYE: When it comes to ethics and morals and religion to see if there's anything different between what religions want you to do and what you feel you should do, what you think is ethically innate within you. For most people – most people are not inclined to murder people, but certain religions quite reasonably have rules against that. It's antisocial. See if that comes from within you or it comes from outside of you from without you.

ROB BELL: My understanding of spirituality is that this life that we've each been given, the very breath that we took and we're about to take is a gift. That life is a gift and how you respond to it, what you do with it matters.

PETE HOLMES: It's not about literal facts or the unfolding of what happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It's a story because sometimes you need an explanation and sometimes you need a story. And a story is going to transform you and symbols are going to trans...