Yes, people might then accept that the story that religions might tell is false, but that still leaves itches that need to be scratched - and because science does little to help people to scratch the itch, religion would recur as a creative response to existential angst, justified not by rigour but by results.
But why is that 'itch' there for some people and not others? I don't think there's an 'atheism gene', or that I'm any different in my fundamental biological make-up from the next Christian, Muslim, Hindu or whatever (although I'd be pained to extend that list to Scientologists, I'd have to admit...) - and if you extend that to societies or nations, why are there some countries where pretty much everyone follows one religion or another, while in others like the UK you have widespread atheism/agnosticism? Whatever the spokespeople for established religion (and their non-specific-theism running dogs
) may say about religion fullfilling the kind of 'itch' you talk about, why do a large proportion of people around the world now apparently feel able to face life without believing in Flying Spaghetti Monsters?
Also, I appreciate the argument Dan and others have made, here and elsewhere, about religion providing moral guidance for want of a better phrase, but I have two big problems with that. One is that it kind of implies that atheists are necessarily immoral, or at best amoral, and in consequence likely to rob, rape or murder the next person they run across; the other is that the moral guidance offered by religion quite often fucking stinks, to put it bluntly - whether it's women getting stoned to death in Iran for adultery or Christian fundies in America picketing the funerals of Aids victims. The UDHR may frequently be regarded as scarcely worth the paper it's written on when considered against the sum total of appalling wickedness and inequality that goes on all over the world, but I think it can only be considered a step in the right direction when you consider the alternative (other than complete lawlessness), namely theocracy.
Edit: some great points from nomad in the last couple of pages - had to laugh at "what men think is always more rational that women
and other men think".
Edit2: I see where luka's coming from too, but I think you can get that benefit of metaphor, psychic structuring or whatever from myths without literally believing them to be true. In zhao's thread about the 'lack of the mysterious' he made some (pretty silly, I thought) point about the wonder-filled world view of magic realist authors versus the drab, grey, soulless (
ad nauseam) universe espoused by us unimaginative rationalists, and he name-checked a few authors including Rushdie. Because obviously the Cambridge-eduated, Booker-winning author literally believes in ghosts, witches, prophecies and all the rest of it. I mean, seriously! You can enjoy fairytales without needing the fairies to be real, can't you? I think this is one area where Hinduism and Buddhism maybe do a little better than the Abrahamic religions, because a lot of the stories in their ancient scripture are
so transparently fantastical (I mean psychedelically fantastical, in contrast to the common-or-garden fantastical mythology in the Bible/Qu'ran) that there's a case to be made that it's implicitly understood that they're not literally true, but are metaphors for deep spiritual truths, whatever you think of
those. So followers of those religions might be susceptible to all sorts of other superstitions and quackery, but they don't have this crazy insistence on ideas that have been flatly disproven, like the world being 6,000 years old.
