After doing a decent amount of research, I came across an article by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry that was particularly intersting. The beginning of the article explains how prominent the age old question of “Would the World Be Better Off Without Religion?” The question has been covered everywhere from books to interviews to televised debates by scholars and there is still no conclusive answer. The article points out that part of the problem with answering the question is the actual phrasing of the question. When asking if the world would be “better” without religion, we are entailing a judgement call and an opinion. To get to the actual question at hand, a more clear way of rephrasing it would be to ask if the world would be more humane without religion.
The author calls on the works of Daniel Dennet, an athiest philosopher, who tried to determine if the presence of religion made people more or less moral. His results were rather inconclusive and determined that no evidence to support the claim that people “who don’t believe in reward or heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob or break their promises than people who do. The prison population in the United States shows Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others—including those with no religious affiliation —are represented about as they are in the general population.” The review of other scholar’s data suggests that correlational data may be more useful in determining a more complete answer to such a question.
The author points out the problem with “cherry-picking” points in history in which religiosity incited violence because there are just as many points of violence and hate being promoted by non religious peoples. The author admits that “though metadata studies” conducted by various scholars, that although the data shows there is a statistically significant (albeit small) between “religious belief andand (a) decreased levels of antisocial and criminal behavior and (b) heightened levels of prosocial behavior, such findings do not and cannot demonstrate causality (Galen 2012)” as other trsits such as personality and upbringing could play a role in the data.
By the end of the article, the author concedes that while the “hypothesis that the world would be “better”—more humane—without religion is entirely reasonable… the data consistently point to a negative association between religiosity and criminal behavior and a positive association between religiosity and prosocial behavior.”
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/would_the_world_be_better_off_without_religion_a_skeptics_guide_to_the_deba