Organized religion is what makes religion work.

For reasons that are probably very deep-seated, the arch is a common feature of much religious architecture. An arch is self-supporting, but only if it has a keystone. God is the keystone of civilization. In other words, those of Voltaire to be specific, if God did not exist, man would create Him. There must be a keystone, or the human arch does not stand up.

Much of history can be understood as a search for a better arch than one whose very existence can be challenged. Reason, for example, exists, but, unfortunately, homo sapiens as a species is unable to agree on what reason demands. (How many people have read Kant, much less pretend to understand him?) Ditto, the state, which exists, but is run by corrupt and foolish humans. Not much of a keystone there. No, the keystone must be agreed upon, authoritative, and infallible. As it turns out, only a God recognized by a shared faith in His nature will do.

That does not mean that there really is a God, just that it doesn’t matter, because godless societies perish. Those who style themselves as more “enlightened” may argue that God represents a coordinating force in the massively multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma that Hobbes called the war of all against all, i.e., that God is Leviathan for the moral realm. (The role as creator is logically a separate thing, but it is arguably a necessary corollary: how can the giver of laws be sure of the laws unless he is also the creator the universe to which those laws apply?) But game theory won’t unite the masses in good behavior.

The interesting thing is how detailed theologies need to be to generate social cohesion. I like the Jewish version, in which God is the only divine thing and worshipers deal with Him directly. But more mythic theologies like Christianity and Islam, with their special humans (Jesus, Mohammed, the popes) have far more adherents. Jewish culture makes time for disputation; most people would really rather be told what God wants than try to figure it out for themselves when there are mouths to be fed. Arguably, anti-semitism is the Jewish keystone, the thing that keeps Jews working for their common good as a community. Gentiles, being in the minority, need to find something more compelling, something available only in the metaphysical realm.

Nothing in science contradicts religion. If God created the Big Bang, or even the nothingness from which the Big Bang happened, He is still “the creator,” and everything is His handiwork. As I said, the creator thing is really a by-product of the law-giver thing. That’s where theology comes in. For God to operate as a moral keystone, we need to want to please him, and for that, we need a whole mythos about who He is, why we should want to please Him, and the consequences of not pleasing him. For some, Pascal’s wager is enough — what do you have to lose? For others, it’s fire and brimstone.

Whatever drives people to try to please God, if the rules conduce to plus-sum material outcomes, i.e. a standing social arch, we should be very slow to try to dissuade people of their core beliefs. Religions go through reformations, and I would argue that re-interpretation, not secularization, is the key to successful modernity. Western Europe is experimenting with secularization, and some of the results are positive. But God plays the long game, and the emergence of populist nationalism, which may very well entail a religious revival, suggests that the arc of history may in fact bend toward faith not reason.