Humanity's Greatest Squandering

Twenty billion years, longer than the universe itself has existed. That is how much time humanity has collectively spent on religion: praying to gods that never answered, wars fought in their names, or monuments built to myths that turned to dust when empires crumbled.

The arithmetic of devotion

From historical demography, we estimate there to have been about 232 million people at the beginning of the first millennium, a little under 1 billion by 1800, and more than 8 billion today. When we integrate that curve over the entire Holocene, we obtain 1.7 trillion person-years lived.

In the United States today, where solid data is available, people average 8–9 minutes on spiritual activities per day. The US is a relatively secular society, so in more devout eras that figure was obviously higher. A cautious estimate is 20 minutes per day prior to 1900 and 10 minutes since. That leads to 176 trillion hours (i.e. 20 billion years) of collective time. Of course these numbers have varied by culture, epoch, and even season. Even if the estimate is off by an order of magnitude, the scale remains colossal.

Shared fictions, real costs

Yuval Noah Harari calls religions and ideologies “common myths” that bind strangers into cooperative societies. Myths have indeed helped scale cooperation beyond tribe and kin. But cooperation through such illusions has carried a massive cost, and the bill runs into the billions of years.

Every civilization thought its gods eternal. Egyptians worshipped Ra, Hindus built intricate cosmologies around Vishnu and Shiva, Mayans venerated Kukulkan, Greeks raised marble temples to Zeus, and the Chinese honoured Shangdi. Each believed their pantheon to be real. Today those deities only survive as museum relics. Why should today’s set of gods be any different?

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes saw this already 2,500 years ago: “If cattle, horses, and lions had hands, they would depict the gods as cattle, horses, and lions.” Humans, too, made gods in their own image, projecting their needs, fears, and vanities onto the heavens.

Religion inspired architecture, music, and community. Prayer brought comfort in suffering. Yet comfort is a placebo at best, and a distraction at its worst. Psychologists do find that prayer and ritual can reduce anxiety, but these are generic cognitive effects, not proof of divinity. Secular practices, such as mindfulness, therapy, music, or civic ceremonies, yield the same benefits without supernatural claims. If the defence of religion is merely that it functions like a stress ball, then we must admit it is not a sacred truth but a coping mechanism, one that comes at an extravagant cost to humanity. Community also does not require supernatural myths; secular associations achieve the same without falsehood. And the cohesion religion fostered also fractured societies into schisms and sects, fuelling wars and persecutions. Secular ideologies have wrought horrors too. The difference is that we hold these ideologies responsible, whereas religions still claim moral immunity.

The opportunity cost

If centuries of patronage in the arts and scholarship had gone into universal education or open science, humanity could have advanced by generations. What if only one percent of that time, a mere 1.8 trillion hours, had been spent on something real?

A compulsory classroom year has about 900 hours. One percent of spiritual time buys almost 2 billion student-years, or a full twelve-year education for 163 million people. A year per researcher counts approximately 2,000 hours. So, one percent funds 880 million researcher-years. Since there are roughly 9 million full-time researchers today, this amounts to nearly a century of today’s entire global research workforce, operating at full capacity the entire time.

Improvements in cognitive skills translate into sustained economic growth. Empirical studies observe private returns to R&D of around 20–30%, with social returns often exceeding 50%. The opportunity cost of devotion is therefore staggering.

Religion left us pyramids, cathedrals, and scriptures. Monasteries preserved manuscripts, while mosques sponsored scholars of medicine and mathematics. But weighed against the crusades, inquisitions, religious terrorism, sectarian wars, and centuries of stagnation enforced by dogma, the balance sheet is not neutral; it is deeply negative.

From imaginary friends to tangible futures

The 20 billion years were spent talking to imaginary friends, building shrines for our shared stories, blessing ice blocks to combat climate change, and fighting wars for gods who were as mortal as the civilizations that conceived them. Had we redirected only a fraction of that time into education and science, whole continents could have been literate centuries earlier, while medicine and technology could have been propelled many centuries ahead.

Religion was not a benign diversion. It was a colossal misallocation of humanity’s most precious resource: time. And unlike gods, time is real.