Here's an interesting little article/study. I saw a brief and largely unfair grilling of the author on FoxNews.
Their discussion of the conclusions:
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developing democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.I at first had some real issues with this until they also popped out this:
There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002).Now I'm a bit baffled. Obviously they took into account the regional variations. Or at least addressed them. The only thing I really can fault this study with is that it uses a very narrow focus on causality. I don't believe that religiosity alone can be solely related for an explanation of the findings. Things never are that simple.
The study appears to have some validity if only at the level of a talking point.
3 comments:
I'm not sure if a 'south vs. north' division is the only way to look at it. Did they bother to break the numbers down by urban vs. rural? I wonder if they did but didn't like the results.
And I agree that 'causality' is a huge problem with any study (and I use the term very loosely) like this one. Simply seeing that A and B exist side by side more than A and C does not imply that A causes B, or vice versa.
Aside from that, the data are very suspect. Just look at Figure 2. The author doesn't even bother to draw a trend line for any of the supposed relationships between measures of religiousness vs. secularism. Just eyeballing it, there does not seem to be a trend at all in Figure 2 (as opposed to Figure 1, where the belief in God is inversely proportional to the belief in evolution…sad (and unnecessary) but true).
Sure, the US has the highest homicide rate, but then we are definitely the most diverse country of those listed. Could it be that anything-goes-secularism combined with a highly diverse population leads to a high homicide rate? The author might say, No. I would respond, disprove it. Who knows, but I am of the opinion that this guy is full of crap.
For further prove this guy is full of it, check out the lack of relationships between belief in God and: adolescent suicide rate (Figure 3), life expectancy (Figure 5). There are trends in Figures 4, 6-9…but these issues (under 5yo mortality, adolescent gonorrhea, syphilis, abortions and births/pregnancies, respectively) could just as easily be explained by other factors as there is no mention of controlling for other variables.
I would be interested in seeing data comparing a single country, say…the US, over time. Since it’s pretty well accepted that we’re becoming ever more secular, were there more cases of adolescent gonorrhea, syphilis and pregnancies/births 50 years ago? 100? 200? All questions not addressed by this study, but definitely required before I believe that religion is the root case of all societal ills.
Just my two cents.
Thanks Tom. Great comment.
The causality of the issue is IMAO even more complex. Your statement is completely accurate. Issues like cultural diversity, cultural norms, racial frictions, monetary stratification, etc appear to me to be much more likely to provide valid causality.
I do think the talking point is still there. At the 10,000 foot level, this really looks like hypocrisy. Though I honestly can't see how you can attribute these issues directly to religious belief. It also misses religious diversity, which is extreme in this country.
A further qualm I ran into was the relations between religiosity and adolescent issues. It really doesn't work that way. I find it highly unlikely that the people they polled for the data were adolescents. It is also obvious that adolescents are in general the least religious members of the present society.
He also fails in his comparisons in lots of other ways. Japan is an extremely cultural variation. I don't think that it can even be listed as a valid data point. Most of the European countries are very mono-cultural. (as you point out.) The US in reality should be analyzed as 50 separate countries rather than a single country. Culturally this would be more accurate.
Still, there is a lot to think about.
Psalm 33:12: "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance."
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