Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS129 - Would the World Be a Better Place Without Religion?
"One of the things that annoys me about this thing, this issues is that, you know, I do expect one side of the issue to ignore the data, but I don't, but I'm really bothered by, when, when, when skeptics and you know, atheists who think of themselves as skeptics as well, you know, people that value, you know, rational thinking, evidence based anything, then they go on and to make these statements not only on the basis of no evidence, but in fact, sometimes contra the evidence.
I mean, there's a couple of interesting examples that Scott and Rahel mentioned in their, in their article. One is that in Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett claims that there are no studies bearing on the question of religiosity and violence. But in fact, there are. There are actually several dozen studies such studies, and at least two large reviews. And Dan just didn't, you know, obviously didn’t know about it, I'm not saying that he just sort of ignored that on purpose. But it's kind of, you know, before you make that kind of statement, you know, use Google and check it out. Google Scholar in particular.
Similarly, in The God Delusion, Dawkins makes the claim that there is a lack of evidence on the question, and the only thing that he cites is his friend, Sam Harris, about this idea that there is a correlation between incidents of sort of violence and states in the United States that have a higher degree of religiosity. But again, Dawkins doesn't seem to be aware that there are dozens of peer reviewed studies actually available on the issue.
And also, the idea of citing sort of population level studies as evidence is at the very least controversial because, you know, Scott points out that from a statistical perspective, it's often not the case that you can scale up or down things from a population level to an individual level. You may find a correlation between two variables at the population level, which actually doesn't hold in the individual level. And it's the result of essentially sort of artifactural or third effects or third variable effects and things like that...
‘Citing examples of religious violence or citing examples of, you know, religion doing good in the world. And Scott also references some of these examples from, from the books you referenced, like The God Delusion. So for example, in the intro to God Delusion, Dawkins says, imagine with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 911, no Crusades, no witch hunts, no Israeli Palestinian wars, etc, etc, etc. So these are all like, you know, examples in support of the case that religion is making the world a worse place, a less humane place. And, and of course, religious people have their examples as well’...
‘Imagine a world without Stalin, without Pol Pot, without Mao, and so on, and so forth’
‘And all the other cases in which yes, in which very cruel and inhumane things were done, not in the name of religion, so citing examples doesn't really tell you very much about the overall effect, the net effect of religion.
And then the other category I want to, to vent about is this kind of a priori reasoning, or if not entirely a priori then at least sort of abstract principles that people cite as to why religion makes the world a worse place.
Like, I'm going to paraphrase this one, something along the lines of, you know, like, in any world, like good people can do good and evil people can do evil. But in order to have good people do evil, you need religion... and the logic behind that is, you know, of course, like, if someone's well intentioned, but they have a false model of the world and how the world works, then they can totally think they're doing good by, you know, baptizing and then killing babies, if they think that that will lead to, you know, that will prevent an eternity of suffering for those babies. So, and that there are cases in which like, well intentioned people did harm to the world because religion gave them a false model of the world.
But again, there are plenty of examples of well intentioned people or people who are basically good, doing harm to others, because of other totally non religion related effects, like, you know, conformity or authority effects, which are just very deeply ingrained in the human brain. If you set up a an Asch’s conformity experiment, or… the Milgram experiment. Yeah, this didn't really have anything to do with religion... when you look at the full story, the picture just becomes so much murkier.’...
There is a an experiment… back in 1972, which apparently has not been replicated...that particular experiment actually looked at the differences, if any, between religious people, very religious people and you know, non religious people and very non religious people, in their tendency to obey the authority of the scientists and actually administer the electrical shocks to the subjects.
And the results were kind of interesting, because the experiment found out that extremely religious and extremely non religious people actually were less likely than moderately religious, or moderately non religious people to administer the shock. And it's not clear why...
[On religiosity reducing crime] The effect, in fact, seems to be moderated by the attendance to church and other praise or worship. In other words, it’s not just religiosity per se, but you have to go to church. And it also seems to be particularly relevant, the effect seems to be particularly relevant for what is called intrinsic religiosity. So these are people who go to church because they want to not because there is social pressure, or even they don't actually go to church, they pray on their own. That sort of stuff. So these are people who actually, truly, fundamentally believe in in their religion...
‘Often a hypothesis that I hear advanced, often by, you know, atheists or secular humanists, in response to these correlations is, well, you know, it seems plausible that it's not really that the church per se, or the content of the church that causes more pro social behavior, but the fact that you're part of this community. Which seemed quite plausible to me so...
I’m a little surprised that when you control for religiosity reduces the effect but controlling for social attendance doesn't actually’...
‘The bad news for us secular is is that not only is it true that religiosity is statistically correlated with self control in moderation, but it's also true that lack of religiosity is moderately correlated, in fact, weakly correlated with psycho pathological traits...
There's this research that shows that intrinsic religiosity, for instance, in high school students, makes them more prone to pro social and empathic behavior. And there is also a research that shows that religious people are capable of more sophisticated moral reasoning than average. So all these things are and one of my favorite is actually that you can, subconsciously prime people with religious references, like, you can expose them to a scrambled words that that, that if they were not scrambled, they would spell God or religions or heaven or something. And that increases their generosity...
All of those things I find very interesting, and at the very least, sort of, should be cautioning us about making sort of these sweeping statements about a world without religion, which is, would be just much better, obvious. And obviously so. It doesn't seem obvious at all’...
It is a fairly well known, not particularly well kept secret that a lot of people who teach religion, especially in the Catholic Church, are actually either agnostics or non believers, I'm talking about priests, ordained priests...
I think we could agree that fewer beheadings is better, or, you know, things like that. But if we're talking, for instance, about you know, general pro social behavior. Well, pro social behavior has its own drawbacks. I mean, societies that have very high levels of pro social behaviors tend to be sort of suppressing individualistic tendencies [which themselves] have all sorts of positive things on their own, to be sort of valued and recommended. So it's not quite clear that, you know, depending on what one's idea of a better society actually is, even if one demonstrates that religiosity increases prosociality, that may not necessarily be a good thing, in and of itself, or at least beyond a certain limit...
‘[The article is] titled, do lobsters and other invertebrates feel pain, and it looks at the evidence. And as it turns out, it the evidence is very difficult to come by, because it's not easy to figure out whether an animal actually feels pain or not. So for instance, you know, a lot of people say… I'm not going to eat lobsters, because... they scream in the in the hot water’...
‘It's the high pressure air going through the carapace. And not, it's not a scream’
Mentioned above:
“If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments”: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Religion on Crime
"The results of the meta-analysis show that religious beliefs and behaviors exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals' criminal behavior."
According to the podcast, the relationship between religion and crime was consistent and always in the same direction - and never a null result