There is an interesting relationship between education and religious belief. It is often assumed that increased education leads to greater levels of disbelief in god. The fact that religion is in rapid decline (as I tried to document in my series Why Atheism is Winning) and heading towards extinction in the developed world, where levels of education are highest, suggests such a correlation.

But it would be wrong to infer that this implies a direct causal relationship between education and lack of religion. The stronger causal relationship is that increased modernity leads to decline in religion, and modernity involves more than just education. Religion thrives on fear of death and the afterlife, and it could be that improved standards of living and a lowering of fears and insecurity about living life in this world are what undermine its appeal. The negative effect on religion may thus be indirect, by enabling greater levels of modernity and higher standards of living.

Even if one infers a direct link between education and disbelief, the relationship need not be monotonic in that people with lower levels of education are necessarily greater believers. I wrote about four years ago that “a longitudinal study of 10,000 adolescents actually found the opposite effect, that those who did not go on to college had greater declines in attending services, in the importance or religion, and in disaffiliation from religion” and that there is some evidence that religious belief can actually increase when people go to college. Why? Because they learn how to better find rationalizations for the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Thus up to a point, an increased amount of formal education can actually lead to greater belief because it suppresses people’s natural curiosity and makes them more accepting of the verdicts of ‘authorities’ (such as ‘experts’ and the authors of textbooks), while not being able to distinguish between reliable authorities who use good evidence and closely reasoned arguments to arrive at judgments, and unreliable authorities (like priests and theologians) who simply assert dogma as if they were deep truths, without providing any evidence to back them up.

It seems as if belief in religion follows the pattern described in the poem An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) that goes:

So by false Learning is good Sense defac’d.
Some are bewilder’d in the Maze of Schools,
And some made Coxcombs Nature meant but Fools.
In search of Wit these lose their common Sense,
And then turn Criticks in their own Defence.

Many of the arguments for god by theologians and philosophers are so incredible that one finds it hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously, unless one has surrendered logic and common sense and substituted for them a rudimentary skill at rationalization that blinds one to the flaws in the arguments. As Michael Shermer says in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (2002, p. 283): “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” Or, as George Orwell put it even more acidly in his Notes on Nationalism (1945) in the context of people willing to believe in political absurdities, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But while some learning can increase religious belief, still deeper learning usually leads to a decline again. This widely quoted passage from Pope’s poem makes this point:

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

The evidence is quite convincing, for example, that very high levels of education, especially in the sciences, are strongly correlated with disbelief in a god. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US found that “academics in the natural and social sciences at elite research universities are significantly less religious than the general population. Almost 52 percent of scientists surveyed identified themselves as having no current religious affiliation compared with only 14 percent of the general population” and “In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists said they believed in a personal God.”

It is not increasing education alone but what kind of education that also matters. After all, many theologians have great amounts of formal education but that does not prevent them from putting forward the most absurd question-begging claims for religion. I think that two kinds of attitudes towards knowledge lead to greater disbelief.

One is when people begin to take a skeptical attitude towards their most cherished beliefs and begin to ask for evidence and reason in support those assertions that they had previously taken for granted as self-evidently true. This tends to naturally occur in the highest levels of scientific education where one needs to do this to be taken seriously by one’s peers.

But this can also happen without much formal education for people who simply have a thirst for knowledge and an inquiring mind and a critical bent. Some of the sharpest minds I have encountered have belonged to people who did not go to college at all or dropped out and simply educated themselves. But to be able to do that more effectively, they need access to the literature. It used to be that serious thinkers used to write books aimed at the general public but with the advent of modern universities and technical journals, scholars started writing for other scholars and this changed the nature of their output, making them fairly opaque to the general reader, and thus resulted in a very small readership.

For a long time self-educated people were limited in the availability of accessible books and articles on science or atheism or critiques of religion. The recent spate of serious books aimed at the general public and written by the new/unapologetic atheists has changed all that. Suddenly all that powerful but hitherto esoteric knowledge has been made accessible to anyone interested, and the fact that these books are selling by the millions is evidence that many people have long sought such knowledge about religion and how advances in science have undermined belief in god.

The other attitude that leads to skepticism is when people go more deeply into their religion and religious texts and I will look at this in a subsequent post.

The godless heathen are spreading their message everywhere. I got an email from blog reader David about a billboard that he and fellow members of the NCW Freethinkers Meetup in eastern Washington state have put up.

David says that the region is very reactionary and religious and so this was quite a bold move on their part, even though the billboard does not directly undermine belief in god but only asks for the separation of church and state to be maintained. But I suspect that there are a lot of closet skeptics in that region as well, and this billboard will hearten them that they are not alone.

So well done David and the NCW Freethinkers!

An odd problem that Christianity faces in the US is that Jesus is seen as basically a wuss. All that turning-the-other-cheek stuff does not sit well with a country that has a Chuck Norris mindset. This may be partly the reason that churches tend to be predominantly elderly and female.

To appeal to men, I have written before about how some Christian groups have developed worship services that involve all manner of manly activities.

But this may not be enough. What Jesus additionally needs is a physical makeover to make him less effeminate and more appealing to the testosterone-heavy crowd and this billboard that purportedly appeared in Myrtle Beach, SC may be one strategy.

Reports of this billboard date back to the mid-2000 period but I have not been able to confirm that it is real.

Of course, no post on manliness is complete without a video of the Village People singing their hit song Macho Man.

The recent Pew survey of US religious knowledge that I discussed on the radio and on this blog, had some features that I want to discuss further.

The things that surprised me about the Pew study were:

• That 45% of Catholics did not understand what transubstantiation meant. You would think that this would be a big part of their preparation for first communion and subsequent devotional activities. That the number of unaware people is so high suggests that this part of their doctrine is viewed as so absurd that it is downplayed. I mean, really, the idea that the wafer and the wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus because of a prayer and are then consumed seems outlandish and even macabre. It is likely that although the words “This is the body” and “This is the blood” are said during the service, it is not emphasized that people should take it literally.
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Since there no credible evidence to back up the idea of god, believers essentially have to resort to debating tricks to try and justify their beliefs. Theologians are quite good at this because they have a lot of practice. After all, it takes considerable rhetorical and logical skill to debate questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But debating tricks are just that, tricks, and any reasonably good debater can quickly identify the ones used by an opponent and neutralize them.
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Dinosaurs are a headache for biblical literalists. Since religion has no rational basis, you have to build your base of believers by indoctrinating children at a young age. And because children are fascinated by dinosaurs and can’t seem to get enough of them, you need to work them into the story somehow. The fact that dinosaurs existed at one time and are now extinct is an unquestioned fact and must be faced. The catch is that dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. It is no good for creationist adults to deny their existence the way they deny other inconvenient scientific facts because even the most trusting and naïve child is going to balk at such a counterfactual statement.
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In his regular New York Times column, David Brooks trots out his usual banalities, this time about how without god we cannot have a timeless morality.

That’s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.
…
Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity. Without timeless rules, we all have a tendency to be swept up in the temper of the moment. But tough-minded theologies are countercultural. They insist on principles and practices that provide an antidote to mere fashion.

How can people write such nonsense? Does he really think that how we understand what the Bible says about morality has not changed from Biblical times?

The book The Christian Delusion edited by John W. Loftus has a chapter titled Yahweh is a Moral Monster by Hector Avalos that lists the horrendous morality that is found in the Bible. (The essay is largely a refutation of a defense of god offered by Christian apologist Paul Copan in an essay titled Is Yahweh a Moral Monster? The New Atheists and Old Testament Ethics that can be read here. )

In his chapter, Avalos ends (p. 232) with a section titled Atheism’s Morality that is worth quoting at length:

Copan fundamentally misunderstands the New Atheism insofar as he believes that it cannot provide a sound moral ground for its judgments. For a Christian apologist to think he or she has triumphed by pointing out the moral relativism of the New Atheism is to miss the entire point. As an atheist, I don’t deny that I am a moral relativist. Rather, my aim is to expose the fact that Christians are also moral relativists. Indeed, when it comes to ethics, there are only two types of people in this world:

1. Those who admit they are moral relativists; and
2. Those who do not admit they are moral relativists.

Copan fails because he cannot admit that he is a moral relativist, and he thinks that God will solve the problem of moral relativism. But having a God in a moral system only creates a tautology. All we end up saying is: “X is bad because X is bad.” Thus, if we say that we believe in God, and he says idolatry is evil, then that is a tautology: “God says idolatry is bad and so idolatry is bad because God says it is bad.” Or we end up using this tautology: “Whatever God says is good because whatever God says is good.”

As Kai Nielsen deftly argues, human beings are always the ultimate judges of morality even if we believe in God. After all, the very judgment that God is good is a human judgment. The judgment that what God commands is good is also a human judgment. So Christians are not doing anything different except mystifying and complicating morality. Christians are simply projecting what they call “good” onto a supernatural being. They offer us no evidence that their notion of good comes from outside of themselves [My italics]. And that is where the danger lies. Basing a moral system on unverifiable supernatural beings only creates more violence and endangers our species. I have already discussed this at length in my book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.

Copan cites Dinesh D’Souza who repeats the oft-cited anecdote that atheists have killed more people than religionists. Again, this is based on the false idea that Nazis were atheistic Darwinists, and that Stalinist genocide was due to atheism rather than to forced collectivism (something I discuss in detail in chapter 14 of this book). Speaking only for myself here, I can say that atheism offers a much better way to construct moral rules. We can construct them on the basis of verifiable common interests, known causes, and known consequences. There is an ironclad difference between secular and faith-based morality, and we can illustrate it very simply with these propositions:

A. I have to kill person X because Allah said so.
B. I have to kill person X because he is pointing a gun at me.

In case A, we commit violence on the basis of unverifiable premises. In case B, we might commit violence on the basis of verifiable premises (I can verify a gun exists, and that it is pointed at me). If I am going to kill or be killed, I want it to be for a reason that I can verify to be true. If the word “moral” describes the set of practices that accord with our values, and if our highest value is life, then it is always immoral to trade real human lives for something that does not exist or cannot be verified to exist.

What does not exist has no value relative to what does exist. What cannot be proven to exist should never be placed above what does exist. If we value life, then you should never trade something that exists, especially life, for something that does not exist or cannot be proven to exist. That is why it would always be immoral to ever take a life based on faith claims. It is that simple.

Avalos captures quite succinctly my views on this topic. I am a moral relativist because I simply cannot see how a moral framework can be constructed that is independent of human input and judgments. The reason that Brooks thinks the rules are timeless is because a human being told him that one particular holy book’s rules (out of the many holy books with their own rules) are given by a god and are thus timeless. He chose (or was indoctrinated) to believe that claim. How is that not a product of human judgment?

If a god were to suddenly appear to me, even then I would not unhesitatingly accept those moral commands. If this god said, for example, that I should murder my children (as the Bible says he told Abraham to do with his son Isaac) or indeed that I should murder anyone at all, I simply would not do it and I am confident that these days most people would do the same. None but the most fanatical god believers would comply and we would consider such people to be either insane or moral monsters.

If a god issued commands that we now consider immoral, he/she/it would face a revolt on his hands because all thinking people are, in the end, moral relativists and reject moral commands that are not congruent with their own moral sensibilities or based on agreed-upon humane principles.

Jonathan Turley writes about legislators in Kyrgyzstan who sacrificed seven sheep in order to get rid of evil spirits in the parliamentary chamber and about chickens that are sacrificed as part of the Jewish Kapparot ritual.

He ends his post by saying “What is astonishing is that some nations remain in the control of such superstitious throwbacks.” I couldn’t tell if he had his tongue in cheek because, apart from details like animal sacrifice, how is this more of a superstitious throwback than Congress starting its day with a prayer or priests blessing houses and the like?

Texas is experiencing a drought and so the governor has decided to proclaim “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”

Since no time frame is specified for when the rain should fall, such prayers are bound to be answered, at which point everyone can thank god for his mercy and blessings.

Next, people in Texas are asked to pray for the sun to rise tomorrow.

(Via Pharyngula.)

The latest issue of Time magazine has as its cover story the question “What if there’s no hell?” which focuses on a 40-year old evangelical preacher named Rob Bell who is head of a megachurch in Michigan called Mars Hill Bible Church that boasts 7,000 members attending its services each Sunday. He is described as a ‘rock star’ in the evangelical movement and has just published a book titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived that is causing consternation in evangelical circles by arguing that hell may not exist and that heaven may be open to everyone, not just those who accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, the usual standard for admission among evangelicals.
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