Authors: Unknown
Moving
on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal
Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large,
atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more
intelligent? Several research studies have been published on the
statistical relationship between religiosity and educational level, or
religiosity and IQ. Michael Shermer, in
How We Believe: The
Search for God in an Age of Science,
describes a large
survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank
Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the
discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with
education (more highly educated people are less likely to be
religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in
science and (strongly) with political liberalism. None of this is
surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation
between religiosity and parents' religiosity. Sociologists studying
British children have found that only about one in twelve break away
from their parents' religious beliefs.
As
you might expect, different researchers measure things in different
ways, so it is hard to compare different studies. Metaanalysis
is the technique whereby an investigator looks at all the research
papers that have been published on a topic, and counts up the number of
papers that have concluded one thing, versus the number that have
concluded something else. On the subject of religion and IQ, the only
meta-analysis known to me was published by Paul Bell in
Mensa
Magazine
in 2002 (Mensa is the society of individuals with a
high IQ, and their journal not surprisingly includes articles on the
one thing that draws them together).
57
Bell
concluded: 'Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship
between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational
level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher
one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be
religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.'
A
meta-analysis is almost bound to be less specific than any one of the
studies that contributed to it. It would be nice to have more studies
along these lines, as well as more studies of the members of elite
bodies such as other national academies, and winners of major prizes
and medals such as the Nobel, the Crafoord, the Field, the Kyoto, the
Cosmos and others. I hope that future editions of this book will
include such data. A reasonable conclusion from existing studies is
that religious apologists might be wise to keep quieter than they
habitually do on the subject of admired role models, at least where
scientists are concerned.
The
great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long
the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger
asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in
God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if
you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand,
if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get
eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On
the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
There
is something distinctly odd about the argument, however.
Believing
is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least,
it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide
to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can
decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside
them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't.
Pascal's wager could only ever be an argument for
feigning
belief
in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of
the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous
idea that believing is something you can
decide
to
do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in
Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency,
where we meet the robotic
Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your
believing for you'. The
de luxe
model is
advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in
Salt Lake City'.
But
why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing
you must do if you want to please God is
believe
in
him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that
God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity?
What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as
the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe
have
to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would
say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know
why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not
enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply.
Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone
for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First
World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly
bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we
don't need to
know
in order to refute Pascal's
Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming
that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you
bet
on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest
belief) over honest scepticism?
Then
again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be
Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was
said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at
all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn't
the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet
vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he
promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I
have encountered people, for example in the question session after a
lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in
favour of believing in God, so it was right to give it a brief airing
here.
Is
it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose
we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists.
Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life
if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and
therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing
to him, fighting and dying for him, etc. I won't pursue the question
here, but readers might like to bear it in mind when we come to later
chapters on the evil consequences that can flow from religious belief
and observance.
I
think the oddest case I have seen attempted for the existence of God is
the Bayesian argument recently put forward by Stephen Unwin in
The
Probability of God.
I hesitated before including this
argument, which is both weaker and less hallowed by antiquity than
others. Unwin's book, however, received considerable journalistic
attention when it was published in 2003, and it does give the
opportunity to bring some explanatory threads together. I have some
sympathy with his aims because, as argued in Chapter 2, I believe the
existence of God as a scientific hypothesis is, at least in principle,
investigable. Also, Unwin's quixotic attempt to put a number on the
probability is quite agreeably funny.
The
book's subtitle,
A Simple Calculation that Proves the
Ultimate Truth,
has all the hallmarks of a late addition by
the publisher, because such overweening confidence is not to be found
in Unwin's text. The book is better seen as a 'How To' manual, a sort
of
Bayes' Theorem for Dummies,
using the existence
of God as a semi-facetious case study. Unwin could equally well have
used a hypothetical
murder as his test case to demonstrate Bayes' Theorem. The detective
marshals the evidence. The fingerprints on the revolver point to Mrs
Peacock. Quantify that suspicion by slapping a numerical likelihood on
her. However, Professor Plum had a motive to frame her. Reduce the
suspicion of Mrs Peacock by a corresponding numerical value. The
forensic evidence suggests a 70 per cent likelihood that the revolver
was fired accurately from a long distance, which argues for a culprit
with military training. Quantify our raised suspicion of Colonel
Mustard. The Reverend Green has the most plausible motive for murder.*
Increase our numerical assessment of his likelihood. But the long blond
hair on the victim's jacket could only belong to Miss Scarlet . . . and
so on. A mix of more or less subjectively judged likelihoods churns
around in the detective's mind, pulling him in different directions.
Bayes' Theorem is supposed to help him to a conclusion. It is a
mathematical engine for combining many estimated likelihoods and coming
up with a final verdict, which bears its own quantitative estimate of
likelihood. But of course that final estimate can only be as good as
the original numbers fed in. These are usually subjectively judged,
with all the doubts that inevitably flow from that. The GIGO principle
(Garbage In, Garbage Out) is applicable here - and, in the case of
Unwin's God example, applicable is too mild a word.
*
The Reverend Green is the character's name in the versions of
Cluedo
sold in Britain (where the game originated), Australia, New
Zealand, India and all other English-speaking areas except North
America, where he suddenly becomes Mr Green. What is that all about?
Unwin
is a risk management consultant who carries a torch for Bayesian
inference, as against rival statistical methods. He illustrates Bayes'
Theorem by taking on, not a murder, but the biggest test case of all,
the existence of God. The plan is to start with complete uncertainty,
which he chooses to quantify by assigning the existence and
non-existence of God a 50 per cent starting likelihood each. Then he
lists six facts that might bear on the matter, puts a numerical
weighting on each, feeds the six numbers into the engine of Bayes'
Theorem and sees what number pops out. The trouble is that (to repeat)
the six weightings are not measured quantities but simply Stephen
Unwin's own personal judgements, turned into numbers for the sake of
the exercise. The six facts are:
1.
We have a sense of goodness.
2.
People do evil things (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein).
3.
Nature does evil things (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes).
4.
There might be minor miracles (I lost my keys and found them again).
5.
There might be major miracles (Jesus might have risen from the dead).
6.
People have religious experiences.
For
what it is worth (nothing, in my opinion), at the end of a ding-dong
Bayesian race in which God surges ahead in the betting, then drops way
back, then claws his way up to the 50 per cent mark from which he
started, he finally ends up enjoying, in Unwin's estimation, a 67 per
cent likelihood of existing. Unwin then decides that his Bayesian
verdict of 67 per cent isn't high enough, so he takes the bizarre step
of boosting it to 95 per cent by an emergency injection of 'faith'. It
sounds like a joke, but that really is how he proceeds. I wish I could
say how he justifies it, but there really is nothing to say. I have met
this kind of absurdity elsewhere, when I have challenged religious but
otherwise intelligent scientists to justify their belief, given their
admission that there is no evidence: 'I admit that there's no evidence.
There's a
reason
why it's called faith' (this last
sentence uttered with almost truculent conviction, and no hint of
apology or defensiveness).
Surprisingly,
Unwin's list of six statements does not include the argument from
design, nor any of Aquinas' five 'proofs', nor any of the various
ontological arguments. He has no truck with them: they don't contribute
even a minor fillip to his numerical estimate of God's likelihood. He
discusses them and, as a good statistician, dismisses them as empty. I
think this is to his credit, although his reason for discounting the
design argument is different from mine. But the arguments that he does
admit through his Bayesian door are, it seems to me, just as weak. That
is only to say that the subjective likelihood weightings I would give
to them are different from his, and
who cares
about
subjective judgements anyway? He thinks the fact that we have a sense
of right and wrong counts strongly
in God's favour, whereas I don't see that it should really shift him,
in either direction, from his initial prior expectation. Chapters 6 and
7 will show that there is no good case to be made for our possession of
a sense of right and wrong having any clear connection with the
existence of a supernatural deity. As in the case of our ability to
appreciate a Beethoven quartet, our sense of goodness (though not
necessarily our inducement to follow it) would be the way it is with a
God and without a God.
On
the other hand, Unwin thinks the existence of evil, especially natural
catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis, counts strongly
against
the likelihood that God exists. Here, Unwin's judgement is
opposite to mine but goes along with many uncomfortable theologians.
'Theodicy' (the vindication of divine providence in the face of the
existence of evil) keeps theologians awake at night. The authoritative
Oxford
Companion to Philosophy
gives the problem of evil as 'the
most powerful objection to traditional theism'. But it is an argument
only against the existence of a good God. Goodness is no part of the
definition
of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.