Art Hobson's Op/Ed Column on Saturday 08/29/2009

[Betsy]

I can't just put the link because you have to be a subscriber to read articles online - but here is his column in the NWA Times last Saturday:

Since the United States lost its arch enemy, the Soviet Union, in 1991, Americans have been at a loss to identify a general theme that unifies such diverse global issues as terrorism, poverty, dictatorship, environmental decline and nuclear weapons. I suggest that one such overarching theme is religion. Largely, it’s what world and domestic affairs have been about in recent decades.

But, paradoxically, we seldom discuss religion, and when we do we’re tongue-tied by social correctness. We don’t ordinarily bring up religion at, say, dinner parties. So we fail to notice that it’s the most important contemporary topic. Fortunately, this code of silence is frequently broken by socially incorrect books, scholarly articles and polls.

A groundbreaking analysis of religion and social conditions, by paleontologist and sociological researcher Gregory Paul, was published this year in the peer reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology. Paul studied 17 prosperous nations, including most of western Europe plus Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. Using survey results and other data for each country, he researched 25 social indicators and nine religiosity indicators. He combined the social indicators into an overall Successful Societies Scale (SSS) for each nation, he put together the religiosity indicators into a “Religiosity Versus Secularism Scale” (RVSS) for each nation, and he tabulated the correlations between each of these indicators and scales.

The correlation between the SSS and RVSS is the most revealing of the article’s many conclusions. The United States is an extreme outlier, being both exceedingly dysfunctional and exceedingly religious. We scored a rating of three on the 0-to-10 SSS scale while all 16 other nations scored between five and nine, and a rating of one on the 0-to-10 RVSS scale while Ireland scored two and the other 15 nations scored between four and 10. The correlation between religiosity and dysfunctionality is quite strong throughout all 17 nations, with the most religious nations (the United States, followed distantly by Ireland, Italy and Austria) being the most socially dysfunctional and the most secular nations (Sweden, Japan, Denmark and France) being the most socially successful.

Looking in detail at the social indicators, the highly religious United States scores the most dysfunctional in per capita homicide, incarceration, juvenile mortality, gonorrhea and syphilis infections, teenage abortions, adolescent pregnancies, marriage duration, income disparity, poverty, work hours, overexploitation of resources, and income inequality. In nearly all these cases, the gap between the United States and the other 16 nations is large.

For example, the annual homicide rate is six per 100,000 for the United States and between one and two per 100,000 for all 16 other nations. The teenage abortion rate is 29 per 1,000 for the United States and between 14 and 21 per 1,000 for the other nations, most of which have less restrictive abortion laws than does the United States. The birthrate among adolescents age 15-17 is 34 per 1,000 in the United States and between one and 19 per 1,000 in the 16 other nations.

Looking in detail at the religiosity indicators, the socially dysfunctional United States scores by far the most highly religious in belief in God, biblical literalism, frequency of prayer, belief in an afterlife, belief in heaven, and belief in hell, and has the smallest percentage of atheists and agnostics and the lowest acceptance of evolution.

For example, 63 percent of Americans“absolutely believe in God,” followed by 50 percent of Irish and 48 percent of Italians; at the secular (and socially successful) end of the spectrum, 4 percent of Japanese believe in God, followed by 12 percent of Swedes and 14 percent of Danes. Only 44 percent of Americans accept evolution, followed by 64 percent of Irish and 67 percent of Italians; at the secular end, over 80 percent of Swedes, Japanese, Danes and French accept evolution.

This evidence shoots down several popular hypotheses concerning religion. One of these is that religion is an innate human trait. Paul’s data shows there’s no “God gene.” If we were genetically predisposed to believe in God, the other 16 nations in Paul’s study would continue to believe in God, but they don’t.

Another false hypothesis is the notion that the positive aspects of religion encourage social habits that are more effective than government assistance in promoting a nation’s social welfare. The data shows precisely the opposite correlation: The least religious nations have the least social dysfunction.

Creationists often argue that belief in evolution fosters social dysfunction. The evidence shows precisely the opposite.

Paul’s data supports the hypothesis that people turn to religion out of despair. Citizens of progressive social welfare nations feel reasonably secure and thus, according to this hypothesis, few feel a need to seek supernatural protection, resulting in big drops in religious belief. It’s striking, and supportive of this hypothesis, that as religion has declined in Europe there’s been no significant religious revival in any of the secular democracies. America’s dysfunctionality and chronic competitiveness, on the other hand, elevate our social pathology and drive us to seek supernatural gods, boosting our religiosity levels. So religion is partly an effect of social insecurity.

But religion may also be a cause of social insecurity. The American religious right has promoted such ideological wedge issues as abortion and creationism rather than addressing social ills. These powerful conservative forces support deregulation, lower taxes for the wealthy, faithbased charities and abstinence-only sex education programs, while opposing anything that could be considered “socialized.” Such policies increase America’s social dysfunction, reinforcing the religiosity that’s contributing to the dysfunction.

I welcome your thoughts. As I said, America needs to talk about religion.

Art Hobson is a local resident and retired physics professor who is the author of “Physics: Concepts and Connections,” a college-level textbook for nonscientists. His column appears every other Saturday.

Opinion, Pages 4 on 08/29/2009

[Dardedar]

DAR
Betsy, Hobson's explanation of this data is the best I have seen yet. But he made a little boo in one sentence and has now updated it on his website. The seventh paragraph should read:

"Looking in detail at the religiosity indicators, the socially dysfunctional United States scores by far the most highly religious in belief in God, biblical literalism, frequency of prayer, belief in an afterlife, belief in heaven, and belief in hell, and has the smallest percentage of atheists and agnostics and the lowest acceptance of evolution."

I can make the change for you or you could do it. Best to fix that little bug before sending it around to everyone (as I intend to do).

The study in question is here: http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/upl ... 8441_c.pdf

See also: "The dependence of religion on dysfunctional societies"
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/200 ... ional.html

[Savonarola]

But he made a little boo in one sentence and has now updated it on his website.

Actually, the original quote is still accurate. Scoring low in the latter group of categories is scoring high in "religiosity." That said, I think that the clarification is a good thing.

[Dardedar]

An interesting exposition of this data, with charts, here:

http://bhascience.blogspot.com/2009/08/ ... ional.html