Blogs / Cosmic Variance

The struggle to definitively prove or disprove the existence of atheists has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Some have proposed the cosmological argument — “many cosmologists seem to be atheists” — while others have fallen back on the argument from design — “without atheists, who would believers have to argue against?”

But the Catholic Encyclopedia seems unconvinced by these arguments:

The most trenchant form which atheism could take would be the positive and dogmatic denial existence of any spiritual and extra-mundane First Cause. This is sometimes known as dogmatic, or positive theoretic, atheism; though it may be doubted whether such a system has ever been, or could ever possibly be seriously maintained. Certainly Bacon and Dr. Arnold voice the common judgment of thinking men when they express a doubt as to the existence of an atheist belonging to such a school. Still, there are certain advanced phases of materialistic philosophy that, perhaps, should rightly be included under this head. Materialism, which professes to find in matter its own cause and explanation, may go farther, and positively exclude the existence of any spiritual cause. That such a dogmatic assertion is both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration, for it is an inference not warranted by the facts nor justified by the laws of thought.

You have to admire the confidence — the fact that “dogmatic atheism” is “both unreasonable and illogical needs no demonstration,” and let’s leave it at that. It’s a little bit different from the tack they take in another entry:

Formal dogmatic Atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men.

The Encyclopedia does not dirty its hands by explaining the nature of this self-refutation, any more than it explained the previously-noted unreasonability and illogic. I like it! It’s kind of like arguing on the internet.

The Volokh Conspiracy is ruminating over why so many academics are hostile to some religions rather than others. Todd Zywicki cites data:

According to a study by the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, 53% of professors have an unfavorable view of Evangelical Christians but only 3% have an unfavorable view of Jews. A summary of the study is here. 33% have unfavorable views of Mormons. Muslims, Atheists, and Catholics all score in double-digits.

He goes on to express his astonishment…

It is almost impossible to imagine any identifiable group of Americans today who would hold such a reflexively negative view of other groups of Americans. I can’t imagine that any degree of racial bigotry by any group toward any other group would even approximate this degree of bigotry and prejudice.

Until, of course, his commenters point out an inconvenient fact: this “prejudice” pales next to that against atheists.

Co-blogger Ilya Somin then chimes in with a theory — it’s all just bias against conservatives.

Overall, I think the data confirm my theory that most academics are not hostile to religion as such, but merely to those religious groups that they perceive (for the most part correctly) as politically conservative.

The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an “unfavorable” view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics’ views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct.

I have a different theory. What if academics had an unfavorable view of evangelicals and Mormons, and a generally favorable view of Catholics and Jews, because of how those groups view academia? Crazy, I know, but bear with me here. Catholicism and Judaism, whatever their other faults, have long traditions of valuing learning and scholarship, while Mormonism and evangelical Christianity … not so much. (Those are wild generalizations, of course, but the trends are clear.) Perhaps these unfavorable views are not actually prejudices at all, but informed opinions based on empirically verifiable realities?

Just a theory.

For his final guest post, Tom looks at a topic right up our alley: Einstein’s thoughts about religion. The difference being that he knows what he’s talking about, having written a book on Einstein.

Many thanks to Tom for chipping in this week. His previous posts are here and here, and don’t forget the Inverse Square Blog.

—————————————

The Jewishness of Albert Einstein.

I’m a bit late to this particular party, but I hear that there was a bit of a media and blog hullabaloo about a letter by Albert Einstein that was auctioned last month for 170,000 pounds. That doubles the previous record for an Einstein letter, and at least part of the reason for its record price seems to have been its content — what seemed to some a startlingly blunt assessment of religion in general. He wrote:

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

To get down to cases close to home:

“For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

To be sure, he acknowledged, he was happy to identify himself as one of “the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity…” But clearly belonging to a community did not make him blind, deaf or dumb.

The reason I ignored this at first is that after fifteen years in the Einstein game I’m pretty tired of WWED appeals to authority, all that pouring through the great man’s quotations to find something to support whatever view one may have had in the first place.

The reason I’m picking it up now is that the letter raises a question that allows us with only a little leap of the imagination to begin to gather the intense pressure of the experience of being Jewish in Europe in the first few decades of the last century – especially if you were smart, prominent, public.

Just to get it out of the way: there is nothing surprising about this letter. Just five years earlier Einstein wrote that, when he was young he had experienced a bout of real piety, until:

“Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.”

That revelation remained with him throughout his life, and he never made a secret of it. He refused to claim a religious affiliation in the papers he filed with the Austro-Hungarian government to take up a professorship in Prague. Told he had to claim something, he declared he was of the “Mosaic” faith – a construction that conveyed his disdain for the whole notion pretty well, IMHO.

And so it went. In 1915, he told one correspondent that, “I see with great dismay that God punishes so many of His children for their ample folly, for which obviously only He himself can be held responsible,” …. “Only His nonexistence can excuse him.”

Those who followed this malign, non-existent deity were fools. When he visited Palestine in 1921, Einstein was much impressed by the sight of Jews constructing cities and a way of life out of raw dirt and effort. But the sight of traditional Jews praying at the Wailing Wall seemed to him the “dull-witted clansmen of our tribe.” They made such spectacles of themselves, “praying aloud, their faces turned to the wall, their bodies swaying to and fro,” that to Einstein, it was “a pathetic sight of men with a past but without a present.”

That’s enough: the point is that Einstein made it clear in public, and even more so in private communications that have been in the public record for decades now, that revealed religion in general and orthodox Judaism in particular had no hold on him at all. When he used the term God, it was mostly just an off-hand short-hand: “God does not play dice” was another way of saying, as he did in the EPR paper, that “no reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit” the excesses of modern quantum theory.

But all this begs the question why Einstein bothered to claim Jewishness, if Judaism itself as a practice and a body of belief had no hold on him.

Einstein himself gave two answers. The first was he saw in Judaism a framework and a fair amount of thought about how to live ethically with others. His take on the tradition pulled out of Judaism “the democratic ideal of social justice, coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men” and a passion for “every form of intellectual aspiration and spiritual effort.” This is religion as heuristic – and specifically, Judaism as a sustained body of inquiry into certain problems that interested him.

The second, of course, was that he had no choice. Whatever he may have believed, others defined him: “When I came to Germany,” he wrote some years later as part of an explanation for his conversion to Zionism, “I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than to Jews.”

It was more than the casual anti-Semitism that he experienced or perceived, dating back to his failure to get an academic job after finishing his college degree. Rather, Einstein’s strong identification not just as a person of Jewish background, but as a highly public member of both the Berlin Jewish community and the nationalist Zionist movement, is one measure of just how rapidly the nature of German anti-Semitism changed in the immediate aftermath of defeat in World War I.

I go into this at some length in this tome – from which most of the above comes, in one form or another. See chapter ten if you’re interested. In this venue, I want to make just two points abstracted out of that much longer story.

(more…)

Reflecting on his earlier speech on faith at the height of his campaign, Mitt decides to stand up for atheists:

But upon reflection, I realized that while I could defend their absence from my address, I had missed an opportunity…an opportunity to clearly assert that non-believers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty.

If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief — to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience — it may be the non-believer who is among the first to be condemned. A coercive monopoly of belief threatens everyone, whether we are talking about those who search the philosophies of men or follow the words of God.

We are all in this together. Religious liberty and liberality of thought flow from the common conviction that it is freedom, not coercion, that exalts the individual just as it raises up the nation.

(from a speech at the “Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury dinner”). He loses a lot of ground with me on the rest of the speech, where he elaborates on his earlier claim that “freedom requires religion” and argues that without religion keeping us all well behaved, the US would have descended into anarchy or facism. All the same, it’s nice to see someone tied so closely with both politics and faith demonstrating understanding of why atheists get a bit squicked out with the notion of theocracies.

UPDATE: This was recovered from before the recent site troubles. As Sean mentioned, earlier comments have been lost.

Bit of a kerfuffle over at DramaBlogs ScienceBlogs, in the wake of PZ Myers’s visit to a screening of Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie, Expelled. PZ apparently signed up online for tickets to a screening (under his own name), but upon arrival he was recognized by the organizers, and asked to leave. Expelled from Expelled! It’s the 21st century, we all have to re-calibrate our irony meters. Adding to the fun was the fact that the rest of PZ’s party was allowed to continue in to see the movie — and among the friends he had dragged along was Richard Dawkins, who was apparently not recognized. This is too delicious a story to pass up, and it’s already been reported in the New York Times and elsewhere.

But not everyone is amused, even on the pro-science side. Chris Mooney complains that the controversy gives a huge boost, in the form of priceless publicity, to Expelled and its supporters. People who never would have heard of the movie will now be curious to see it; the filmmakers are already gloating about all the attention.

I think that Chris is right: this is publicity for the movie that they couldn’t possibly have received any other way, and PZ and Dawkins are basically doing exactly what the filmmakers were hoping for all along.

And they should keep right on doing it.

To understand why, consider the much more intemperate response by Matt Nisbet, Chris’s partner in the Framing Science game. They have been exhorting scientists to communicate more effectively by framing issues in a way that resonate with their audiences. This sounds like very good advice, and in fact kind of obvious and uncontroversial. But when ask to give examples, Chris and Matt often choose Richard Dawkins as their poster boy for what not to do. Personally I think that Dawkins has been very good for the cultural discourse overall, but Matt and Chris fear that his avowed atheism will turn people against science, making things easier for folks who want to fight against evolution in public schools.

In his post, Matt is perfectly blatant: PZ and Dawkins are hurting the cause, and should just shut up. When called up by the media, they should decline to speak, instead suggesting that the reporter contact someone who can give the pro-evolution message in a way that is friendlier to religion.

As you might expect, neither PZ, nor Dawkins, nor any of their ilk (and I count myself among them) are likely to follow this undoubtedly well-intentioned advice, as this pithy rejoinder demonstrates. The heart of the difference in approaches is evident in the analogies that Matt brings up, namely to political campaigns:

If Dawkins and PZ really care about countering the message of The Expelled camp, they need to play the role of Samantha Power, Geraldine Ferraro and so many other political operatives who through misstatements and polarizing rhetoric have ended up being liabilities to the causes and campaigns that they support. Lay low and let others do the talking.

When Chris and Matt talk to the PZ/Dawkins crowd, they do a really bad job of understanding and working within the presuppositions of their audience — exactly what framing is supposed to be all about. To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.

There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.

What Matt and Chris (seemingly) fail to understand is that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins are not trying to be successful politicians, persuading the largest number of people to come over to their side. They have no interest in being politicians. They are critics, and their goal is to say correct things about the world and argue against incorrect statements. Of course, they would certainly like to see evolution rather than creationism taught in schools, and ultimately they would be very happy if all of humanity were persuaded of the correctness of their views. But their books and blogs about science and religion are not strategic documents designed to bring about some desired outcome; they are attempts to say true things about issues they care about. Telling them “Shut up! You’ll offend the sensibilities of people we are trying to persuade!” is like talking to a brick wall, or at least in an alien language. You will have to frame things much better than that.

Politicians and critics often don’t get along. And the choice to be one or the other usually comes down more to the personality of the individual rather than some careful cost-benefit analysis. (You know that PZ will be regaling youngsters with the story of how he was expelled from Expelled for decades to come.) I’m very much in the mold of a critic; one of my first ever blog posts was why I could never be a politician. It’s easy enough to tell the difference: even if a critic knew for a fact that a certain true statement would harm their cause politically, they would still insist on saying it.

But one stance or the other is not better nor worse; society very much needs both politicians and critics. The job of a critic sounds very lofty — speaking truth to power, heedless of extraordinary social pressures and the hooting condemnation of a benighted populace. But if everyone were a critic, it would be a disaster. We need politicians to actually things done, and (in the rare instances where it is carried out with integrity) the role of a politician should be one of the most honored in society. A gifted politician will understand the contours of what is possible, and work within the constraints posed by the real world to move society in a better direction.

However, we also need critics. If everyone were a politician, it would be equally disastrous. In Bernard Shaw’s famous phrasing, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The perfect can be the enemy of the good, but if we don’t have a loud and persistent chorus of voices reminding us of how far short we fall of perfection, we won’t work as hard as we can to get there.

And we should hardly be surprised that bloggers and polemicists tend to be critics rather than politicians. We should have people out there selling evolution to skeptical listeners who might be committed to religion and suspicious of science. But that doesn’t mean that sincere voices who believe that thinking scientifically sends you down the path to atheism should be told to shut up. Without stubborn critics who refuse to compromise on their vision of the truth, our discourse would be an enormously poorer place.

Back when my oldest kid was 2.5 and planning her Halloween costume (a guaranteed-to-terrify “pink monster princess”), she pointed out that “last year, I was the one who was scared, but this year, I’m going to scare both those guys!”. I knew that one of the guys had to be our neighbors’ friend Pete, who’d unknowingly traumatized her with a rather horrific mask the previous year, but I was stumped about the other. I asked who the “two guys” were, and she replied, “Pete…and SANTA”.

Her relationship with Santa has thus always been, well, complicated. She’s fascinated, and troubled, and yet remains devoted to the idea of Santa. As she nears 7, she oscillates between a deep suspicion that her parents are somehow complicit and a joyful hope that Santa is as real and bountiful as he’s always been (with the latter state taking the lead as Christmas morning approaches). Over the last year, I watched her pragmatic, rationalist core battling the idea of a magical figure who somehow figures out the ultimate just-in-time logistics delivery problem, and I thus was not sure that her belief in Santa was going to survive till December. It did, but with an increasing number of tests and conditions, as she remembered what Santa’s handwriting looks like, and is sharp enough to notice if Santa uses any familiar wrapping paper.

The reason that she couldn’t quite give up Santa yet is simple. At this point, Santa makes her happy. Deeply, contentedly happy. On some level she knows that the mechanics of Santa go against everything else she understands about how the world operates. And yet, the idea that there is still a little bit of magic that might operate in her very own life makes her giddy.

As adults, even the most rational of us sometimes make small concessions to that joy in letting ourselves believe in something wonderful, but not sensible. When I bowl, I firmly believe that absurd amounts of body english after the ball has left my hand are key to keeping the ball out of the gutter. I obviously “know” that this can’t possibly help, but it makes me really happy to indulge my belief that it does. I have friends who have chants that will make parking spaces open up, who carry umbrellas to prevent it from raining, or who have magical articles of clothing that are critical to the success of their favored sports team. All of these beliefs are obviously absurd, but satisfying nonetheless.

Which in the end, is why I typically stay out of the God vs the Atheists discussions in the blogosphere. I am soft enough of heart to take no pleasure in trying to argue people out of something that makes them deeply happy. I find no evidence for what they believe, and I profoundly disapprove of any attempt to institutionalize those beliefs beyond an individual church/synagog/mosque, but I just cannot build up a big head of steam to fight against individuals’ believing in something that helps them cope with life’s frustrations, tediums, and cruelties. I am not blind to the evils that have been visited upon us in the name of organized religion. Yet, individually, there are many people whom I value and love who also take comfort from believing in God. Individually, their belief causes no harm to anyone. They still support teaching of evolution in schools, and don’t abandon free will in favor of waiting for God’s Will to be manifest. They will still be friends with a godless heathen like myself. While this “mostly harmless” manifestation is not true for all religious individuals, it dominates in those that I know personally, making me loathe to engage in sweeping criticisms of theists, even while I struggle with concerns about the impact of invasive institutionalized religion.

I won’t defend my tolerance with well-reasoned arguments, since I have none. Other writers and readers of this blog have given this topic far more rigorous thought than I. Instead, the tolerance grows out of the same inkling that it would feel a bit small for me to take away my daughter’s belief in Santa before she was ready to stand without it.

It has been a dodgy couple of days for news about my part of England.

Yesterday I watched with pride as my hometown football team – Wigan Athletic – scored three goals in the first half against Blackburn. This then turned to horror as they conceded three, with my pride eventually recovering after they pulled a couple back for a scrappy 5-3 victory (first in thirteen games).

Then (via PZ) I find out that the same type of creationist nonsense that we’re forced to waste time and effort fighting in the U.S. is rearing its empty head in England, and in Lancashire no less! As the Observer reports

The AH Trust, a charity set up last year by a group of businessmen alarmed by the direction in which they see society heading, has identified a number of potential sites in the north west of England to build the £3.5m Christian theme park.

The trust claims it already has a number of rich backers who are keen to invest in the project, which will boast two interactive cinemas, a cafeteria, six shops and a television recording studio, allowing it to produce its own Christian-themed films and documentaries.

Oh the horror! What is going on in my home country? And this isn’t just a place to churn out rip-offs of The Passion of the Christ; they have other issues

‘The church in this country is in crisis and many church leaders living in Australia, America and Canada have openly proclaimed that God has left the church in England,’ the trust states on its website.

‘Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society and we need the television studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood, which presently is destroying the church foundation.’

It just brings tears to my eyes. But I’ll end on a note of pride. Even better than Wigan breaking their losing streak at football is to read this about your hometown

The theme park’s anti-evolution bias and its emphasis on Genesis has raised eyebrows among planning officials, according to Jones, who originally wanted to build the park at the site of an old B&Q store but was refused permission by the council.

‘Wigan council slammed the door in our faces. You mention the C [Christian] word, and people don’t want to know,’

It just warms your heart doesn’t it?

I find it sad that in American politics any candidate needs to devote time to talking about their religious faith, unless they are apologizing for the intellectual weakness it represents, or explaining why they have decided that the separation of church and state is wrong. And this brings us to Mitt Romney’s “statement on faith”, taking place this afternoon.

In Kennedy’s famous original version (it’s worth reading) his intention was to make faith irrelevant, since it was to be seen as a personal issue that should play no role whatsoever in governing the country. Although I find any such religious faith bizarre, it is true that there have been presidents whose beliefs do not seem to have been driving their decisions, and I can certainly live with that. But in Romney’s case, the situation is starkly different. As Andrew O’Hehir writes in Salon, beginning by quoting the speech

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy told the Houston ministers, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”

Kennedy was seeking to take his then-controversial faith off the table by embracing the constitutional and secular nature of the American republic, and by asking voters to judge him on his own words and deeds rather than as a representative of his church. If Romney were trying to accomplish something similar, one could only commend him. But his task is more perplexing and difficult than that.

Romney needs to appease a constituency that conspicuously does not believe in the absolute separation of church and state, that favors public funding of religious education (or at least certain varieties of it) and has frequently sought to impose theological ideas or religious structures in the public sphere. He’s not trying to convince right-wing evangelical Christians that he would govern as a secular president; he’s trying to convince them that his ideas about religion are close enough to theirs, in some general way, that they should overlook the differences.

Read that first paragraph again and then wipe away your tears as you realize how far backwards our politicians have moved.

O’Hehir then goes on to discuss some of the aspects of Mormomism that will make achieving this difficult for Romney. But the most important part of all this seems to me that Romney should be losing the votes of rational Americans by having brought these issues to the fore himself. That he is one of the many Americans – the religious – who believe in a particular set of supernatural fairy tales should be a strike against him. But that he explicitly seeks to make these irrational beliefs part of his governing philosophy and thereby impose them on others is far, far worse, and should make them fair game. I’d love to see journalists stepping up and doing their part to interrogate Romney and any other candidate on their superstitions whenever one of them decides that those beliefs have a place in the political sphere. Right now that group includes Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee, Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and almost everyone else I can think of.

I have a hard time imagining most of these people making a statement that echoes Kennedy’s own

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

Over to you, Mitt.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is enjoying a late surge in the polls for the Republican nomination, especially in the crucial early caucus state of Iowa. Part of his appeal is a sense of humor, as evidenced by this clever appropriation of the Chuck Norris Facts meme:

Chuck Norris, in addition to his considerable thespian credentials, is a proud creationist who wants the Bible taught in public schools. So it is not surprising to find Mike Huckabee denying the reality of evolution during a televised debate.

But this video, while also quite funny, is pretty scary. Via Cynical-C, it’s a 2004 speech to the Republican Governors’ Association.

A phone call from God! Quite the thigh-slapper. Huckabee artfully includes an assurance that God doesn’t take side during elections — although we all know his preferences, apparently.

I understand that it’s a joke. But there are moments of solemnity during the “phone call,” when Huckabee is being perfectly serious. One of those is at the 2:00 mark, where we are reminded that the President talks to God. And then we receive a list of instructions, including “protecting marriage.” (It needs to be protected from The Gays, for those who don’t have your decoder rings.) George W. Bush himself has occasionally mentioned talking to God, although usually in private meetings where it’s difficult to get objective verification, and admittedly his theology is somewhat unsystematic.

A lot of people who don’t really believe in the old-fashioned supernatural nevertheless think it’s a good idea to appropriate spiritual terminology for their own uses — re-defining “faith” as “any hypothesis that has not yet been proven,” or “God” as “the warm feeling I get when contemplating the universe,” or “religion” as “a nice kind of social club that brings people together to reinforce each other’s goodness.” It’s not a good idea. These are words, and they have meanings when you say them — people think they know what you have in mind. When you say “God,” most people think of the dictionary definition — “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.” They’re not thinking of “the laws of nature.” And they honestly believe in this dictionary-definition God. And they let that belief affect, or at least justify, how they govern the country. Shouldn’t every non-religious person be deeply alarmed about this state of affairs?

At the Beyond Belief II conference, Stuart Kauffman gave an interesting (although flawed, I thought) talk about complexity and reductionism, and then ruined the whole thing by suggesting at the end that we should re-define “the sacred” as something arising from the radical contingency of the empirical path of biological evolution. Or something like that, it was a bit vague. What an abysmally bad idea. If you want to choose a word that refers to something other than the traditional religious conception of supreme beings and all that, then don’t use religious language. Because there are other people out there — far vaster in number than you — that are using those same words to mean exactly what they straightforwardly denote: a supernatural power with a vested interest in smiting the wicked, especially boys and girls who fall in love with boys and girls, respectively. And they’re running this country at the moment, and their beliefs are enacted into policy.

Of course, arguing with Mike Huckabee and his friends runs the risk that Chuck Norris will come along and kick your ass. That’s just the chance we have to take.

Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum both link to this Pew Report on various worldwide opinions. Here is the graph that gets people talking, a plot of per capita GDP versus religiosity:

This looks like a curve that was drawn by hand, rather than fit by least-squares, but there is obviously a correlation: as a country gets wealthier, it gets less religious. The United States, obviously, is a whopping outlier. Why is that? What is it about the U.S. that makes it so different from our demographic cousins, even within the Anglosphere? (Kuwait is also an outlier, but the reasons are pretty straightforward.) I’ve heard various theories, but none has really been convincing.

(Looking closely, maybe a better fit to the data would be to horizontal line segments: one at 2.25, for GDP between 0 an 10,000, and one at 0.75, for all higher incomes. Perhaps there is a phase transition that countries undergo when their per capita GDP hits around 10,000. Or, even more likely, there is some hidden third variable that is highly correlated with both GDP and religiosity. That kind of curve would make the U.S. seem less exceptional.)