Is there a God?

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by Zeta-Flux

The way I meant cherry-picking was that I thought the author had only chosen certain countries, without any criteria (except that they supported his position), from which to obtain data. However, the author does explicitly state he is limited to prosperous countries.

No? Then let's look at the figures.

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/...1.html#figures

If you remove the outliers USA and Portugal (or use a more robust non-parametric estimator) then correlation disappears for homicides (Figure 2).

Obviously there is something about the USA and Portugal that's different, which is precisely NOT explained by how often people pray every week. IIRC the conditional probabilities of race and homicide in the USA, differ by up to a factor of 20...

So, the authors did pick cherries to support their claim: any good statistician would have excluded the USA and P.

Other gripes: (the more !!!!! the more ironic...)

Figure 1: Call Stockholm!!!!! The more you believe in god, are less likely you are to accept evolution as a fact. Surprise!!!!!!

Figure 3: Australians are totally suicidal!!! Must be the beer they drink!!!! They would be much better off if they went to church more often!!! Or less!!! Or moved to Great Britain!!!

Figure 4: (under 5 mortality). Looks like believing in God kills your babies, doesn't it? Well, as soon as you adjust for poverty, then that correlation disappears, too.

Jackpot:


Figure 8: totally positive correlation between belief in god and abortions!! Man, those religious chicks really sure like getting those abortions!!!!!!!!


Bonus!!! Bonus!!! Bonus!!!


Figure 9 (teenage pregnancies):Those religious chicks really like getting laid, too!!!! No wonder they're getting all those abortions!!!!<shift>1!!!

Conclusion:

The study is useless. Thank cheesehead for wasting everybody's time.

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by flouran

Well I feel bad for the girl.

Save your empathy for the ones with smart parents, who do everything to discover new tricks, which improves the odds for everybody, but who's child still doesn't make it to adulthood.

Originally Posted by flouran

It sucks that she had dumbshit parents who cared more about God than they did about her well-being, till the point that it put her life in mortal danger.

Unfortunately, stupidity is hereditary. That the child wouldn't have been a Darwinian dud like her parents is wishful thinking. And as there is currently no shortage of human life: good riddance!

[cheesehead]

Folks,

Let me point out a certain commonality in recent accusations that the article I cited was biased, deficient, misused statistics, "cherry-picked" data by not including certain other countries, used inappropriate divisions (nations, instead of smaller units such as regions or states), "cherry-picked" data by omitting events in the more distant past, and used a sample size that was "too small".

Each of those accusations could have been avoided, I think, by carefully reading the article's title and other statements of scope. One of the reasons I had such a hard time understanding the accusations is that I assumed, at first, that the accuser had done so.

If you're not used to reading scientific articles, let me give you a couple of hints:

1. Carefully read the title.

2. Carefully read the paragraphs that describe the scope of the article.

A scientific presentation needs to define its scope and stick to it. That's one of the ways that science avoids making errors: by adhering to well-defined bounds when making statements.

That isn't to say that wondering about a wide variety of things, letting ones imagination go free, and so forth is unscientific. Those things are fine, even essential, for getting inspirations and making serendipitous discoveries. But when it comes time to present ones results or draw conclusions, one needs to define the bounds (scope) within which those results or conclusions are valid.

To criticize a scientific study/article on the grounds that it didn't go beyond its stated scope is to either (a) misunderstand how science avoids errors by not doing so, or (b) have been careless about noting the scope in the first place.

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

[...blah, blah, blah...]

If you're not used to reading scientific articles, let me give you a couple of hints:

[...blah, blah, blah...]

Do not take advice from cheesehead's spinal cord.

A quick google tells us that the author is infamous enough to have generated a wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_S._Paul#Religion

Originally Posted by wikipedia

Paul authored a paper in 2005 entitled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look".[2] He states in the introduction that the paper is "not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health".[3] This paper has been criticized on statistical grounds, for conceptual ambiguity , its indirect measure of "religiosity" (the author's term) and its "chi-by-eye" interpretation of scatterplots rather than quantified measures. Summing up in a published article in the same journal, Moreno-Riaño, Smith, and Mach from Cedarville University wrote that "[Paul's] methodological problems do not allow for any conclusive statement to be advanced regarding the various hypotheses Paul seeks to demonstrate or falsify."[4] At the time the paper was published, Paul announced plans to write a book on the subject, claiming that the findings are strong enough to justify further study.[5]

Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt University is one of the scientists who criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that "Paul’s analysis generates the 'desired results' by selectively choosing the set of social problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of religion". In a response [6] to the study by Paul, he builds on and refines Paul's analysis. His conclusion, that focus only in the crime of homicide, is that there is a correlation (and perhaps a causal relationship) of higher homicide rates, not with Christianity, but with dualistic Christian beliefs, something Jensen defines as the strong belief in all of the following : God, heaven, devil and hell. Excerpt: "A multiple regression analysis reveals a complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it."

The Paul should stick to painting pretty pictures of dinosaurs but leave the thinking to the experts.

[Zeta-Flux]

cheesehead,

I think I've found a way to engage you, and avoid much of the emotional baggage. I've written a little quiz, to make sure we are on the same page. Having written numerous quizzes in the past, and knowing that it is easy to make mistakes, or misinterpret the questions, or even for the teacher to write bad questions, I won't read too deeply into your answers. They are only meant to provide a baseline from which to go from.

Half of the quiz is true/false. Go ahead and just answer true or false. If you feel your answer needs explanation, or you wish to explain your reading of the question, feel free to do so after answering true or false.

Here we go:
Part A
True/false.

Q A1: If A and B are strongly (positively) correlated then A causes B.
Q A2: If A is strongly correlated to B, then B is strongly correlated to A.
Q A3: If A is strongly correlated to B, and B is strongly correlated to C, then A is strongly correlated to C.
Q A4: If A is strongly correlated to B, one cannot demonstrate that causal relationships between A and B are minimal/non-existent.
Q A5: If A is strongly correlated to B, then it is reasonable (without further information) to believe that A causes B.


Part B
Questions about the article.

Q B1: What is the total sample size of prosperous nations? (I.e. what is the total number of nations under consideration)
Q B2: What is the cut-off line for prosperity?
Q B3: How does the sample change if we vary the cut-off line (i.e. how robust is the choice)? For example, if we change prosperity by $5,000 does the number change dramatically?
Q B4: How many of the nations in the sample satisfy the author's definition of religiosity? How many are not religious?
Q B5: How robust are these numbers? In other words, if we throw away the two outliers (one on each end) does that affect the break-down much?
Q B6: What is the correlation coefficient? (See http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/statcorr.php for the definition.)
Q B7: Is this a strong positive correlation?
Q B8: How robust is this number? In other words, if we throw away the biggest two outliers, does the number change much?

I hope this will give us a baseline, and prove to you that I'm looking at this from a scientific perspective.

Best,
Zeta-Flux

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by tha

Atheism took of in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century as a widening protest movement by the people against abuse of power by the churches. In the post WWII era everything in Europe had to be reorganized and many organizations unloaded ballast from the past. And so the atheists renamed themselves to humanists. If you don't believe God is using us as his wire puppets then we must be responsible for ourselves.

Actually, long before militant atheism became vogue, the more-common term for members of the "take nothing on faith" crowd was freethinker. And the "movement" started rather more early than that, notably in Germany.

The history of the freethinker movement in the U.S. is particularly interesting, as the above Wikipage notes:

Driven by the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an immigration of German freethinkers and anti-clericalists to the United States (see Forty-Eighters). In the U.S., they hoped to be able to practice their beliefs, without interference from government and church authorities.[9]

Many Freethinkers settled in German immigrant strongholds, including St. Louis, Indianapolis, Wisconsin, and Texas,[9] where they founded the town of Comfort, Texas, as well as others.

These groups of German Freethinkers referred to their organizations as Freie Gemeinden, or "free congregations."[9] The first Freie Gemeinde was established in St. Louis in 1850.[10] Others followed in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other states.[9][11]

Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and the abolition of slavery.[9]

Freethought in the United States began to decline in the late nineteenth century. Its anti-religious views alienated would-be sympathizers. The movement also lacked cohesive goals or beliefs. By the early twentieth century, most Freethought congregations had disbanded or joined other mainstream churches. The longest continuously operating Freethought congregation in America is the Free Congregation of Sauk County, Wisconsin, which was founded in 1852 and is still active today. It affiliated with the American Unitarian Association (now the Unitarian Universalist Association) in 1955.[12]

The "lacked cohesive goals or beliefs" bit brings to mind the term "herding cats", and the fact that most of the remaining U.S. freethinker movement has been absorbed into existing faiths or church-like organizations (e.g. the Unitarian Universalists) makes me think that organized collective delusion will always have an edge over disorganized rationality. Perhaps science is the nearest thing going to the freethinker movement - if so, that would certainly put it on par with many mainstream faiths in terms of number of practitioners. I find that thought appealing, because scientific pursuit of knowledge strikes me as "productive freethinking".

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Zeta-Flux

cheesehead,

I think I've found a way to engage you, and avoid much of the emotional baggage. I've written a little quiz, to make sure we are on the same page. Having written numerous quizzes in the past, and knowing that it is easy to make mistakes, or misinterpret the questions, or even for the teacher to write bad questions, I won't read too deeply into your answers. They are only meant to provide a baseline from which to go from.

Half of the quiz is true/false. Go ahead and just answer true or false. If you feel your answer needs explanation, or you wish to explain your reading of the question, feel free to do so after answering true or false.

This may have been meant by you only for Cheesehead, but I'd like to weigh in at least on Part A of the quiz:

Here we go:
Part A
True/false.

Q A1: If A and B are strongly (positively) correlated then A causes B.

False, because one could equally well say "...then B causes A", and in situations where there is a clear chain of cause and effect, only one statement can be (which is not to say "is") true.

Q A2: If A is strongly correlated to B, then B is strongly correlated to A.

True; this follows from the symmetry in its 2 arguments of the statistical definition of correlation.

Q A3: If A is strongly correlated to B, and B is strongly correlated to C, then A is strongly correlated to C.

True, with the caveat that A and C could be more or less strongly correlated than (A and B) and (B and C) are, so one cannot use a sharp cutoff for "strongly correlated" and always have the statement be true. (E.g. if one sets a corr. coefficient of 0.9 as demarcating "strong", and it happens that e.g. corr(A,B) = 0.92 and corr(B,C) = 0.91 but corr(A,C) = 0.88).

Q A4: If A is strongly correlated to B, one cannot demonstrate that causal relationships between A and B are minimal/non-existent.

I'm inclined to argue "False", but need to think about this a bit more, since it seems to depend on "standard of proof". For example, the stock market rally that began in early March is strongly correlated with a rise in average daily temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. I would argue that (based on pre-March temperature trends and what is likely to happen as we move into Fall) that this is mere coincidence, but perhaps spring indeed tends to bring a rise in northern-hemisphere investor optimism, so it's merely a case of the general correlation (looking e.g. at past years) being weaker than this year's.

Q A5: If A is strongly correlated to B, then it is reasonable (without further information) to believe that A causes B.

False, again based (a) on the interchangeability of A and B in the correlation but not in any chain of cause and effect, and (b) on the fact that there can be statistical correlation of A and B without any plausible mechanism by which A and B could be causally related. Note that (b) is in fact a scientific statement, since in many religions, "God can do whatever He wants", so any correlation, no matter how factually spurious, can be ascribed to "God's will".

[__HRB__]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The "lacked cohesive goals or beliefs" bit brings to mind the term "herding cats", and the fact that most of the remaining U.S. freethinker movement has been absorbed into existing faiths or church-like organizations (e.g. the Unitarian Universalists) makes me think that organized collective delusion will always have an edge over disorganized rationality.

I beg to differ.

Collective delusion will necessarily be some sort of average, so you get a large bias, whereas disorganized rationality will have a large variance. I don't see any reason to assume ex ante, that the trade-off is in favor of a larger bias.

If we look at the evolutionary trajectory, we can actually surmise that a larger variance has the edge over a larger bias, since there is a strong tendency for open societies (which allow disorganized free-thinkers and disorganized, i.e. unregulated, free-markets) to wipe the floor with all others.

[Zeta-Flux]

ewmayer,

Thanks for taking the quiz. As you are not cheesehead, none of the caveats I gave him are applicable, so I'm now going to score your answers. :)

Q A1: Good answer, except that both A causes B and B causes A could both be true (as they might represent non-unique instances). In other words, A could cause B, which then causes A to happen again, which...
Q A2: Ditto.
Q A3: I think the answer is false. But this was the one question (in the true/false) where I wasn't really sure what answer is right. Let me give a situation that demonstrates the issue, as I see it. You might find some problem with it.

Suppose we want to see if being named Joe is correlated with liking peanut butter sandwiches. We find that it is (for sake of argument)! Those named Joe are much more likely to enjoy peanut butter sandwiches than those who aren't (mostly because it is an American food, and the number of non-Americans skews the result). We then check whether having the last name of Johnson is correlated with liking peanut butter sandwiches. It turns out it is again!

But is having the first name of Joe highly correlated with having the last name of Johnson?

I'd have to work through the math to figure it out. (It might be the case that the large sample size negates the positive connection between being named Joe and liking pbs's. But intuitively, it seems to make sense so far...)

Q A4: I'd say false also, at least in the context of scientific methods. You can do additional experiments, showing that the given correlation is a function of some hidden variable; which when accounted for removes any noticeable correlation.

Q A5: Good answer.

[ewmayer]

Example of a religious custom which, while useless in a practical sense, might at least be enjoyable to watch (though I hope sufficient rest and refreshment breaks are included for the plowers):

Naked girls plow fields for rain

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.

Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state plowed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods. They said elderly village women helped the girls drag the plows.

"They (villagers) believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains," Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar's remote Banke Bazaar town.

"This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily."

India this year suffered its worst start to the vital monsoon rains in eight decades, causing drought in some states.

My Comment: Note the self-fulfilling nature of the custom - No matter how long it takes (assuming it's not decades) you continue to have the naked girls plow the fields. Then when it finally does rain, "look - it worked!"

(The snark in me would like to add, "better hope the rain gods don`t have lecherous tendencies.")

[axn]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

"better hope the rain gods don`t have lecherous tendencies."

Which brings to mind an intriguing question: what would a lecherous god's optimal strategy be, to maximize the "viewing time"?