Atheism Explained

For instance, if churchgoers of denomination x are mainly farmers, they will be different in many ways from the population as a whole, and if you find that these churchgoers are rarely convicted of fraud, this could be just because farmers (let’s suppose) are rarely convicted of fraud, compared with other occupations. There are ways to disentangle the effects of different influences, but it’s quite a tricky exercise in statistics, and it’s easy to put a foot wrong.

Another difficulty is that social scientists can’t examine people’s souls and measure the type of religious commitment they have. So what they do is try to find out whether people are affiliated with a church and whether they go to services regularly. This is something concrete and measurable, whereas the depth of someone’s religious faith or commitment is something hard to pin down. Even this may not be accurate, however, for most studies merely ask people how often they attend services. It’s too expensive to follow them around and find out how truthful their answers are.

For several decades numerous studies were reported showing that people who attend religious services have lower crime rates than people who don’t. The same research also persistently showed that people attending Protestant services have lower crime rates than people attending Catholic services, while those attending Jewish services have even lower crime rates than the Protestants. It was often speculated that there might be a ‘hellfire effect’, that people who believed in God’s retribution for sin would have an added deterrent against breaking the law (despite the fact that Jews pay less attention to the afterlife than Christians).

Then in work published in 2006, an economist named Paul Heaton looked more closely at the results of some of these earlier studies and came up with a different conclusion.¹⁰² Heaton found an overlooked flaw in the design of these studies: they had failed to control for the fact that high crime in a locality causes reduced church attendance.

When this was corrected for, Heaton found that church attendance was associated with more crime, not less, though the observed difference was ‘not significant’, meaning that it was so small it was likely to be due to chance. Essentially then, Heaton found that church affiliation has no measurable effect on the crime rate.

If you think about religion in relation to anti-social behavior the following striking and quite well-known facts are liable to occur to you. Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have much lower levels of religious involvement than the United States—and also much lower levels of most kinds of crime, especially violent crime. Japan has even lower levels of religious involvement than Europe (and what religious observance there is, is mainly nontheistic), and Japan has astonishingly low crime rates, even by European standards.

In 2005 Gregory Paul published a study comparing eighteen industrially advanced nations.¹⁰³ He concluded that a higher level of religious belief within a country goes along with higher homicide rates, higher young-adult suicide rates, higher abortion rates, higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and lower acceptance of the theory of evolution.

Paul’s study was criticized by several social scientists, who argued that it was inconclusive because of allegedly lax statistical procedures, and because Paul did not attempt to look at different types of religious belief. Partly in response to Paul, Gary Jensen produced a study in 2006 looking at over forty nations and distinguishing between ‘dualistic’ and ‘God-only’ religions.¹⁰⁴ His conclusion was that dualistic religion (belief in the Devil as well as God) was associated with more violence as well as other social evils, while God-only religion (belief in God without belief in the Devil) was no more associated with these evils than non-religion.

The difficulties in disentangling the actual influences at work are especially great when doing comparisons between entire nations, and I don’t have much confidence in Paul’s conclusions or Jensen’s.

Contrary to an impression given in the popular literature, the studies aimed at finding whether religious belief leads to better health are very few. All the relevant studies up to 2006 are summarized and criticized by Richard Sloan,¹⁰⁵ who points out the shortcomings of these studies and identifies the many ways in which they are misrepresented—sometimes by the people who do the studies, more often by journalists and theistic propagandists. However, attempts to find some health benefits of religious adherence will continue, and no doubt some rigorous studies will be done which take us closer to an understanding of what the actual health effects of different forms of religious commitment are.

A 1972 study by George Comstock found that church attendance is correlated with quicker recovery from illnesses. This result continues to be cited by theists, though Comstock himself subsequently withdrew the conclusion that church attendance could be beneficial for health. The problem is that his analysis didn’t control for the possibility that people with serious or worsening illness may find it harder to get to church. In that case, we could explain the correlation by saying that worsening illness reduces church attendance, rather than by church attendance benefiting health.

Recently there has been a huge growth of research studies of how happy people actually are.¹⁰⁶ These studies show a very slight advantage in happiness (‘subjective well-being’ or SWB) among churchgoers. This should be seen in the context of the more conspicuous findings of this research: that most people in all the advanced industrial countries are happy, that the countries with the happiest populations are Switzerland, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries, that having a higher real income is strongly correlated with happiness, and that freedom is also strongly correlated with happiness. There’s also powerful evidence that once various extreme sources of wretchedness are removed by economic growth, while most people are then happy, their level of happiness stays close to a ‘set point’ which is largely governed by their genes.

What are we to make of all this? After decades of reports that belief in God had good effects, the last few years have seen a spate of reports that theistic belief has evil effects or no significant effects. I think we should take all these findings with a large pinch of salt, while not in any way decrying the efforts of social scientists to arrive at a more accurate picture of what is really going on in human cultures. I’ve heard atheists say that the percentage of atheists in prison is much lower than in the general population, but I immediately think that there may be ways in which it pays prisoners to profess a religious affiliation.

Suppose that in the future some new correlations are found between churchgoing and various good things. I don’t think this would mean much as a practical guide. Whenever such research has looked at different religious denominations, it has always found differences among the denominations. Shall we then convert to that religious denomination which has the best health record (Seventh-Day Adventism?) or the lowest crime rate (Judaism?) or the highest real income (Unitarian Universalist?)? (The denominations in parentheses are just my first guesses.) But if we’re not going to do that, why support theism in general because of such side-benefits?

If churchgoing is beneficial, it could be that churchgoing is correlated with healthier lifestyles like not smoking. In that case, it’s possible to get the benefits without going to church, by opting for the healthier lifestyle (or accepting increased health risks as part of the cost of the enjoyment yielded by the less healthy lifestyle). It could be that people who go to church receive benefits from taking part in community activities, and that what they believe is immaterial (except insofar as it helps to motivate them to participate). It could be that religious devotion is beneficial but has nothing to do with belief in God: maybe Buddhists, Jains, or Unitarian Universalists gain as much from attending services as Jews, Christians, or Muslims.

Above all, there is the problem that an association between churchgoing and something good doesn’t show which is cause and which is effect (or whether both are the effect of some third factor). Perhaps, for example, married people are more likely to go to church than single people (there is much evidence that married people are happier and healthier than the unmarried). Or perhaps, in a culture where most people believe in God, extreme misfortune causes people to cease to believe in God and thus stop going to church, and extreme misfortune is associated with numerous material and moral evils.

We can hope that these purely factual questions will eventually be settled by research and by improved social science theory. But right now, despite centuries of theory and research, the study of the actual social and medical effects of theistic and other belief-systems is in its infancy.

What we can say is that those effects are probably not large. Any connection between belief in God and good or bad health or behavior is not so dramatic that either theism or atheism is going to cause the social order to collapse or to degenerate into general misery.

Rational discussion is not an all-powerful force shaping the way people think, but neither is it a negligible force. Free debate tends to lead to the growth of those ideas favored by reason and by the evidence. Since atheism is so favored, it will always win out against theism wherever there is free debate.

Most of the world’s people still live in low-income countries, and in most of these theistic belief is tremendously powerful. Yet people in low-income countries want the benefits of economic growth. As they get these benefits, their religious commitment, or at least that of their grandchildren, declines. I am speaking here in the perspective of centuries, not election cycles: there can be irritating flare-ups of theistic ideology during the course of modernization.

Among industrialized countries, the United States stands out as a solitary and quite remarkable exception. Its level of belief in God or of any important religious ideas and its level of regular visits to a place of worship are vastly higher than Europe’s or Japan’s, and fit the usual profile of a third-world country.

Although the U.S. is the great exception among industrialized countries, in the sheer scale of its theistic activity, the trend in the U.S. is just the same as in Europe: active commitment to theistic religion declines with every passing decade. The U.S. has recently experienced massive immigration of comparatively devout theists from third world countries, yet the decline in religious participation has overwhelmed the effect of immigration.

Many people have become alarmed by the rise of the Christian Right. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the Christian Right, by strictly dispassionate standards, has been an almost total failure. ¹⁰⁸ None of its major objectives has so far been achieved, and evangelical involvement in politics has further discredited evangelical Christianity. Viewed from within the history of American Protestantism, the Christian Right is one more manifestation of decay.

In the United States, the proportion of people polled who say they have no religion is very low by European standards, but it rises ineluctably. Of course, some of those who say they have no religion do believe in God, just as some who identify with a religion have no belief in God. But precise statistics on theistic belief are harder to obtain for a long period, and statistics of religious affiliation give a rough indication.

America’s periodic waves of religious revival should not be feared but viewed with sympathy. Each wave recruits young enthusiasts for theistic religion. They tend to have a high level of honesty: they care deeply about the truth of their ideas. The best and the brightest of them think for themselves, criticize the received doctrine, repudiate it, and eventually become atheists.

America’s loss of theistic commitment has been slow but has now reached a tipping point. Over the next fifty years, we will witness a more rapid shrinkage of organized religion and theistic belief in the United States. Half a century from now, the U.S. will probably still have higher levels of theistic belief and religious practice than Europe or industrialized Asia and Latin America, but the difference will be modest. If I were a real-estate speculator I would be checking out church buildings, as most of those that now exist will soon have to be assigned to other uses.

In the immediate future we can expect to see an intensified American preoccupation with ‘atheism’, hence the demand for books like this one. But in a longer perspective, as belief in God dwindles, people will just stop talking about God or atheism, unless they are historians of ideas who study such vanished ideologies as Mithraism or Marxism.

There was a time when all decent people were horrified at the thought of cutting open dead bodies but today no one bothers to label themselves ‘pro-autopsy’. Atheism is like pro-autopsyism: when it’s universal, people will no longer talk about it or even have a name for it.

Clear thinking about God, which I believe this book encourages, can be a valuable exercise and can save numerous individuals much emotional discomfort. It has therapeutic value for as long as theism remains a conspicuous feature of our cultural landscape. For some, it’s also a fascinating way of getting into philosophy and the history of human culture.

Ultimately, atheism is limited. Atheism is like a clean water supply: very elementary and purely negative. It doesn’t tell us how to conduct our personal lives or how to organize our social order. But then, despite first impressions, neither does theism.

Does Belief in God Make Life Better?

Can God Improve Your Health?

Beyond Theism and Atheism