Religion doesn’t improve society: more evidence

Sigh. Typical Jerry Coyne New Atheist rhetoric. Takes some cherry-picked statistics (note that the list of figures says nothing about suicide rates or antidepressant use) that demonstrate a correlation but that give no indication whatsoever of which is the cause and which is the effect.

I think I addressed this one before. In order to systematically study the influence of religion on society, you need to conduct your study over multiple generations across multiple different countries and people groups, come up with a way of allowing for the differences between state religion and minority religion, and then figure out how to determine which is the cause and which is the effect.

Basically, this is just the New Atheist equivalent of the YEC claim about the amount of salt in the sea proving that the earth is young. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

3 Likes