Atheism linked to economic innovation, productivity

By Mathew Goldstein

We can reasonably assert that philosophical naturalism has nothing to do with anything beyond the belief that the physical universe obeying natural laws is all that there is.  Nevertheless, beliefs about how our universe functions are unavoidably going to tend to influence individual day to day decisions that could, in turn, have larger implications for society.  The Journal of Institutional Economics recently published a study by two economists, Travis Wiseman of Mississippi State University and Andrew Young of West Virginia University titled Religion: productive or unproductive? that claims to have found evidence for negative correlations between religious belief commitments and some macro economic activity.

The researchers used religion data from a variety of sources: the Pew Form’s 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey; the Gallup Poll’s State of the States surveys from 2004 and 2008; and the Census Bureau’s Religious Congregation and Membership Study of 2000 and 2010.  Religiosity was determined by four factors: regular attendance at religious services, strong belief in God, regular prayer, and viewing one’s religion as “very important.”  “Productive entrepreneurship” was calculated using a combination of new businesses created, new businesses created with 500 or more employees, per-capita venture capital investments, patents per capita, and the growth rate of self-employment.

They found that the percent of individuals reporting as atheist/agnostic is positively associated with productive entrepreneurship.  Conversely, all of the religious variables they tracked “tend to correlate negatively and significantly” with a state’s productive entrepreneurship score. The percentage of a state’s residents who are self-described Christians in particular “robustly correlated” with a lower score in productive entrepreneurship.

The Big God is Watching You & Civilizing Cooperation

by Gary Berg-Cross

The relation between religion and civilization has long been discussed and there are many takes on it.  In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud discussed the aims of civilized life and frustrations in achieving pleasure and happiness.  Religions aren't always interested in the worldly aspects of pleasure and can be at odds with that aspect of human aims.  In The Future of an Illusion, Freud lamented the typically religious person’s preoccupation with what he termed the "enormously exalted father" figure that was central to a God concept. The idea of placating this supposedly higher-power being for some future reward seemed to Freud infantile and absurd. The frustrating reality to Freud was, however, that the bulk of mankind hangs onto this illusion.

In Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict' Psychologist Ara Norenzayan updates some of the speculation about the historical role of Religion in the development of civilization.  He provides a long list of studies on particular points to suggest that the psychological factors at play in the early connect are still with us.  But like many things modern we might now know how to achieve some of the positive influences in a secular society with less of the downsides that religions can promote.

Norenzayan starts with the observation that  around 12,000 years ago or so human societies scaled up from small, tight-knit kin groups of hunter-gatherers to what we have now - large, anonymously, co-resident & cooperative societies. Emphasis on cooperative.  In Big Gods, major portions of which can be read online, Norenzayan  hypothesizes that normal individual cognitive processes and cultural selection explains the success of very early religions and something else – that increase in cooperation.  Norenzayan’s idea is that there was something that solved the problem of generating more cooperation. And he proposed that something as simple as “God/someone powerful is watching – so be good!”  was it.  Developed as part of religion in the Neolithic period it enable more complex activities.  Here is how one review put it.

Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods--powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups.

With a Big God whip ancient societies could solve co-operation dilemmas much better, and as a result they expanded. Not necessarily a new idea but Big Gods provides an elegant overview including real research suggestive of how belief in Big/super-knowing, all powerful and very morally intrusive gods emerged and influenced cooperation.

He has a nice summary called  "The Eight Principles of Big Gods" whch are:

1. Watched people are nice people.

2. Religion is more in the situation than in the person.(more on this later)

3. Hell is stronger than heaven. (yes hell gets invented somewhere in the 1 millennium BCE)

4. Trust people who trust in God. (yes, you can't trust those none believes especially)

5. Religious actions speak louder than words.

6. Unworshipped Gods are impotent Gods. (the orignal way to kill a god, just talk up your own and invent commandments to do that)

7. Big Gods for Big Groups. (our God is bigger than yours so we are exceptional)

8. Religious groups cooperate in order to compete.

Evidence includes the Sunday Effect  of pro-social behavior. For Christians, reminders of religion are typically more salient on Sundays than on other days of the week (and of course at Christmas and Easter). One study looked at responsiveness to an online charity drive over a period of several weeks. Christians and non-believers were equally likely to give to charity except on Sundays. On that day Christians are/were 3 times as likely to give. These results suggest that the “religious situation” is more important than the “religious disposition.”  There are a host of other studies showing that self-reported religious people don’t help out in tasks more than secular people.  But is ideas of God are evoked while playing word games. The game innocently planted thoughts of God (divine, God, spirit) in some participants. Other study participants played the same word game but without religious content (cat, dog tree). The result in an evoked religious situation religious participants do help more.

But there is a down side to this type of cooperation because in group effects. These group effects are better seen in the later first millennium BCE era of the Big Faith-Religions. This is  'Axial Age' (as Karl Jaspers called it).  Such Big Faiths built on Big Gods to further develop inside group cooperate. “Supernatural surveillance” by established Big Gods helped early religions expand while sustaining social solidarity within the group.  The non-civilizing down side is that it discourages cooperation with outsiders. His might be noted as running as a theme in parts of the Hebrew old testament. Those other guys are God’s enemies.  So this type of civilizing cooperation is limited and comes at a cost. It’s part of the discontent with civilization.  As Norenzayan notes:

People who are going to sacrifice for their co-religionists are the same people who are going to be, under the condition of threat or conflict, intolerant or even violent to people who are not of their own religion. Quote from Interview

Speaking of Big God’s enemies, some Psychologists have argued that concern with supernatural surveillance also explains one of the most persistent but hidden prejudices tied to religion: intolerance of atheists. Surveys consistently find that in the United States, as well as in other societies with religious majorities, atheists have one of the lowest approval ratings of any social group. It makes sense.  We don’t believe that we are being watched from the clouds.  How could we be cooperative or moral?

What’s the solution here?  Well understanding is a start, but facts and reasoned arguments are often resisted. Luckily we have real world experimentation going on in more secular societies to show that human ingenuity and understanding can engineer secular-based cooperation.

But Norenzayan  includes some warnings via 2 secular principles that follow the Big 8:

9. "Combined with strong secular institutions that keep the cooperative engines going, existential security is the nemesis of religion." (p. 186)

10. "Prosocial religions have one crucial advantage over secular ones - the demographic windfall of more children. And that religious advantage is the secularists' Achilles' heel." (p. 192) Its that Big God - Big Group idea again, so we have to be smart if not quite as big...

More at: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/research.htm

Capturing Non-Belief in Fiction

by Gary Berg-Cross

Interesting ideas can often be explored through the lens of fiction. If Huck Finn was an insightful character from the 19^th century Holden Caulfield, the 17-year-old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is one from the 20^th read in school.  Young Caulfield is widely recognized as a figure resistance to growing older in an irrational world manifest in an attempt to protect childhood innocence. As a 50s publication, catcher’s Holden quickly became an icon for estranged teenage rebellion and James Dean-style angst.  And, by the way along with Huck he seems very much a skeptical if not atheist figure. "Catcher" is very much about the detection of hypocrisy in American life and religion as Twain’s Huck found earlier in his trip down the river of American Culture. Religious piety about what is right and how to lead a good life is very much part of a hypocritical web. Twain, as discussed in Tom Flynn’s excellent The New Encyclopedia of UNBELIEF, held a Calvinist view of life and God as a trickster that spins a web that traps most of us in a personal hell on false belief.

Wikipedia has sort of a list of noted atheists and agnostics characters .”  in the broad category of “Fiction” who have, “either through self-admission within canon works or through admission of the character creator(s), been associated with a disbelief in a supreme deity or follow an agnostic approach toward religious matters.

It's mostly a list from TV and such.  For example, Kurt Hummel is listed from the musical comedy-drama Glee.  People like Dr. Allison Cameron  on House is obviously an example of a skeptical, free-thinking character. We might see more in pop culture as the Nones-way-of-life proceeds.

A bit more interesting is Rebecca Goldstein's (Steve Pinker’s wife) contemporary novel (36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction).   This uses the New Atheism as a driver of contemporary issues such as celebrity and influence raised by the NA movement.

Goldstein's protagonist is Cass Seltzer, a psychology of religion prof who gets pulled into the spotlight by the surprise success of his book called, after William James, The Varieties of Religious Illusion. Both Seltzer's fictional book and Goldstein's actual novel contain an appendix, -  36 Arguments for the Existence of God. The appendix is not actually an argument in support of god, and Matthew Goldstein (aka Explicit Atheist), often a blogger here, would have a field day in shooting down the arguments.  Maybe he has already.  These arguments are really more conversational points and the lightness of position (reflecting the lightness of what earns popularity in today’s culture) is partly what gives the Seltzer character his path to fame and media access- an atheist with a soul. It’s a bit like former Mayor Koch and the people I discussed in by blog “Do They Contradict Themselves?”

Nobel Prize literature has some atheist and freethinker characters.  One is in Ferit Orhan Pamuk’s (aka Orhan Pamuk) early 80s work called Silent House. Pamik  is a multi-talented Turkish novelist/ screenwriter,  and received the Nobel Prize in Literature (2006). After winning his proze more of his work has been translated and getting reviews in English language outlets.  One of this is Silent House whose main character is a bitter, bereaving 90-year-old widow Fatma.  The silence of the book is about important issues that are not talked about directly.  The story takes place somewhere in Turkey's violent summer of 1980. The Turkish Armed Forces were about to restored order via a coup after violence had broken out between right-leaning nationalists and communists. This coup was to transform Turkey from its fading economic to a more explicit secular if very military state.  

Pamuk uses a house locale and a ritual summer visit from grandchildren to hold up a bit of mirror about the noisy, dissipation and dissonance of Turkey in that era of political and cultural change. As one reviewer noted Fatma's life is, “just like her house, isn't silent. Instead, it's pensive and nearly bursting with lament, shame, sadness, and squashed hopes.“ The widow Fatma herself is silent about the deeper things but bemoans the outer disorder:

When all that horrible hullabaloo lets up, when all that noise coming from the beach, the motorboats, the wailing kids, the drunken cursing, the songs, radios, and televisions, quiet down, and the last car goes screaming past, I slowly get up from my bed and stand just behind my shutters listening to the outdoors: nobody's there, they're all exhausted and have gone to sleep.

Fatma's shushing, keep-the-world and its problems out of here is a great part of the silence, it is her deceased husband, Selahattin the local doctor that is the atheist, intellectual voice that speaks through her. It is some of his political, rational and intellectual hopes that have been squashed and silenced.  We learn of this family patriarch as Fatma recalls him to us wile alone in her bedroom. Her monologues ruminate on their joint past and we learn that Selahattin has been exiled from Istanbul for his leftist politics. Madden the doctor doubles down on a self-and-family-destruct course by proclaiming (Nietzsche style) that God dead. For good measure he throws in darts about Eastern vs. Western/scientific values. 

Isolated in an illiberal backwater and fortified by drink, Selahattin dedicates himself to an encyclopedic task – comprehensively rewriting the world to bring secularism and the scientific method to the Turks. It’s doomed to failure and passes on the burden to  grandson Faruk, who following his grandfather (and father) in working on a manuscript whose goal is to disprove the existence of God, offer a rational if reductionist explanation of Turkey and the universe too.

The shape of the atheist doctor’s struggles is somewhat familiar from other fiction.  It is like a Russian novel (Turgenev was apparently an influence).  But his shadow casts a feeling some of us may recognize even in the West that he idolizes a relative bit.  And perhaps we see some of the doctor's questions echoed when groups of free thinkers meet in the 21^st century . We wonder why science has yet to triumph over various hardened forms of superstition. We may wonder why there passive acceptance of much that is wrong and be improved on.  We may identify with lonely pioneers who struggle to organize thought around them and reason things out in times when intellect is sequestered by ignorance a conventions of hypocrisy.

For a review of “Silent house”  see Marie Arana, in WaPO October 08, 2012

Images

Holden Caufield: http://familyguy.wikia.com/wiki/Holden_Caulfield

36 Arguments: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6734417-36-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god

 

Silent House: http://www.blackcatbooks.com.au/index.php?cPath=1&&page=2