Razib, is there much of a social cost in being an Atheist in America? Do they face real prejudice?

In my country, which is considerably more secular than America, there are no social costs at all. Atheists are common and taken for granted, especially among intellectual types.

Razib, is there much of a social cost in being an Atheist in America? Do they face real prejudice?

i think it depends on where you live. i think the biggest social cost in many areas is that churches are essential networking tools. to some extent the unitarian-universalist church serves as an atheist node point i suspect.

as for more explicit discrimination, well, i don't think it is a big deal if people don't make a big fuss about it. here in oregon something like 20% of the population is non-religious, and a large minority are atheists. but, i had a friend who took a job in louisiana, and as an agnostic who was raised unitarian-universalist she did feel kind of an outsider. people would make jokes about non-christians going to fry and shit at work, assuming she was of course a christian.

I can't imagine joining a quasi-church just to network.

Most of my countrymen would just go to discos, bars and other licenced watering holes. An atheist might join a sceptically oriented society or club. Politics and political causes are popular networking ruses. So are sport and gyms, hobbies (the problem being to find hobbies that appeal to the opposite sex.)

The majority probably meet up at work.

Razib: Once again, I bow before your text-production skills. I will proceed to actually read this behemoth once I wake up a bit more...

Razib, how much of professed atheism (or, for that matter, theism) do you think is a result of social group signaling? For example, there seems to be a pretty strong meme out there that atheism is a sign of intelligence. It seems to me that a lot of people are motivated by wanting to be a part of that group. (Something similar could be happening in Louisiana, in a different direction.)

david,

in the US, not much. in other countries, perhaps more.

Barrett's book is pretty slender, yet it costs fifty-five bucks. Razib, do you recommend it?

I am a big fan of Boyer (and Atran too, although his book is not as well written). In fact, Boyer's book Religion Explained is why I got into evolutionism and psychology in the first place. I used to be deeply religious, and Boyer's explanation of how a phenomenon as rich, complex, nuanced, and emotional as religious belief might be explained in terms of elegant underlying mechanisms lit a fire in my imagination that has never really gone out ...

Fifty-five bucks though. Burning imaginations don't buy food.

Razib, do you recommend it?

no.

I used to be deeply religious

Darth, how does one go from "deeply religious" to... what? I'm looking for a self-aware answer, not "X happened and I lost faith" - this apparently goes against all of the hypotheses in the post (unless your circumstances radically changed), but obviously it does happen.

Excellent post Razib.


The closer you are to a rare event the more reasonable it is to believe that it wasn’t chance, but destiny. (Also the further from the source the more likely that error or falsehood has been introduced into the story.)

Personal experience vs. second hand story Bayes probability analysis:

Probability that a specific person wins the lottery = .0000001
(I chose 1 in 10 million instead of Razib’s 1 in 100 million.)

Probability that the world is sufficiently strange that I am destined to win the lottery = .000001 (Pick your own number. One in a million seems reasonable to me.)

Total probability of my winning the lottery = (.000001 x 1.0) + (.999999 x .0000001)

I win the lottery. Yay!

I won because I was destined to win
= (.000001 x 1.0)/(.000001 x 1.0 + .999999 x .0000001) approximately = .9

Now if I have ten family members and a family member wins then the probability that a family member was destined to win is about .5.

If I have a hundred friends and one wins the probability that the friend was destined to win is about .1

Suppose each of my hundred friends has a hundred (distinct) friends and one wins the lottery. The probability that the friend of a friend was destined to win is about .001

"But why supernatural agents? Because they have innate inferential richness, and you know people didn't make you, so by elmination it has be something supernatural."

"Supernatural" is interesting here becomes it seems to derive from "people". Our concept of a God is similiar to that of a person or some other agent, such as an animal, but one that is freed from the confines and restrictions of having a physical body. It may be the case that the cognitive apparatus that postulates the existence of Gods and spirits arises out of some other module that mediates between our notion of mental causation and mental events and their embodiment in a flesh and blood body that must act upon the world in the same way the non-animated objects act upon one another. Human actions are bounded by the limits of the human brain, but it seems likely that evolution would have found no need to give us cognitive access to those limits, so the actions of agents may provide an open-ended explanation for events that are otherwise unexplainable. Perhaps this may provide clues as to why gods of monotheistic religions have such incredible, unbounded powers. Evidence for this may show up early in development when children exhibit a concept of "magic" and a distinction between normal and "magical" causation. This may or may not be what you mean by "inferential richness". Some gods, however, seem to be a bit more more material and embodied than one would like to think. For example, it appears that the ancient Greeks felt that their Gods really did have bodies in the same way that human beings do, but just that they were immortal bodies. Assuming that's true, this type of a God might reveal the close assocation that human beings have between agency and mental properties and physical bodies. For example, when ghosts are described, they often appear as transparent versions of the actual person that they used to inhabit. They appear to have a body. Yet, they are thought of as spiritual entities.

this apparently goes against all of the hypotheses in the post (unless your circumstances radically changed), but obviously it does happen.

david, i recall seeing that at least half of american atheists aver having been believers at some point. the hypotheses are probabilistic after all, and barrett's contentions have more to do with the religious than the oddball irreligious.

David Boxenhorn, there is no way I can give a brief answer to your question. Besides, how trustworthy would my narrative be? In any case, I concur with Razib's points about probabilistic causation. I'm sure that the loss of faith on any individual's part is a multifactorial phenomenon that doesn't readily yield to a few simple constructs.

Fly your argument also implies that you'd have to have an extremely strong prior belief in rationality and no fate, in order not to be persuaded by an event like winning the lottery.

The evidence would be less convincing if you were a regular player of course. Then your chance of winning some time in your lifetime are much better.

But on the other hand, if you'd just seen a fortune teller, who told you that you would win the lottery, then you'd believe in fate and fortune tellers.

In that case, how do we avoid believing in fate? Since our lives are full of unique events. E.g. What is the prior probablity of that exact sperm meeting that exact egg to create me? Therefore it was fated that I would be born.

The only way I can see of escaping this trap is to have a prior probability of acausal forces of zero. One must define the prior probability of fate as zero in order to be able to perceive rational causes.

i.e. Fate and reason are diametrically opposed ideas.

Alternatively one might weigh up the probability of the finite number of miracles that happen in a finite lifetime, against the infinite number of other miracles that didn't happen - And conclude that although miracles happen all the time, they are vastly exceeded by the miracles that didn't happen, so the prior probability of miracles is infinitessimal. i.e. There are no acausal forces.

Ummm .... does this make any sense?

Well, Dan, the problem with this line of thought is, if you believe in miracles, you almost certainly will not believe all potential miracles are a priori equally probable. And of course God is inscrutible. Anything out of the ordinary could be the hand of God, but if He chooses not to act, who's to say He should have?

I don't think logic can resolve this. You can have a self-consistent worldview with many miracles, or few, or none.

Excellent post!!!!! I am atheistic now, but have a Master of Divinity from a Baptist Seminary, so I know the other side. In my study of physics, I have reason to believe that everything is fated from the atomic level on up. I wonder if the interconnection of events and processes in life also generates a sense of belief in a supernatural agency. Seemingly improbable events could seem the result of a conscious agency when in fact it could be the result of myriad interconnected factors from the dawn of time and possibly other worlds as well.

George,

you almost certainly will not believe all potential miracles are a priori equally probable

That's what a Bayesian would think of as an unbiased prior. You'd have to start off with something like that if you were thinking rationally. If you knew nothing else about the world.

Of course if you were living in the Garden of Eden, and walking with God in the cool of the day, then you wouldn't be starting off in that totally ignorant state.

But in that case, I would think that a truly fatalistic culture would have no reason to expect there to be mechanistic rules of nature. So it's hard for me to see why they'd ever develop science and technology. I mean God could act mechanically if he chose to, but why would he choose to?

It's like creationism. Of course God could have created a living world where all the species are related in a treelike hierarchy, but you wouldn't have expected it in advance, whereas evolution predicts that exact kind of relationship.

the new york academy of sciences has a podcast "science and the city" with a discussion between Mike Gazzaniga and Tom Wolfe concerning Gazzaniga's "The Ethical Brain"... http://www.nyas.org/snc/readersR...sp? articleID=32

He has some discussion in the book about these issues. But I'm not really certain anyone has brought his split-brain work to bear directly. At the beginning of the discussion he goes over the ideas about how the left brain basically has a 'narrator' in it that tries to explain why the right brain does stuff even if it has no access to the real causes. This strikes me as just the sort of brain chunk you would need to have HADD going strong.. So we at least know that most of the time it's on the left side.. maybe we can get in there and get a closer look with fMRI or sumthin..

A similar issue confounds economists who find the natural propensity of people to see "the state" as a person, with singular sets of information and intentions, as opposed to a collective that consists of individuals with varying goals and information sets. Over at Cafe Hayek:

In the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly (paid subscription required), Yale University Professor of Psychology Paul Bloom reports on research that suggests that our minds are evolved to anthropomorphize events and institutions.
...
Evidence of this anthropomorphization is ample: count how many times you read or hear the phrase “we as a nation choose” this, or “we as a nation did” that – as if 300 million of us are analogous to an individual who perceives, chooses, and acts. Likewise, note how many times you find people who believe that “the market” “seeks” or “aims” to achieve this or that outcome.

see http://cafehayek.typepad.com/ hay...umans_gene.html

I'd like to emphasize the link b/w ToM + HADD on the one hand and self-deception on the other. One key way to relieve cognitive dissonance (momentarily perceiving yourself as less "benefective") is by self-deception -- I'm constantly late for work not b/c I don't get ready on time, but b/c the metro trains have it in for me. I'm normally on time, but there was a thunderstorm today -- sure I knew about it and could have left extra early to compensate, but if only the rain hadn't *intervened*, I would've been on time!

Since you mentioned Baron-Cohen, I googled sex differences in self-deception but didn't get anything definitive one way or another. I'd think that just as women are more religious than men, they're more prone to self-deception. Not in some backward sense where women are incapable of reason and men are disinterested self-reflecters, but in the partially overlapping bell curves sense. You could test that by examining who makes more excuses that implicate someone / something else when students or employees don't do their HW, show up late, etc. The prediction would be that males would outnumber females in the "yeah, I didn't do my HW, but I don't care / my bad" category, and vice versa in the "No, but you don't undestand -- " category.

What did these authors say about racial differences in religiosity? I'd look at statistics of membership to some church, but that's misleading since, as you noted, many non-religious people's beliefs are astrological, animist, etc. Rushton's rule predicts an african - white - asian order. Asians show a lopsided IQ profile tending toward Baron-Cohen's "male brain" w/ much greater spatial than verbal skills, and Arthur Hu's IQ page shows african-americans IQ profile tending toward the "female brain" w/ better verbal skills (and top-level african-origin novelists, poets, songwriters, etc. outnumber african painters, sculptors, fashion designers, etc.). The prediction would be for greater religiosity among africans, and if what I said before panned out, greater tendency toward self-deception. Again, only in an overlapping bell curves sense, nothing crazy.

If asians are less likely to self-deceive, perhaps that accounts for a portion of the variance in racial differences in levels of self-esteem and depression / suicide.

agnostic, on a gestalt level i think you would have to say there is an east asian -> european -> african spectrum in religiosity. even among koreans only 1/2 are religiously affiliated. the main confounding factor in this is that i wouldn't bet that east asians are less superstitious though. i.e., organized religion might be weak, but folk religion, quack medicine, geomancy, astrology, etc. have are been thick on the ground in east asia.

p.s. see links to a world survey on theism here. you'll see what i mean.

I am an agnostic, though with a religious temparment --ie, I never stop asking the question. I must say, though, when I surf through the t.v. stations with preachers on them, I can't help but think they are agents for atheism. Are they funded by Dawkins? I can imagine that going to a Babtist seminary would have a similar effect -- or to a Jewish one for that matter, especially if orthodox. A lot depends upon your conception of God and the possible mechanisms of His justice (if such a mechanism exists).

Dan Dare: “Fly your argument also implies that you'd have to have an extremely strong prior belief in rationality and no fate, in order not to be persuaded by an event like winning the lottery.”

Yes. Of course it is only one data point. Many examples of being certain something was “fated” to happen and being wrong would act the other way. But one event can change a person’s perspective for life. I know.

An event whose probability I later calculated at less than one-in-a-hundred billion happened to me. The event itself was trivial, just a critical turning point in a game of Risk. But as a mathematician, I was fully aware of how unlikely the occurrence was. That directly led me to wonder what evidence a scientist would need to be convinced that “strange” things happen in this world. I don’t believe the charlatans and crazies who claim to be able to do “strange” things as they wish. The evidence against them is very strong. I only concluded that the world is a strange place and I shouldn’t immediately discount it when a friend relates an unusual occurrence.

(This is hearsay evidence by an anonymous poster so I personally would give it no credence. Such “experiments” are only convincing to those who directly experience them. My guess is that insane people experience “strange” stuff often. So if I were reading this post I’d be more likely to conclude the poster were insane than that the event really happened. It has been over thirty years since that event and I’ve never again experienced anything similar. Even I now question my memory of the event. I really only have memories of my memories. I guess I’m really directing this comment to readers who may have had a similar experience. Hmmm, do insane asylums provide Internet access?)

Here is a link to a Risk Game odds calculator. Put in Attacker = 25 and Defender = 1. Their graph shows the defender surviving past the sixth roll less than 1% of the time. In my game the defender won 25 consecutive rolls. I had counted my attacking armies prior to the battle.

http://db.cs.helsinki.fi/t/ipuus...isk/ webrisk.jsp

They were my dice. I rolled for myself. As attacker I rolled first. I required the defender to use a dice-rolling cup sometime after the sixth loss. The defender rolled numbers between 2 and 6 to win against my rolls. I remember once rolling 1,1,2 and was beaten by a lousy 2.

The probability of the defender winning:

0.3403^23 (23 rolls of three die against one, ties go to the defender)

0.42 (one roll of two die against one)

0.58 (one roll of one die against one)
Giving 1.7e-11 * 0.42 * 0.58 = 0.41412e-11

Or less than one chance in 100 billion. I concluded that the Uniform Probability assumption for die rolls did not apply that evening. I have no idea what happened. I regularly played Risk with the same people and nothing similar happened before or after that game.

I discussed this event with fellow mathematics graduate students. One wondered how I as a scientist could doubt that it was a chance occurrence. I wondered how as a mathematician he could believe a one-in-a-hundred billion occurrence was more likely than the possibility that something weird happened that night. (To be fair he wasn’t there so he was reacting to hearsay evidence. I would likely have responded the same way.)

Fly. I don't think I've ever heard of this game.

The only board game I've ever played in decades is Monopoly and I have a version of that now on my PC which is so much better than playing with a physical board. Like you don't need to find someone to play with you - You can just play against the computer.

I can't think of any 1 in 100 billion, or anything like it, noticeable event that has happened to me any time in my lifetime. Not since conception anyway.

Perhaps running into friends that you haven't seen in decades would be the closest, but that would be 1 in millions at best, not billions.

But a lot of minor events are amazingly improbable.

Like you are going for a 5 kilometer walk and it starts to rain. What is the probability that you will collide with a particular raindrop? Yet somehow you do.

"I'd like to emphasize the link b/w ToM + HADD on the one hand and self-deception on the other. One key way to relieve cognitive dissonance (momentarily perceiving yourself as less "benefective") is by self-deception"

This seems to say that the type of self-deception that perpetuates religious beliefs is not specific to religion itself, and the ToM and HADD play a more important role in starting religious beliefs than preserving them in the face of contradictory evidence. There may be some sort of personality trait associated with a kind of stubbornness that makes it difficult for people to change their beliefs and that may be more prevalent in religious people.

Dan Dare: “Perhaps running into friends that you haven't seen in decades would be the closest, but that would be 1 in millions at best, not billions.”

In her 8th grade biology class, my sister’s teacher was showing slides from his prior job as a forest ranger. The class was in Oklahoma. His first slide showed four children playing on the Yellowstone National Park sign. My sister jumped up and shouted, “THAT’s US.” Sure enough he had captured our family on film clear across the country long before he knew my sister.

To me that was a coincidence. So many small things happen in life that rare combinations crop up frequently but are seldom noticed.

The Risk game stood out because it wasn’t just any sequence of die rolls. (Or raindrops.) Even one “wrong” roll would lead to my winning. The sequence was so long that it triggered my interest early on. The “experiment” was very simple so calculating the odds was easy.

One hundred billion is so large that it may be greater than the total number of dice games played throughout all history. (Avg. number of players per year x Avg. number of games per player x number of years dice games have been played.)


“The only board game I've ever played in decades is Monopoly and I have a version of that now on my PC which is so much better than playing with a physical board. Like you don't need to find someone to play with you - You can just play against the computer.”

I “wasted” many years playing Chess, Risk, Spades, Hearts, and Bridge. Later I enjoyed playing computer games more than playing people. (I didn’t really like beating friends at Chess. I liked losing even less. And computer games such as Civilization were far more interesting than any of the old board games.)

I haven’t played any games in years. Too much interesting stuff to read on the Internet.

Dan,

I played Monopoly as a kid, but disliked the fact that there was too much randomness in it. I actually created a very sophisticated game based on it, with many more roles and alternate winning strategies. Unfortunately after 6 months of making cards and cutting out pieces, my Mom accidently identified it as garbage, and threw it out :(

You must be fairly senior in years, as Risk the board-game has been around for decades, a computerized, enhanced version of the game, marketed under the title Civilization, has been around for 12 years or more. I used to play it a lot. I still play an Open Source version called FreeCiv.

Fly,

Interestingly, like you, I much prefer to play against the computer rather than other individuals - that way you deal purely with the vissicitudes of the game, rather than the bitching and moaning of people - particularly when they are losing, which was fairly inevitable when they played against me?!

First, is Determinism true?

Hmmm, I wonder what the correlations might be for religiosity among women in patrilocal cultures vs matrilocal cultures?

pconroy,

I've certainly have heard of Sid Meier's Civilization. I confess to serious computer-game junkie-hood.

I'm more into fps shooters than strategy games, though I quite enjoyed Age of Mythology that I received as a Christmas present last year.

I seriously need to upgrade my PC and/or I am getting the new Xbox-360 and a HD widescreen LCTV.
Sadly it has not yet been released in my country. (Please get a move on Mr Gates.)

Rietzche Boknecht,

First, is Determinism true?

The situation in modern physics is very curious. The underlying time-evolution equations in Quantum Theory are totally deterministic.
But the measurement process yields indeterminate statistical results.

In the early 20th century when QM was invented, they conceived the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of QM in which the state function "collapses" probabilistically to yield the actual measurement.

In recent years this interpretation has fallen out of favor, because it is so inconsistent with the rest of Quantum Theory.
The reason it's a paradox is because one would expect measuring devices to obey the same deterministic laws of quantum physics as everything else. So where does the probability part come from?

No-one fully understands this paradox
IMHO, but there have been many attempts to construct different interpretations of QM to try to understand why and how this happens.

Surveys among physicists show that the most popular new interpretation is currently the Many Worlds Interpretation.
I am not personally a supporter of this interpretation.

I favor a different approach based on Bayesian probability theory.
Unfortunately the construction of a Bayesian version of Quantum Mechanics is not yet a completed project.

Probably the leading worker in this approach is Christopher Fuchs at Bell Labs. I follow his work with great interest.

I am sorry that I can't be more final, but this is still an area of very intense investigation.
It's also very controversial ;-).

It isn't really correct to identify Risk with Civilization -- there is a Civilization boardgame (on which the computer game is based), and there are a few similiarities, but they aren't fundamentally the same. (There are computerized Risk games, though it's hard to do any diplomacy against computer opponents...that's why computerized Monopoly didn't hold much charm for me; you couldn't really *deal*).

Dan, thanks for that response. The Wiki links were interesting.

As for “determinism”, my focus is different. I look at what can be modeled and predicted given human limits of observation and calculation. For example, assume the world is deterministic so only one course of events can happen. But humans can’t measure the exact initial state. Even if the precise initial state were known, the calculations needed to derive future states from the initial state are far, far, far, beyond human technology limits. So human interpretation of reality will be uncertain even if reality is deterministic.

Whether the universe is or is not deterministic is an interesting scientific question. If the universe isn’t deterministic, then the cosmic random number generator is the ultimate magic.

Fly

If there is a core of determinism somewhere deep inside the quantum theory - it seems quite likely to me that we will never be able to access it. Planck's constant being what it is.

QM may forever be true as a theory of measurements - In which case it represents the limit of human knowledge.

Appreciated, Dan Dare. I hadn't kept abreast of the developments in these areas, though immensely interesting indeed. Thanks.

agnostic - interesting question about sex/race differences in self-deception. I'd say it would take a bit of work to define exactly what it is we're talking about. E.g., I can't vouch for the quality of the research, but the only thing I've ever seen written about sex differences in the example you give - blame placing - claimed that females were more likely to place the blame for screw-ups on themselves, and males more likely to attribute their failings to external factors. But even if this were so, how much does this particular trait indicate "self-deception" in total?

At any rate, I'd assert that habits of blame-placing have little to do with sex and a great deal to do with culture. Whether it's a race thing, I don't know, and I'm hard put to see much correlation among religiosity, blame-placing and self-deception. If, as according to your hypothesis, religion, self-deception, and external blame-placing are correlated, and if males and East Asians should have or do less of all of the above, that would leave unexplained for me all the impatient Westeners I've seen driven to apoplexy by what has been described as a more "feminine" style of social relations among, at least, some Asians - obseesion with tact and maintaining social harmony, avoiding displays of anger, endless amounts of emotional energy poured into diffusing and deflecting blame - and the inability, from the perspective of the less male-brained, ostensibly more religious Westerner, to just bloody well put personal feelings aside and get down to business in a nice, proper, impersonal fashion.

If we could get a handle on "self-deception", though, the depression/suicide/self-esteem angle is interesting.

To get away from the anthropomorphic version of the moral law (ie, the Hebraic conception of God) maybe we ought to consider the Hindu and Bhuddist approaches -- not the forms of popular worship, but the six orthodox metaphysical systems developed by the speculative philosophers of India. The aspect of their approach that is interesting to me is that the moral law is seen as immanent, not transcendant: the sort of thing that could work within the laws of probability rather than violating them. The Western idea of Providence is another example, though dealing with the fate of groups rather than of individual human beings, of the same non-anthropomorphic approach. For example while not physically improbable, was it just a happy coincidence that a genius like Lincoln showed up at the crucial moment of the American Civil War, or that the French fleet sailed into Yorktown in the nick of time to assure the victory of George Washington over Cornwall. These were events of profound consequence so far as the future of the American experiment in liberty and the rights of man are concerned. You can see how they might lead some to the idea that America is a providential nation without necessarily anthropomorpisizing (sp?) the source of it all. So maybe the positing of agency in human form is not inevitable? I know this is only semi-coherent, but I wanted to take a stab.

Being a social pariah is a matter of self-esteem today, but in the past it might have been life or death...

My wee wifey points to this as the reason why calling someone a liar could be a shooting matter in the American frontier. "Smile when you say that, partner."