Danger: Religion!
Of course parents worry about the effects of movies, computer games and pop music on their kids. Though causation is hard to prove, correlations -- for example, between watching violent shows and acting violent -- certainly capture people's attention.
In this paper, by Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society, the author uses the same statistical techniques on a different subject. He writes:
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies."
I admit, it's a pleasure to see conservatives' dubious statistical methods wielded against them. Loosely defining religious belief, choosing what and how to count, prefacing your numbers with a polemic about the menace posed by other people's way of life, not bothering to compare the correlation to other possible relationships among the measures: all of this is familiar from claims that sexy videos cause teen pregnancy or that ``Grand Theft Auto'' makes kids violent.
The problem with these moral-panicky assertions is that a correlation between two measures does not establish that one causes the other. Nor does it prove that the connection is more than a coincidence. For example, two recently fallen Illinois politicians -- a governor charged with corruption and a Senate candidate who dropped out after some embarrassing sexual revelations -- were both named Ryan (they were not related). But being named Ryan, despite this correlation, is not a cause of political disaster, nor a sign of some other cause to be discovered.
The lack of significance of a simple correlation in itself is especially important to recall when the measurements you're linking -- with labels like ``religious belief'' or ``bad teen-age behavior'' -- can be defined in so many different ways.
Paul, whose real goal seems to be an assault on the anti-science movement to teach ``intelligent design'' in schools, is blasting at the other side with their own dubious instruments. For the weakness of his analysis, see this thorough explanation by Scott Gilbreath.
In sum, this is science being used as a cover for tribal feeling. ``Danger: Religion!'' is the title of a story by the British science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss, which is set in a time-travelling society whose vehicles are equipped with warning devices to prevent landing in epochs of religious belief. How you feel about the title will tell you how you'll feel about Paul's paper. What you think about it is a different matter.
