Would you believe science if it said ‘yes’?
An ambitious new survey concluding that religious children are more selfish than non-religious ones, has been widely rejected by religious readers citing a variety of potential study design flaws. Would you have demonstrated the same opposition had the study reached an inverse conclusion?
The study by the University of Chicago, published in Current Biology, meticulously surveyed a group of a thousand children, and determined that “sickular” kids are more generous than religious ones.
For those concerned for the obvious reason, the study does not question the validity of religion itself, nor is it a silver bullet in the arsenal of secular philosophers. The study evaluates people harboring certain ideas, not the veracity of ideas themselves.
The response from many Pakistanis online has been negative. Numerous objections were raised, ranging from plausible but unproven, to outright absurd. The idea that religion makes people moral (and the lack of it makes non-religious people less so), has been accepted at face value for much of human history. Naturally, people assumed that the results of this latest study have something to do with strong confounding factors, small sample size, or some other human error yet unidentified.
Skeptics must think critically, not just about their objections, but about their conscious or subconscious biases on the matter. Would similar resistance have been mounted if the study had confirmed our worldview of religion as an essential part of raising good children; or would the skeptics have moved on amid a chorus of “Mashallah”?
Note that the difference in levels of generosity may not have much to do with religious values at all, but rather the prevalence of religious values. One of the theories being used to help explain these findings, is that the difference may be attributed to religious majoritarianism, and not necessarily the values enshrined in religious systems.
In a world where theists form a clear majority, there are certain privileges to be savored. Watching four out of five people confirm your beliefs, allows confidence in one’s own righteousness as well as a firm sense of security. Depending on how diverse one’s society is, this confidence may balloon to a point where the mere whiff of dissent sets off an alarm, followed by discrimination against the dissenter, seldom culminating in a hate crime. Consider the ongoing deadly attacks against Bangladeshi secular writers, for instance.
Even in ostensibly secular countries like the United States, religious institutions enjoy vast influence and theists collectively constitute a roughly 78 percent majority. A Pew Study marks atheists among the least trusted group of people in the United States, while a Gallup Poll shows that 45 percent wouldn’t vote for a qualified atheist. Conventional wisdom dictates that politically empowered people have more freedom to act mean and get away with it. The non-religious underdog is more likely to be penalised for the same transgression.
Even Jean Decety, the neurobiologist behind the study, observes that the behaviour of religious children is not in line with the religious teachings.
“It’s an unconscious bias. They don’t even see that’s not compatible with what they’ve been learning in church,” he said, as reported by Forbes.
It’s a phenomenon he refers to as ‘moral licensing’. Essentially, it means that we are unconsciously so convinced of our inherent goodness because of what we believe and the religious rituals we perform, that we are led to believe that we have nothing to compensate for by acting generously towards other.
In Islamic vernacular, that would loosely translate to ‘takabur’. Most Muslims agree that Haquq-e-Allah (rights of Allah) and Haquq-ul-Ibad (rights of people) are both requirements to be fulfilled, and one cannot be used as a substitute for the other. But that is for religious scholars to decide, and I claim no authority on the matter.
My concern is the ‘selective’ acceptance of science in Pakistan. This selectivity is largely motivated by cultural and political reasons, rather than a true academic disagreement.
In Pakistan, denial of evolution is common, but of climate change far less so as it ruffles fewer cultural feathers. In fact, acceptance of climate change allows one the moral authority to berate larger carbon emitters like the United States. This acceptance is often not based on honest evaluation of data that proves man-made global warming, any more than the denial of evolution and natural selection is based on unbiased assessment of fossil records and genetic proof.
When all else fails, a tirade is launched against the legitimacy of science itself. It is asserted that the human institution of science has no real power to determine objective truths; take, for instance, the fact that scientists once believed that the Earth was flat.
There is a thought exercise I routinely recommend to people who selectively reject scientific truths. If your doctor urges you to take drug A for your heart disease, citing studies demonstrating its efficacy, would you take it? Or would you insist that your opinion as a non-doctor is as good as the doctor’s expert opinion, since science keeps changing and is often wrong about things?
Would you go about poking holes in the cited study, arguing that the sample size is too small, or that the apparent improvement of the subjects is the result of varying genetic and environmental variations, or would you simply take the pill as prescribed?
Study results aren’t sacrosanct, and can indeed be challenged. But this opposition is far more meaningful coming from other experts, and not non-scientists with nothing more to base their stance on than a ‘hunch’ that the data “doesn’t seem right”.
Science is not to be resisted for personal comforts, because truth rarely looks out for our convenience.
Religious beliefs may be worthy, but humans are always biased. Unconscious biases need to be countered through conscious critical thinking and sincere introspection. If left unchecked, they lead to sanctimoniousness and prejudice, and cause us to unknowingly betray our own ideals.