From, of all places, a comment on Slashdot:
Imagine two baskets.
One contains all the things explained by the phrase “god did it”. The other contains all the things explained by “science”.
A long time ago, everything was in the god basket, and nothing at all was in the science basket. The weather? God did it. Pregnancy? God did it. Disease? God did it. Where does stuff come from? God did it.
Then, as humanity learned more stuff, things got taken out of the god basket and put into the science basket. The weather. Pregnancy. Disease. Where stuff comes from, right back until a few billionths of a second before the big bang, getting closer all the time.
So what’s left in the god basket? Good question — but that’s not where I’m going with this, because actually that’s irrelevant.
The point is this: there has never — never ever ever — been a single thing that has been taken out of the science basket and put back in the god basket. Not one. Ever.
The traffic is all one way.
December 14th, 2007
Derek
I’m an atheist and generally find most arguments on behalf of religion to be tedious and self-serving. But I just read an interesting one from none other Charlie Munger:
I’ll go further: I say economic systems work better when there’s an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. We have a charming Irish Catholic priest in our neighborhood and he loves to say, “Those old Jews may have invented guilt , but we perfected it.” (Laughter). And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.
The rest of the presentation is pretty teriffic, too. Here are a couple other chestnuts.
On Arthur Laffer:
When I talk about this false precision, this great hope for reliable, precise formulas, I am reminded of Arthur Laffer, who’s in my political party, and who is one of the all-time horse’s asses when it comes to doing economics. His trouble is his craving for false precision, which is not an adult way of dealing with his subject matter.
On Freud:
The third weakness that I find in economics is what I call physics envy. And of course, that term has been borrowed from penis envy as described by one of the world’s great idiots, Sigmund Freud. But he was very popular in his time, and the concept got a wide vogue.
Get it here.
Interesting thought about religion from Jonah Goldberg, in which he writes candidly and dispassionately about his (relative lack of) faith.
And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?
I have no idea if this assertion is borne out by the facts, but it’s consistent with the well-document phenomenon of relatively little violent crime in Europe and Canada even as religiosity is much lower there as well.
Every now and then some misinformed clown writes a letter to the editor about how problems in society would be solved if (among other things) we had prayer in school. I always want to ask those people why, except for that commited by Islamists angry about cartoons, violence is so low in <a href=”http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=norris_27_2″>Denmark</a> (scroll to chart at bottom).