How NOT to regress murder rates on religious belief

This post on reddit's r/atheism did a linear regression of murder rates on "importance of religion" figures (both sets of data from wikipedia).

The poster there also looked at IHDI (inequality-adjusted human development index) and its effect on the relationship.

The poster found a weak (and statistically insignificant) relationship between importance of religion and murder, but after adjusting for IHDI the sign changed (though the relationship remained weak).

But much about the analysis - and hence the conclusions is wrong or suspect.

(I'd normally have replied on reddit, but since this discussion is relatively long for a comment and involves figures, it's better written up elsewhere. Further, since this sort of analysis is the very raison d'être of my benighted blog, it goes here.)

While I usually work in R these days, I'm going to do the calculations for this in a spreadsheet, like the original - so that those looking at the original poster's spreadsheet can follow along.

First, I noticed that the murder rates are highly skew. Since the relationships are fairly weak, this skewness applies to both the conditional and unconditional distribution of murder-rate. This instantly invalidates all the significance-testing, so any conclusions about the significance or otherwise of the relationships goes out the window.

Second, the relationship with importance of religious belief is not monontonic, let alone linear. Any conclusions about the direction of the relationship is meaningless without taking this into account. (In what follows I am going to look at "religion is unimportant" percentages rather than "religion is important" - they mostly add to 100%, or nearly so. I do this for a particular reason, though the other figures should give similar conclusions.)

Third, some of the "religion is unimportant" figures are for countries where religious belief is compulsory or effectively so. Let's take Indonesia as an example. In Indonesia, you must choose one of a small number of religions. Lack of religious belief is not allowed. So some countries are "jammed up" against the origin, and the extremely high religious belief figures are highly suspect. Seriously, everyone in some countries thinks religion is important? Absolutely everyone? (This is one reason why for most of my analyses these days I use Wikipedia's "irreligion" figures instead, as in my previous post.)

The "jamming up against zero" issue tends to make relationships curve there, so I transformed that variable too. The usual transform with percentages is the logit transform but those few suspect "0%" figures make that impossible. I could regularize the logit transform, which usually works quite well, but in this case I just took square roots (in a previous analysis with this type of irreligion figures used here I tried a cube-root transformation, since for low percentages it spreads the figures better (it's more like a logit). With this analysis, either succeeds fairly well, but I figured the square root would be better understood.

Since pictures speak much more clearly, let's look at a picture.
I have split the unimportance of religion data into four ranges - first, high figures (in blue - there's a large gap that makes a convenient breakpoint), then medium (teal) and low (green) figues, and finally the 0% figures (red-brown) which I regard as suspect:

Click for larger image.

(I got the data from Wikipedia again myself and cleaned it a little, as there were some errors in the data that had to be fixed but which shouldn't have affected the original poster's figures.)

We see that the 0% figures are inconsistent with the trend in the low figures, and the low figures show a distinctly different pattern to the higher two groups. The upper two groups are reasonably consistent, however - we could probably use a single straight line to describe both. But on the untransformed scale for religious unimportance, there is s stronger suggestion of changing slope)

The log of murder rate is also not monotonic in IHDI though the change is less spectacular (the relationship between IHDI and "religion is unimportant" percentage is strong and close to linear over a fair portion of the range - but again, not clearly monotonic over the whole range).

All of these issues make the conclusions of the original analysis nonsense.

What can we see? the least religious countries do indeed have a lower murder rate. The question remains as to whether this effect remains after considering IHDI - but here's the final concern, though it's not a statistical issue:

Since IHDI is strongly associated with religious belief, if IHDI is substantively caused by religious belief, IHDI could be mediating the relationship between the other two variables. If religion is causative, it might be "acting through" IHDI to reduce murder rates. So we have to be cautious about concluding it isn't causative if it beccomes insignificant after adjusting for IHDI without some rather in depth analysis (and even then with heavy caveats).

I plan to do a more in depth analysis of these figures in R at some point, which will take account of the nonlinearity properly, via additive models.

Are the religious more generous?

It is common to see figures or claims that suggest that religious believers are more generous in terms of donations to charity than the non-religious. (One thing that often concerned me about such figures is that they generally include donations made to their church, which even when limited to money used for actually charitable purposes often have an ulterior motive - proselytization.)

Today I saw a post in reddit's r/atheism that pointed to this information on Red Cross donations by country:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_red_cro_don-health-red-cross-donations

Curious about potential drivers of the figures, I decided to try to adjust for GDP, so I got the GDP (PPP) figures from here:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_ppp-economy-gdp-ppp

So I then divided the Red Cross donations by millions of dollars of GDP to give dollars donated per million dollars GDP, a kind of "generosity" measure in a rough sense (a better measure would reflect donations per "spare" dollar after basic needs). I discovered a down-trend of log-generosity against log-GDP (richer countries donate a somewhat smaller proportion on average). Wondering about other drivers, I then took the irreligion figures from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_by_country

(specifically, the 2007-8 Gallup figures, which uses the very broad definition implied by the question "Is religion important?" - and I used those figures because they covered the most countries) and plotted log-generosity against the irreligion percentage figures, which give this plot:



[The blue curve is a lowess smooth of the relationship, with f = 0.9]

And what do we find? In spite of the fact that this measure of generosity decreases with GDP, this measure of generosity increases with the percentage of people who see religion is unimportant. Is this the whole story? No - there's all sorts of other things that could be adjusted for.

But it certainly doesn't support the usual story - and if anything, suggests the opposite. There's at least some suggestion here that maybe it goes the other way.

Daylight observations of Venus with the naked eye

Near the end of January, I happened to be up just a while before dawn and saw Venus in a clear eastern sky, a little below a crescent moon.

I had read that it was possible to see Venus in daylight, and a friend had photographed it in the western sky near sunset, so I figured that with the moon as a guide I should be able to work out where to look for it.

I went back to bed and then tried again around 9 am (AEST), at which time it was close to directly overhead, and with the aid of binoculars and the moon as a cue I located Venus with a few minutes looking. Given the location, I could make it out very easily with the naked eye. I checked again every hour and found it almost immediately. It was still perfectly visible at 1pm, with the sun blazing overhead and Venus well into the western sky.

Myth confirmed!

I think Rule 34 may be wrong

I couldn't find any porn on the subject of Rule 34.

reddit's r/atheism passes 100,000 subscribers

[Clocked over at around 8:20 am (GMT)]

100,000 atheists (well, mostly atheists) in one forum makes for quite a lot of links, posting and discussion

Human Development Index ... and unbelief

Taking the newly released UN Human Development Index (HDI) figures from here, and percentage of unbelief figures from here (specifically, the Gallup figures), I decided to take a look at how they were related:

The green curve is a loess curve, which simply smooths the relationship to indicate the basic trend.

The fact that HDI increases with Unbelief percentage does not mean that greater unbelief necessarily causes greater HDI; the causality may run the other way, or both variables may be caused by some other variable, or there may be complicated feedback between the two variables, and probably several other causal factors (which is what I would imagine is the truth).

The identified countries, clockwise from top left, are United Arab Emirates, USA, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Dem.Rep.Congo.

We have a budding mathematician

(budding ... becaue that's how mathematicians reproduce, of course.)

My daughter, who is in year three, was given the opportunity to enter the Australian Mathematics Competition (which presently has kids from over 40 countries competing in it).

Not everyone gets to enter; at her school it was only offered to the kids in the extension class.

She got a distinction, which places her in the top 15% of her division (the year 3 and 4 students that entered). Pretty good going, I thought.

Edit: Turns out she was in the top 6% among the entrants in the competition, for her year and the year above.

---

I believe I actually competed in an early incarnation of the same competition way back when I was a school kid, in around year 10 - probably the first year it was offered in NSW, when it was called the Wales awards. (Assuming it's the same competition; in any case I got $40 in an account from the Wales bank, now Westpac. For me at the time that was a lot of money and I used it carefully - I didn't actually finish spending it until I went to university, nearly two and a half years later. I don't know if they still offer any cash.)

Atheist blogroll widget

I only just saw that Blogrolling.com is shutting down and that Mojoey's atheist blogroll has been affected; he has some new (temporary) code up that will link to the list of blogs while he gets something new up.

If I get time today I'd put his new code in, but in any case I am putting this here to remind me that I need to do something about it, and to help promulgate the issue (if I didn't know, presumably some other people don't either).

La trahison des mages

This is what a smackdown looks like

Over at Dear Coke Talk blog, coketalk has on occasion delivered some epic smackdowns.

Take a look at this one, where every sentence someone wrote to her has been linked to the wikipedia page of a logical fallacy it invokes.

Ouch.

Is faith a reliable way to find religious truths?

A response to "I just have faith."

By faith here we mean religious faith of course - which is related to the meaning of faith as something like "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence" (one of the meanings of faith) rather than the kind of faith that is confidence that arises because of reason or material evidence (a different meaning of faith). Beware equivocational imitations.


Is faith a reliable way to find religious truths?


While we ponder that question, look at this:


If the answer is yes, how, then, it is the case that more theists in the world think Christianity is false than think it is true — surely faith, if it is a reliable path to truth, would overwhelmingly lead people of faith to truth?

Either faith isn't a reliable way to find truth - and so we should not rely on religious faith to discover what's true
or
the truth that most people are led to by faith is that Christianity is false.

(Aside: I'm not making an argumentum as populum here - I'm showing a consequence of the premise of reliability)


The same argument works for any religion.

Any consequences for the old argument about "different ways of knowing" is left as an exercise for the reader.

Financial advice

A guy with a gun, a really good plan and a bit of luck might steal a hundred thousand dollars.

To steal a billion dollars, he has to swap the gun for a briefcase.

And the Christian Lobby goes ballistic about ethics classes... again

This morning on breakfast-news TV* there was discussion of the ethics class issue, between a representative from the NSW Council of Churches and another fellow whose affiliation I didn't catch but I presume to be representing the St. James Centre - the group that designed the syllabus for the ethics class trial.

*(this was on ABC2 - the ABC is basically a government-owned but editorially independent national broadcaster - their breakfast news and current affairs coverage is substantially more serious than on the commercial networks, which tend to be more like the US network-style breakfast programs - a glossy entertainment magazine of celebrities, diets and other ephemera)

Well, the guy from the Council of Churches was pretty upset that the government was going to go ahead and implement the recommendations, but his central objection was telling. He stated that the biggest problem was that the students *currently* getting religious instruction ("scripture class") *would have the option to take the ethics class*.

That's right - he was objecting primarily to parents having the choice, if their child was currently going to religious classes. But he didn't actually explain why the choice was bad.

Why is this? Well, the problem was he couldn't raise a serious objection to the kids not currently in religious classes having the choice of attending the ethics class instead of doing nothing (though he did attack the content of the syllabus also) - the interviewer asked him specifically what objection he could raise to then having the choice. So he was only left with the fact that the kids not already sitting out the various forms of available religious instruction would be able to choose to opt for ethics classes as well. [The church lobbhy have even argued at one point that the kids in religious classes would miss out on instruction in ethics (!) ... oops. Er, no, we didn't mean to say we don't teach that.]

This choice is a problem for the churches. While about 20% of Australians list no religion on the census, many of the ones in NSW still have their children attend school religious classes for a variety of reasons. There is also an even larger group that do have a nominal religion and list it on the census (i.e. they list whatever religion ran the religious class they attended themselves when they were children, which would have been the church one of their parents actually attended at some point) - these "nominally religious" people do send their kids to religious instruction - but many of them would choose not to if there was a serious alternative.

Provided sufficient volunteers can be found to run the ethics classes, this could easily halve the attendance at religious instruction (it's what they feared before the trial began, and it's what actually happened).

Hardly anyone actually goes to church any more (to my recollection, something like 10% of Australians attend church more than twice a year, other than weddings and funerals - and most weddings and funerals aren't even held in churches any more). Apart from that core, the rest of the kids are "up for grabs", and they know parents will vote with their feet.

Sundary school is largely a wasteland. The religious classes are, for many, the only place the churches have to get their hooks in... so they're hanging on for dear life to the one really solid free shot at impressionable minds they've got - an advantage they've had entrenched in legislation for 150 years now. The legislation won't change, but for the first time there will be an alternative to religious instruction for those who opt out of religious class, and many, many more are going to take that option.

They're afraid (and they made that quite clear) that free choice will mean an even more rapid demise than they're experiencing now. And they're doing whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen.




Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle

Finally - a real alternative to religious classes

The report on the trial of ethics classes in ten NSW schools has come in with a recommendation to adopt the ethics classes alternative model used in the trial.

News story is here.

(Edit: broken link above now repaired)

Since the Premier had already said if the report recommended adoption, that it would be implemented, it looks like it will go ahead next year. On top of the same-sex-couple adoption legislation (her speech), this will make another worthy achievement for her (nevertheless still doomed) government. Keneally will go down at the next election, but if she manages this, I will certainly remember her as having had a number of very worthwhile achievement.

It's worth noting that Keneally is a Catholic, and has an MA in religious studies from a US Catholic university (she was born in and grew up in the US).

Thankfully, someone is keeping a watch on those very scary atheists...

Someone is very worried.

It's all red because atheists are dangerous and must be watched. Or something will happen!

An increasingly realistic God's Eye View of the Bible

"Inspired" by this.
(I couldn't help but think "why would God be in Low Earth Orbit?!")




The crossing of the Red Sea





The crucifixion





Noah's Ark after the Deluge





Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (look closely!)






Update: something vaguely similar that I quite enjoyed is here (source ) - okay the last panel is speculative, but still it's well done.

Science literacy in Australia and the US

A survey (pdf) commissioned by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies of Australian science literacy has somewhat mixed results.

(Update: See also an ABC News (Australia) report on it here. )

The report on the survey, which was conducted just over a week ago by Auspoll, seems show some disturbing results, though others are mildly encouraging.

For example, 30% of Australians think humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and 39% don't realize it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the Sun. On the other hand, I found that 13% of people knew that 3% of the world's water was fresh surprisingly high.

The survey replicates a survey conducted in 2009 by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences. The press release (which contains all the information I can find online) only describes a brief subset of the results, but I have compared everything I have information on.

Steve Novella commented on the US survey last year; his questions and criticisms would apply to both surveys.

Summary of the results of the Australian poll (correct answers underlined):

Q1: How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun?
 One Year: 61
  One Day: 28
One Month:  2
 One Week:  1
 Not Sure:  8

Q2: Is the following statement true or false? The earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
   False: 70
    True: 30
Not Sure:  0

Q3: What percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered by water?
  0-25% :  0
 26-50% :  2
 51-60% :  4
 61-69% :  9 
    70% : 41
 71-80% : 33
 81-100%:  6
Not Sure:  6

Q4: What percentage of the Earth’s water is fresh water?
      0%  0
      1%  5
      2%  5
      3% 13
  4%-10% 23
 11%-25% 19
 26%-50%  9
 51%-60%  3
 61%-70%  1
 71%-80%  0
81%-100%  0
Not sure 22

Q5: Do you think that evolution is occurring?
Yes, I think evolution is currently occurring:       71
No, I do not think evolution is currently occurring:  8
No, I do not believe in evolution:                   10
Not Sure:                                            11

Q6: Do you think that humans are influencing the evolution of other species?
Yes, I think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:       77
No, I do not think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:  7
No, I do not believe in evolution:                                         9
Not Sure:                                                                  7

Q7: In your opinion, how important is science education to the Australian economy?
Absolutely essential: 42
Very important:       38
Somewhat important:   16
Not at all important:  2
Not Sure:              2

One highly amusing outcome of this survey is that even though only 71% of people think "evolution is currently occurring", 77% think that "humans are influencing the evolution of other species". Presumably at least six percent of people think humans are affecting evolution while isn't happening. The cognitive dissonance must be astounding.

Here's the corresponding information I was able to pull out of the Calacademy press release:

- 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.

- 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time

- 47% of adults can approximate (within 5%) the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.

- 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%

- Less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet's water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%).

- Science eduction: Essential or Very Important to the US economy: 77%


The Calacademy press release didn't mention the evolution questions, but we can do a comparison with another Harris Interactive poll (pdf) which suggests that rates of "do not believe in evolution" and "not sure" in Question 5 above are about half of the equivalent rates in the US, roughly consistent with other figures I have seen.

Here's a graphic showing a comparison of the corresponding the percentage of correct answers from the two surveys on Questions 1-4 and the percentage rating science education as "essential" or "very important" for the national economy:



(Graphic generated in the free statistical package R)

Australia is outperforming the US (pretty handily on some questions), but that may not be saying a whole lot.

The fruits of accomodationism?

PZ and Jerry Coyne have both discussed the PLOS paper on a survey of high school biology teachers in the US.

The graphic I want to discuss is here:


If we remove those who failed to express an opinion (the same in both surveys - 9%) we can do a "triangle plot" or Ternary plot, showing the three other percentages:



On this plot, moving up is "more creationism", moving (roughly) southwest is "more acceptance of evolution" and moving southeast is "more acceptance of ID".

We see that the general public (in blue) and the high school biology teachers (red) are not in the same place. We can't from this tell for sure whether it's the training of biology teachers and the materials and curricula that they have to work with that makes a difference or whether those who might become biology teachers are a priori different from the rest of the population, but numerous anecdotes (which attest to the fact that education does change people's opinions) suggest that training and the teacher's available teaching materials (like textbooks and so on) and curricula will have a substantial impact on what positions they will endorse. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful motivator.

Since training at a university level will generally tend to be based directly on evolution rather than be ID-oriented, while school-level teaching materials and curricula will tend to be more influenced by (for example) NCSE policy, one has to wonder at the overall effect of the two.

If we attribute the shift between the red and the blue points largely to effects other than pre-disposition, we must say that these have produced a shift away from Creationism... but not even slightly shifted toward the position of actual biological science relative to ID.

The suggestion that I take away from this is that this may be in part to the effectively accomodationist stances of influential organizations like the NCSE - by openly tolerating, sometimes even advocating unscientific positions like ID (that God "guides evolution", rather than the scientific position of evolution operating by natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift and so on is basically ID), they merely succeed in replacing one load of unscientific nonsense with another.

This is not science education.

Enough with accomodationism. Let's advocate actual science, and get everyone's favourite god(s) out of biology class.

Even though I am in Australia, this sort of thing has particular relevance for me because the Australian school curriculum in under review right now... and while the science curriculum is safe, look what's in the senior History curriculum:

UNIT 2A, pg 8

Controversies

Students develop their historical skills in an investigation of TWO of the following controversial issues:

 a) human origins (e.g. Darwin’s theory of evolution and its critics).

 b) dating the past (e.g. radio-carbon dating, tracing human migrations using DNA)
...

Yep. Maybe if we looked at the controversy itself as historical, this would count as 19th century history. But this is the Ancient History curriculum... as if human origins and radio-carbon dating are actually substantially in doubt now as being useful for informing us about the past - as if we don't really know these things quite well, and as if actual human origins (and carbon dating, for crying out loud) were at issue.

If these are controversies, why not look at the flat earth/round earth controvery, and while we're at it, germ theory too?

I think accomodationism is poisoning our education, by trying to make us accept as equally reasonable points of view that have nothing to do with the actual science.

I think it's insidious. I think it ruins everything it touches.

If it doesn't work, try something else.

Here's an idea - why don't we try NOT being accomodationist for a decade or so. Try actually insisting on science as science - no holds barred. Actually advocate for science. Insist that we teach the accepted scientific positions (and even the parts where there's some actual scientific disagreement if you like) as is. Without trying to fit in everyone's pet unscientific ideas as well, just because it makes them feel all warm-and-fuzzy.

Let's see what happens.

		Too old for Santa? Telling someone that there's no god is not like telling a small child there's no Santa. It's like telling an adult there's no Santa.

Banging my head on yet another brick in the wall, part III - debating theists

I've had some ongoing health issues and some additional illnesses - I'm still somewhat invalid, and as a result my brain really hasn't been up to much intellectual work.

So instead I've had a number of discussions with theists.

Many of those discussions have had a somewhat similar character, and one in particular sums the whole experience up. This is a brief summary of the course of that typical case.

At the beginning, in response to a comment I made about modern apologetics, a very pleasant theist (let's call him Michael) tells me that William Lane Craig is a "really clever guy" with "persuasive arguments", and I "really should read his book" (they generally mean Reasonable Faith, but sometimes it's another book).

I respond that while I haven't read his book, I have seen video of him debating, and I have seen detailed reviews of his book that discuss some of Craig's arguments and I have had some of his arguments presented to me before, and that I am inclined to doubt the assertion that Craig's arguments are actually very persuasive.

I ask Michael to present to me what he thinks of as one of Craig's best arguments. His response is "the Kalam Cosmological argument".

Well, let's leave aside the fact that he only named the argument, he didn't actually present it - but instead left me to find the argument (I've seen it before, so it wasn't all that hard to find again, but I find it interesting how I always seem to get left with all the heavy lifting in these things - I have to locate the argument, check that this is really what my opponent means and then explain why it's wrong).

(Let's also leave aside the fact that the Kalam scholars were busy establishing the existence of the god of Mohammad, not the Christian god of the New Testament that Michael worshipped. If his argument went through I wasn't going to make him change religions.)

So anyway, I present Michael's argument to him and he says, yes, that's completely convincing, the conclusion definitely follows form the premises and the premises are "obviously true".

So I take him carefully through an analysis of the premises. Fortunately my correspondent is an extremely honest debater, so this only takes us several days.

Long story short - he ultimately agrees that in fact the premises consist of multiple sub-premises, not all explicitly stated, and that none of the sub-premises are actually established. Not one.

Indeed, he comes to agree that at best one of them is "probably true", and is reduced to arguing that the other premise is "not definitely established to be false".

After some prompting he agrees that yes, he does actually need to have them both be "definitely true" before he can try to apply the argument, and that's not the case.

So Michael's choice of "best argument" from Craig turns out to be a house of cards.

We end the discussion amicably. Michael departs with the suggestion that I still go read Craig's book "because some of his other arguments are really good".

I can't clearly apprehend quite how the cognitive dissonance doesn't make his brain explode into pink mist, but I am satsified that at least (given hours of effort and an honest counterpart), I can actually show one person that one of their "best" arguments for god isn't an argument at all.

(I have come to find that this is about as good an outcome as any such discussion is going to get.)

So, at least slightly satisfied, I return to the discussion from where our little debate originated.

What do I find? Another earnest Christian telling me that I "should read the book by William Lane Craig" and that it has "really good arguments".

I resist the temptation to spend several more days - if I am lucky - removing just one item from this new guy's list of "really good arguments".