Contra Hedrick: On Faith & Demographics

Among critics of The Truth Behind the New Atheism, the best-known so far have been Victor Stenger, who dedicated a good part of a chapter in The New Atheism to rebutting my analysis of faith and reason, and Hector Avalos, who attacked me over my claim that the Gospel liberates slaves, beginning with this piece.  (I responded here and here.) Several wild-eyed Internet critics have been even more persistent, but less worth responding to.   

A more interesting Web critic has been Landon Hedrick, a doctoral student in philosophy. 
Landon has Christian roots, and has seemed less inclined to brush them off with contempt than some former Christians.  While he began our dialogue with what struck me as a naive hero-worship of Richard Carrier, a bubble I did my best to burst, he has at times distanced himself from the more self-confident and glib pronouncements of the New Atheists, including (lately) those of Dr. Carrier. 

In this blog, I'd like to respond to some of Landon's overlooked, but imaginative, criticism.  His arguments invoke three substantive questions about faith and demographics: first, does education kill faith?  Or is the slight tendency of well-educated Americans to "lose their religion" an anomaly?  Second, are scientists often Christians?  And third, were most atheists in the world today "socialized into atheism" by Marxist propaganda?

Epistemology also makes a calling.  On what basis we should believe stuff?  Should an author (like me) make a claim in a popular rebuttal of the New Atheism, without backing it up with solid social survey data?  Can a writer be allowed an occasional appeal to his own authority or experience?  In short, does The Truth Behind the New Atheism "wallow in ambiguity?"  Or just take a dip in it occasionally, to take a break from the humorless anality of so much public discourse? 

A tertiary issue might be expressed, "How big an error does it take to discredit an opponent?"  The Truth Behind the New Atheism, like The God Delusion, is full of claims of all shapes and sizes in philosophy, theology, history, sociology, and science.  To give him credit, Victor Stenger tries (however inattentively) to debunk the main claim of one whole chapter of my book.  Hector Avalos narrows this scope considerably: he critiques a single argument that covers about two pages of TBNA, implying that if he successfully shreds that minor point, my reputation as a scholar will be shot to hell.  Conceivably this might work, if my argument were as bad as he says.  After all, a mere 300 Trojans damaged the whole Persian army by the cliff at Thermopylae.  

Hedrick picks a yet smaller target.  Rather than claiming I am wrong about anything at all, he critiques the strength of my support for mere parenthetical rejoinders.  He approaches my book less like a hawk looking for a rabbit to consume whole, than like a hummingbird flitting through a flower bed to extract a little nector to enjoy a lazy April morning.  His goal is also more modest than that of Avalos: not to dismiss my work wholesale, but to place an asterick by my name. "Watch this guy, he might be trying to a fast one." 

With all these issues in mind -- social, epistemological, and personal -- here is Landon's critique (in green italics), including his quotes from me (in blue italics), followed, after each substantive point, by my response and reflections.

1A. Religion and Statistics

Imagine that while reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, you come across a rather bold claim: "As it happens, in Britain, the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to be an atheist." Of course, such a claim would need to be supported by some sort of controlled scientific survey. But imagine that Dawkins didn't even provide a citation; he made the claim without any benefit of actual evidence outside his own experience. Would it be a big deal? After all, Britain is his home.

We can be confident that had Dawkins made this mistake, somebody would have noticed and called him out on it. Perhaps that person would have been Christian apologist David Marshall, who has made an effort to debunk Dawkins on several points. (He even has a list of "160 errors" in The God Delusion.) But imagine further that, when confronted with this problem, Dawkins offered the following response:

"Years ago I saw a study conducted in Liverpool which informed me of this correlation, and ever since then I've personally noticed that this is the case throughout the rest of Britain. I don't know where you can find that study, but you can take my word for it. I'm a generally perceptive person, and I wouldn't be making this claim unless I had a wide exposure to British people."

Would you be satisfied? Would David Marshall be satisfied? As it turns out, I don't think Dawkins did make this mistake in his writings, so "his words" above are completely fictional. But it's interesting that David Marshall, in his book The Truth Behind the New Atheism, makes a parallel claim and leaves it unsupported. On page 41 he tells us that "in East Asia, there was a strong positive correlation between education and the Christian faith. The more books you read, the more likely you were to be a Christian." This claim was not followed by a note citing any valid scientific surveys; it appeared to come straight from Marshall's own observations. When I pointed this out to him, here is the reply he gave:

"I would have liked to cite the study of faith and education in Singapore that I mentioned. The numbers were quite dramatic. They also corresponded with what I've seen all around East Asia: the more educated a person is, the more likely to be a Christian. However, I read the paper in Taiwan, and cited it in a paper I wrote in seminary, and haven't seen it since. The reader is free to disbelieve me if he likes, or suspend judgement until hard stats turn up. But I've been involved with Asian Christianity for 24 years, both on the ground and academically; it would be wise to take my opinion on this seriously. (Alternatively, check into almost any Chinese church in America, and see how many people with Phds in science, mathematics, and engineering you can find.)"

Is it alright for Marshall to put this fact in his book if it's merely based on an old study from Singapore (that he no longer has access to) and his own experience with East Asia? Perhaps it would be more responsible of him if he altered his wording to offer the information not as a categorical fact, but as his belief based on his experience.

DM: Admittedly, I could have supported this minor point better in TBNA. It turns out I was more right on the point than I remembered, though. In Singapore, while only 6.4% of those with less than secondary education counted themselves as Christian in 2000, a full 39.3% of those with university education did. (Eng, Lai Ah, 2008: editor, Religious Diversity in Singapore Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Institute of Policy Studies : Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 47.)

So yes, I "put a fact in the book" that was inadequately supported. Unlike many of Dawkins' claims, however, it was a real fact, even expressed conservatively: the truth is, in Singapore, a university education seemed to correlate with a more than six times greater probability of being a Christian! 

Why should my slight casualness on proving this point (or that the same is true in other East Asian countries) be considered a problem? As Landon mentioned, I listed 160 "errors, gross exagerrations, and highly dubious claims" in The God Delusion. Many of these derive from the fact that Dawkins simply didn't know what he was talking about.  But I do know what I'm talking about, when it comes to Asian Christianity. 

Dawkins should be given less benefit of the doubt, because he is writing out of his field most of the time The God Delusion.  If an author also shows a good track record of getting facts right (and in all due modesty, I think I do), why not give him the occasional benefit of the doubt?  Trusting those we find trustworthy is how we operate in every department of our lives, from taking notes in class, to believing what our spouse tells us about expenses on our 10-40 form, to checking sources on-line or in journals.  Of course, Landon may distrust my claims because he disagrees with my overall philosophy, and perhaps give his own side (Richard Carrier) more latitude, without realizing he is doing so.  Probably most of us do this, to some extent. 

IB. Christian Scientists

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins offers some statistics (based on an actual study!) of the percentage of scientists that believe in God. Marshall appears to distrust Dawkins' cited statistics, writing that it's "a little hard to jibe with experience," since he sometimes meets devout Christians in church who also happen to be scientists (p. 39).


But consider what Marshall is suggesting to his readers here: that the statistics seem suspicious because he meets Christian scientists in church. Isn't this precisely where we would expect to find Christians (of all professions) on Sunday mornings? Clearly such an observation does nothing to deflate statistics from a properly-conducted survey. When I mentioned this to Marshall, he responded as follows:

"Your complaint about my response to the claim that relatively few scientists believe in God seems overly argumentative. My point wasn't that the data was wrong; only that based on my own experience, it seemed fishy. What I'm offering is a prima facia reason to look more carefully at the data. I didn't say only that scientists who are Christian are in church on Sunday. I said I often find the most committed Christians in many churches are scientists. But later I concede that the incidence of atheism among scientists is probably higher than the general public, and then offer some non-rational reasons why that might be so."

But it's hardly clear how meeting Christian scientists in church constitutes even a prima facie reason to be skeptical of the data. The claim made by Dawkins was not that all scientists are non-Christians; his claim was that a survey reported a particular correlation between being a scientist and being an atheist. Besides, do we need this sort of information in order to convince us that we should carefully evaluate the data?

DM: It is the glory of philosophers to be careful, so perhaps I shouldn't complain about Hedrick's criticism.  Except that I didn't say I "sometimes" meet pious scientists in church, I said I "often" do.  Also, I offered two other reasons to question Dawkins' presentation of the facts, which Landon neglects to mention, including a report from one of Dawkins' colleagues on the Oxford physics faculty on all the Christians there whom Dawkins appears to have overlooked.   

Anyway, again, I see nothing horribly defective about my procedure here.

Often, in my experience, when claims by experts look fishy, closer inspection shows they are fishy.  The phrase "Lies, damned lies, and government statistics" reflects the fact that this is a common experience.  A scientist who worked with Stephen Jay Gould said that he had great skill in finding the anomylous piece in a dig that ultimately led to a different understanding of the finding.  That skill, even if partially intuitive and wholly tentative, is I think to be cultivated, not summarily dismissed.  Misgivings are no substitute for strong empirical argument, but are often worth attending to. 

And of course if scientists really are unlikely to be Christians, one would expect fewer of them in church.  And if study of science eroded faith, one would expect scientific Christians who remain to be less enthusiastic about their beliefs.  That does not seem to be what I find.  So I continue to hold the stats, and my own experience, in a state of suspended judgement.  Experience, even without a "study" to back it up, is often a good reason to be extra cautious about alleged statistics, and what they might mean.  I hope such common critical reactions are not lost, enthralled as we now seem by silly headlines like (from an old Time Magazine cover), "Why are men and women different?  It isn't just upbringing.  New studies show they were born that way."   

IC. Are most atheists commies?   

There is at least one more incidence of this sort of problem in the book. On page 30, Marshall writes that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But again there is no citation supporting the claim, it is just a bare assertion. Elsewhere, I believe he has pointed to the Soviet Union and China as virtual oceans of atheists. But even so, how many of these people were really atheists (by whatever definition of the word Marshall is working with)? And how many were really Marxists? Presumably, it must mean something to be a Marxist (perhaps a belief in some set of doctrines laid out in the writings of Marx himself, or an avid reader of those writings, or even just somebody who claims to be a Marxist). Whatever Marshall means by these words, we cannot simply assume that everyone living in a communist country is or was a Marxist. And even if we could, this still doesn't tell us anything about the number of atheists among these people, or how these numbers compare to non-Marxist atheists in modern times. When confronted with this challenge, Marshall responded:

"You complain that I don't cite the claim that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But later in the book, I describe the role atheism played in Marxist ideology in some detail. There are only some ten million atheists in the United States, but hundreds of millions in communist China, who learned disbelief from Marxist teachers. (How do I know? I've been studying communist history, and talking to Chinese young people about their beliefs, for decades. Take my word for it. Or check my sources.) And many atheists in Western Europe and America during the 20th Century were also Marxists.... And my estimate that most modern atheists have been Marxists, at least in the sense that they imbibed Marxist ideology from the same source that they learned atheism, is almost certainly true."

I responded by pointing out that he still had not provided a study or survey which proved his claim, and that merely living in a Communist country probably does not qualify one as a Marxist. I further wrote:

"If Marshall has some evidence that most people who have claimed to be atheists in modern times have also claimed to be Marxists, he should have cited it when he made his claim. Either we take his word for it, as he suggests (since he's been studying this stuff and talking to some Chinese youngsters for decades), or Marshall can just point us to a study/survey which proves his point. I can't check all of his sources all the way through to see if they may have happened to include such a statistic."

And Marshall offered a longer response:

"A 2007 survey by scholars at East China Normal University of about 4500 people showed that a projected 300 million adults in China have some sort of religious belief. (Reported by BBC, Washington Post, etc.) That would leave some 700 million adults without a religious belief. How many are atheists? Given that atheism is what students have learned in school for the past 60 years, it would seem fairly safe to assume -- quite a few. My own small-scale survey supports this conclusion. When I ask Chinese to pick among a thirteen options (including three forms of Buddhism, two forms of Taoism, two forms of Christianity, Islam, "don't know," "am not sure" "other," and "atheism"), so far about 30% have indicated "atheist," and about the same percent was unsure, maybe agnostic. I haven't surveyed enough people yet for these numbers alone to be a strong argument, but this fits my general impression, in 23 years of talking with mainland Chinese. (Perhaps since before you were born.) Furthermore, religion has been growing rapidly -- before 1979, the percent of those who saw themselves as atheist was almost certainly a majority of the Chinese people.

You'll be hard-pressed to find 300 million atheists in all of the never-communist world. Four percent of Americans call themselves atheists; that's 12 million. About 18% of EU citizens call themselves atheists, according to a Eurostat poll reported on Wikipedia; that's perhaps 70 million. A lot of them are in post-communist countries, or have been Marxists in Western European countries. (French and Italian communist parties often received a quarter or more of the votes; German and other W European communist parties have also done quite well at different periods, drawing of course from atheists in particular.) Marxism in the former Soviet Union created hundreds of millions of avowed atheists over its run.

Atheists probably exist in small numbers in Muslim countries. All reports seem to indicate that atheism is very rare in Africa. Atheists in Latin America are often Marxist, and appear to be few in number. (The World Almanac, according to religioustolerance.org, counts 2.7 million.) As for India, Adherents.com (not always a very reliable site) gives just 2% non-religious OR atheist. Some of those are, of course, communists, which has been fairly strong in India.

Put all that together, and it's clear that in the broad sense of "Marxist," my comment was almost certainly correct. Over the past century, a large majority of atheists in the world have learned their atheism as part of a general Marxist education, and have been "Marxist" at least in that limited sense."

The survey that Marshall refers to, however, apparently measured how many people were religious--not how many were theists. One need not claim to be religious to believe in God (just like one could be a religious atheist). The numbers do not measure what Marshall wants them to, so he is forced to guess that the majority of non-religious people are atheists.


The other point to note, again, is that it's not entirely clear what it means to be a Marxist in Marshall's intended context. The context in his book referred to the "Marxist-Leninist enterprise," but here in his response he generalizes to the broader context of individuals who have received "a general Marxist education" (whatever that might mean).Is it a virtue for one's book to wallow in such ambiguity?

DM: My point about China can also be backed up with new data, now. The extensive Baylor survey of Chinese beliefs, led by Menchen, Carson, Byron Johnson & Rodney Stark (2010: ‘Final Report: The Empirical Study of Religions in China'), showed that about 77% of respondents said they lacked religious belief.   By some definitions these would be atheists.  My own survey last fall, less demographically complete, showed that a majority of college students I queried (about 60%) were atheists in the sense that they said their belief about God was that he did not exist. This percentage, however, dropped off for graduates by about half, to some 30%. 

This clearly suggests that a Marxist education was the cause of their disbelief.  Indeed, at the school at which I conducted the main part of this survey, Christians were actively suppressed.

While these numbers cannot be simply extrapolated to the country as a whole, since most respondents were northern intellectuals, what the survey did show was a close correlation between Marxist education and atheism.  Indeed, a large percentage of young repondents identified themselves as Marxists.

Given the results of all these surveys (if the experience of those, like myself and others, who have interacted with young Chinese for decades is not enough), it is evident there are hundreds of millions of atheists in China, who were taught atheism in school.  One can find millions more in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Mongolia, the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, Cuba, and among Marxists in India, Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas. 

It is clear, then, that my point was again correct, even if not defined and footnoted to Landon's satisfaction. 

I have some sympathy for Landon's demand that I should have supported points 1 and 3 more thoroughly, but only a little. I was personally confident, being familiar with religion in Singapore and China, that what I was saying was correct, and these verifications do not add much to that confidence. Given that certainty, I knew that should anyone question my claims fairly, they would find them to be accurate.

If this sounds subjective, that is the point. 

It seems to me we often become helpless in the face of "scientific" claims, and too quickly discount the experience and common sense of practiced observers.  It may be better to gain a feeling for an author's credibility, than to always demand footnotes and exact figures.

If we do have the footnotes, it may give us a false sense of confidence.  Perhaps the footnoted information will prove ephemeral, if we track it down and closely examine it.  That may, in some cases, be why citations are given in the first place -- a kind of shell game, with the author hoping (or betting) that few of his readers will look up the studies he cites. 

Citations only take the demand for evaluating a writer back another step, to another set of people who may also be wrong.  Judgement, in the end, is what we must base our beliefs on: our own, and that of other people we trust. 

I am not deriding careful citations.  There are probably ten times as many solid, scholarly citations per page in The Truth Behind the New Atheism than in The God Delusion.  World religions, especially East Asian religions, is my field. I was being loose, but not careless or uninformed.  But in the end, an author's arguments are his own, and his credibility depends on what happens after critics start asking questions, and looking into the facts for themselves. 

A popular book is not a dissertation.  One must draw the line somewhere, if one wants a popular piece of writing to flow.   

But it doesn't hurt to have thoughtful critics, like Landon Hedrick, around to nip at one's tail, and encourage stronger arguments.