There was an article recently in the Telegraph noting a study suggesting that people with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God. Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, noted that many more members of the “intellectual elite” considered themselves atheists compared to the national average. Professor Lynn also stated, arguably a tad over-simplistically, that the decline in religious observance over the last century was directly related to a rise in average intelligence. 
The article also relays a survey of the Royal Society fellows that found that only 3.3% believed in God, while 68.5% of the general UK population described themselves as believers. Likewise, a separate poll in the 90s of the American National Academy of Sciences found that only 7% of its members believed in God.
The suggestion is that more intelligent people are less likely to believe in God.
Yet, I found the more interesting part of this article to be the 100+ readers’ comments at the bottom of the page – particularly Rev Peter Ratcliff’s comment, saying: “Who really thinks our nation is better off for turning away from God and the 10 Commandments and becoming a nation of adulterers, liars, thieves and murderers as well as covetousness?”
Others commented that thanks to the decline in religious belief over the last decades, the world has become the warring, unjust, increasingly selfish place it has, allegedly, become.
It is a common belief that without religion or God guiding us, we are all doomed to the whims of our inner savages, thereby more prone to wars, lying, raping and generally being very badly behaved.
I disagree. In fact, I would argue that we are becoming less violent, more empathic, and generally more moral than we ever have been. And I would say that this trend is going hand in hand with the rise of secularity among Western nations.
Understandably (as Harvard psychology Steven Pinker points out in his article, A History of Violence), in the decade of Darfur and Iraq and general post 9/11 mania, to argue that we are becoming less violent might seem delusional, if not outright obscene – and perhaps more so when considering the past century of Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
Yet it seems to me that much of the evidence that we are becoming far kinder, gentler and more empathic over long stretches of history, is so clearly evident as to be easily missed.
There are various points of note here:
- Consider the relative disappearance of cruelty as a means of entertainment. Sacrificing humans in great coliseums with roaring audiences would be unheard of today. Or what about cat burning? This 16th century Parisian form of entertainment was one where people would gather dozens of cats in a net, hoist them up in the air and slowly drop them into a bonfire. According to historian Norman Davies, the audiences “shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, animal rights are a force to be reckoned with in the world’s most secular societies and there are more ethically-driven vegetarians than ever.
- Perhaps more notably is the almost complete disappearance of slavery as a labour saving device. Slavery was a norm for thousands of years in many societies, while today it is considered abhorrent and is fiercely fought where ever it still exits.
- While wars still plague the planet, the difficulty of nations justifying them is becoming more and more difficult. In the past, a government having pretty much “world conquest” as part of its general policy was considered normal, and indeed possibly healthy. Today, a nation may actually need to invent a threat in order to justify attacking another nation, and even then, the notion of “the spoils of war” has largely vanished, at least compared to the indifferent raping, looting, and blatant cultural destruction that occurred when a nation invaded another in the past.
- Torturing prisoners is by no means a thing of the past to this day, but it is certainly something that people now universally look to as being unacceptable, most notably so in secular societies. Throughout much of our history, however, torture and mutilation were part of routine punishment, with the death penalty openly handed out for differences of opinion and mere misdemeanors. Indeed, for most of history, there was no notion of an evidence-based trail and injustice was inarguably far more prevalent.
Yet there are other, more general, changes in the manner we conduct ourselves and the world that reflect this inclination to being generally more moral as a people. Note the far greater equality between the races and sexes; the decline in homicide as the major form for conflict resolution; the present abhorrence towards pogroms and genocide and the relative causality they were carried out in our more past; the once common use of human sacrifice in the name of superstitious beliefs; and more to the point, the current vast number of charitable organizations helping people, animals and the environment all across the world – organizations that never existed a mere century ago.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is perhaps best articulated from Steven Pinker’s own observation:
Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
At this point, it may be tempting to counter argue that it is not that we have become less violent, it is that nowadays we simply prefer not to risk our lives, and instead modern governments merely conduct their killings from behind the safety of computer screens or in their stealthy, increasingly robotic, bombers. That may be true, though even this still suggests that the personal act of violence is becoming a less acceptable part of an individual’s behaviour. The question to raise at this point, is whether it’s worse off to wipe out 50% of a population of 100, or 1% of a population of one billion (the latter being the result of our modern warfare, the former being the more common outcome of tribal wars).
It’s a question of proportion versus quantity. There is much room to argue that the sheer “quantity” of suffering is on the rise, as our populations continue to soar. Yet the argument here is that we, as individuals, are becoming less violent/more moral, and I believe the evidence for that still stands, given the points above. And the fact that this goes hand in hand with an increasingly secular world, makes one wonder about the claim that without religion, humans are doomed to savagery.
Indeed, it would seem that the alleged source of moral values is itself a source of our more violent past. The Bible contains a handful of celebrated accounts in which the Hebrews, urged by God himself, were told to slaughter every last resident of an invaded city, only taking the female virgins for their own sport (see Deuteronomy 20:16). The Bible likewise commands that the penalty for idolatry, homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery, even picking up a stick on the Sabbath (among other things) is death by stoning! (see Leviticus 24:16, Deuteronomy 17:2-5, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Numbers 15:32-56). However, perhaps the question of ethics and holy books is best left to another time.
Tags: Philosophy // 1 Comment »
