Correctly performed and logically interpreted statistics play essential roles in science, engineering, and medicine, providing information about objective (verifiable) aspects of the system under study. Statistical analyses in materials science and design engineering ensure the wheels of your car do not fly off into the distance when you hit a pothole at 15 miles per hour. Logic, the scientific method, and statistics helped scientists to show that smoking causes heart disease. Because most smokers also drink coffee, the same series of scientific studies showed coffee drinking is associated with (only appears to cause) heart disease. 

In December of 2014, Chancellor Jack Hawkins sent an email to the faculty, staff, and students of Troy University in Alabama containing a video warning that morality can come only from religion and stating, “If you take away religion, you can't hire enough police.” Dr. Hawkins’ statements led the American Atheists to request an apology on behalf of a student, and his role as an academic implies that statistical or scientific evidence supports his claim of a causal relation between religion and morality - - that religion causes morality - - as well as its inverse, that the lack of religion causes immorality. While his statements do not appear to address the possibility that religion is merely associated with morality, they do appear consistent with the logical Fallacy of Composition: the incorrect idea that if something is true of one part of a whole, then it is true for all parts of the whole.

Unlike other “first world” nations, in the United States secular people in general and atheists in particular are viewed with great distrust. In carefully controlled social science research about Americans’ perceptions of atheists by Will R. Gervais, Ph.D., many respondents to a question about whether a person would leave contact information after an unattended vehicle accident appeared to perceive atheists as less trustworthy than rapists. A Pew Foundation study found that only about 45% of Americans deem atheists trustworthy enough to be elected president. Research by Phil Zuckerman, Ph.D., suggests that American’s distrust of non-religious people stems from the belief that morality depends upon the promise of a reward for good behavior and the threat of punishment for bad behavior after death. No matter what the source of these disturbing perceptions, there is very little scientific evidence useful in determining any potential link between morality and religion.

If we reject the Fallacy of Composition and admit at least some non-religious people are moral, from where could this morality stem if not religion? Zuckerman’s data suggests that atheists adhere to the ethic of reciprocity, what some call “the golden rule,” and also experience the human emotion of empathy. The ethic of reciprocity first appears in written texts some 4,000 years ago, and empathy in living organisms might be as old as life itself.

While science is an iterative, competitive, and self-correcting process that has given us our modern technological world, its reliance upon “methodical doubt” and need for “evidence based” conclusions and solutions means that it could take generations to establish the relationship (if any) between religion and morality. Therefore, it may be useful to determine the trustworthiness of others not through religious means, but by individually assessing not only their empathy, but also behaviors potentially associated with, and perhaps caused by, the ancient ethic of reciprocity.

By Groff Schroeder

Published June 24, 2015 with quotation below:

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”

                                                  - - - Henri Poincaré