According to this NPR study,
Studies have found Christians underperform non-Christians when it comes to tests of logical ability.
Well, I’ll be you any amount of money that the people doing this research don’t even go to church on Sundays. So I’m not going to believe their data. We Christians aren’t logical? The idea!
Not logical? I studied logic for years when I was studying philosophy. Heck, Christians refined logic. Consider the syllogism, for instance. Consider this example: Jean Paul Sartre claims that hell is other people. But anyone who claims that hell is other people is stupid. Therefore, Jean Paul Sartre is stupid! I rest my case.
@Gordon E. Truitt:
the second term should be first mentioned, :All who claim that hell is other people are stupid: A=B; then JPS claims that hell is other people: C=A; therefore C=B. But maybe some Christians aren’t perfectly logical. 😉
JMc
When I heard this on the radio this morning, I was taken aback. While I had heard that “girls aren’t as good as boys at math”, which was the bias to which they compared the Christians and science/logic, I had never heard “Christians don’t do science as well.” I don’t know where that comes from, unless they are equating Christianity with fundamentalism?
The issue is that devout Christians see no problem in defining a moral code based upon a book that was “inspired by God” without being able to prove that assertion.
If I write down on a piece of paper “The sky is polka dot,” and say that God inspired me to say such a thing, there is no way to prove that God did or did not say this. I can then try to convince people to believe God told me this and start my own religion. Possibly out of thin air.
Logic is as it core a way of showing proof and causality. Ancient and medieval Christians who did not really understand the scientific method attempted to use logic to prove their unprovable assumptions about the world, this giving their own brand of “logic” the sheen of plausibility that we are still expected to accept.
A rainbow is not proof God loves us. It is proof that sunlight refracts through water vapor. A man being nailed to a stick of wood is not proof God loves us. It is proof that humans are at times barbarous when confronted with a challenge to their power over other humans.
When your way of living is based on unprovable statements, logic isn’t a skill you develop.
But for the fact that so much in logical argument depends on recursive chains of assumptions that are, in a sense, prelogical, and aren’t susceptible to the full rigors of logical argument but depend ultimately on plausibility.
The plausibility of empiricism as universally applicable is itself dependent on such.
The piece was about the phenomenon called “stereotype threat” — that the notion that ‘x isn’t good at y’ — whether believed by the person or just part of the person’s awareness of their society’s views, can affect performance. And that there is enough of the “Christians don’t do science well” stereotype out there to have an impact.
And as to where it comes from, other than ‘equating Christianity with fundamentalism’, consider how the secular elites/media present the Galileo episode.
Interestingly enough, the story also noted that this “Christians don’t do science well” is not prevalent in other parts of the world.
I have doctorates in physics and an advanced degree in theology. The basic fact that has been repeated throughout the ages is that in the fullness of understanding science and theology are in perfect congruity. As we grow in knowledge and understanding science repeatedly supports and demonstrates the validity of the theology.
@Ken Ray:
Just waitin’ for science to catch up and validate the imminent return of John Frum.
I’m a social psychologist. I don’t study stereotype threat, but I teach about it. The basic finding that there is a stereotype that Christians don’t do science as well and that awareness of the stereotype about themselves can then undermine Christians’ performance on science tasks is consistent with a fairly large body of literature on stereotype threats as applied to lots of different groups (women engineers, African American students, white males on math when compared to Asians..). The “Christians do worse” statement was a quick aside by Vedantam. I am unaware of data on that. It’s possible that it is in the original report. I won’t have time to track it down today, alas. It strikes me that the sort of study that would need to be done to establish the reality (vs. the stereotype) is really hard to do well. I will note that I sometimes teach my students about a study done some years ago on logic puzzles that ministers did better on that natural scientists. The details are back in my office, but if I get a chance I’ll post ’em at the end of the day. It tracks back to the ’80s, though, so I’m not sure it still applies.
With so many “Like and share this to get a blessing from Jesus” posts going around Facebook it’s no wonder that people don’t associate religion with logic and reasoning. Many people, including people in your and my parishes, perceive God as a magician in the sky who grants wishes.
I heard recording of a live comedy act where the comedian interacted with the audience. He asked a man what he did for a living, and he replied, “Professor of Philosophy and Theology.” Without missing a beat, the comedian said, “Oh, I see, you pull aside the bright students and teach them philosophy, and the other ones you just teach religion?”
As Bob Barron points out, a priest was the first one to come up with big bang theory, there is the work of Gregor Mendel in genetics, and other examples that prove the assertion wrong.
I think the blogger at Quantum Theology or the Science Departments at places like Creighton University would dispute that assumption, but it’s also true, as Scott notes, that there is a subset of Christians who aggressively want to be illogical, and thus a stereotype is born.
There is a great intellectual tradition in the Church. But there is another tradition, perhaps with a larger following, of what a friend of mine calls Catholic Voodoo. “Pray this 9 times a day for 9 days and on the 10th day your prayers will be answered. Never known to fail!” These and other such traditions are not helping our reputation with reason and logic.
The good news is that science has overcome all religious schism by judging every Christian alike–we’re all dumb.
That Mahoney study, with DeMonbreun, compared psychologists, physical scientists, and Protestant ministers. Alas, no Catholic priests or religious! They had to guess a rule (which was “any three numbers in ascending order”) and were given one instance, 2, 4, 6. People tend naturally to think it is numbers increasing by 2. A natural solution then is to give some series for which the expected answer is “no” like 1, 2, 3. The ministers took more time to make their first guess about the rule, did more tests before making their first guess, and were less likely to return to a guess they’d been told was wrong than were either psychologists or physical scientists. Alas, this is from a book published in 1976 so who knows how that would hold up now!
The trouble happens when scientists insist that the only things that exist are the ones you can kick, and conversely when Christians look to the bible for their science.
I am surprised at all the mileage y’all got out of what was — as Katherine Christianson told you at #4 — an interesting piece of science. It is street wisdom that women don’t do well on science tests. So the experimenters gave two sets of similar women a science test. One set was asked at the beginning to state their sex. The other wasn’t. The first group didn’t do as well as the second. Ditto with two groups on the conventional wisdom that Christians don’t do science well. One group was reminded of its religious beliefs, the other wasn’t. The second group did better than the first.
If that is replicable, a lot of the comments here represent Christians who secretly think they are not as good at science as atheists arguing that, no, we really are. The protests make me suspect the study is replicable.
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