Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2.11
A later paper was published in the same journal in 2006 by an independent
sociologist called Gary Jensen. This paper reported a more sophisticated statisti-
cal analysis of data from 54 countries collected in the period 1990-1998 about the
rates of homicide and different types of religious belief. There are strong positive
correlations between homicide rates and the more passionate religious beliefs, such
as the belief that the world is a battleground between opposing supernatural forces,
often called God and the Devil, and the belief that moral values are so rigid that
there is no middle ground between good and evil. People who hold such beliefs are
more likely to respond in a violent way to those who oppose them because they
think they have supernatural justification for their actions.
However, if we now look at the relation between homicide rates and belief in God
but not the Devil, with belief in Heaven but not Hell, and with church attendance,
the correlation is no longer positive but negative - such people tend to behave better
than the average person because their view of the world is less confrontational and
emphasises tolerance. Thus the links between religious belief and homicide rates
are clearly much more complex than suggested in the Paul paper but, at the very
least, these correlations do not support the commonly-expressed view that a highly
religious society is always a morally healthier one. The reasons for this are likely
to be many and varied, and deserve much more study by social scientists than they
currently receive.
If the naturalistic assumption is correct, moral values must originate from natural
sources. An important aim of evolutionary theory is to explain why the vast majority
of people have a sense of natural justice, that is, a sense of right and wrong, despite
the fact that moral behaviour of that sort is rarely observed in the interactions of
non-human animals.
