According to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, forty-five percent of Americans Catholics are unaware that, according their own professed religion, the physical body of Jesus Christ tastes rather like a cracker. Protestants and Jews are equally ignorant of key facts about their own religions, though (at least according to the examples quoted in the New York Times) the gaps in their knowledge were less about theology and more about the roles of historical figures.
I can understand being simultaneously devout and a little hazy on religious history, but I don’t understand how you can be both devout and so hazy about the doctrines of your own church. In the words of Bryan Caplan, who blogged this first:
If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:
Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….
Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?
Now it seems to me that in the cases of the Jews and the Protestants, who were unable to identify Maimonides and Martin Luther, Bryan has overlooked a third option:
Option #3: Religious believers have better things to do than study history.
Unfortunately, this won’t work for the Catholics, for whom the analogous option would be
Option #3′: Religious believers have better things to do than to understand the doctrines of their religion.
This makes no sense, because religious believers should surely think that a) it’s important to have the right beliefs and b) the doctrines of their church contain (perhaps imperfect) information about which beliefs are right. (Otherwise, why subscribe to a religion at all?) So you’d think it would be well worth the while of those believers to acquaint themselves with church doctrine, even if they don’t plan to accept 100% of it uncritically.
Since Bryan has ruled out Option #2 with his “But why then…?”, this, I think, leaves us with Option #1.
(For more on this subject, read Chapter 6 of The Big Questions !)
Note: For all I know, Protestants, Jews and Muslims are as ignorant of their own churches’ doctrines as Catholics are. I can’t tell because the Pew Forum website, with the raw survey data, has been down all night.
Could this have anything to do with a correlation between atheism and education?
Vivi: according to the site, the correlation holds after correcting for education. I think it porobably reflects the fact that athiests have actually thought about it a bit and come to the obvious conclusion.
It is a bit surprising that only 54% knew that the Koran weas the Islamic holy book. With all the publicity about Koran burning, what on earth did 46% of the poulation think it was all about?
Only 47% knew the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, but the authors missed a trick by not asking what religion the Pope was.
Another point that ties in with your earlier post about drawing conclusions from statistics. The poll deliberatly oversampled athiests, agnostics, Jews and Mormons by choosing to phone people they knew from previous surveys. They then asked at least 3 questions specifically about Mormonism. They found that Mormons on average knew more answers about religion. Surprise surprise!
This is interesting of course, but I’m not sure how significant it is. The idea that it is the job of the individual believer to decide whether their religion is true or not is pretty much a Protestant view. For other religions its more about following rituals and being part of a long standing community. Its therefore not surprising the Catholics have less interest in the details of their religion.
What Robert said is true to a considerable extent about Protestants as well. Your observations seem to be based on a belief that a religion is a set of facts that one has to believe to achieve salvation. Some are, perhaps, but not mine: The United Methodist Church has no creed, and I wouldn’t for a minute consider joining a church that did have one. FWIW, nowhere in the gospels Jesus ever list beliefs about supernatural things his followers had to adhere to; he seemed to be much more concerned with how they should treat other people.
As a confirmed agnostic with many religious friends and families, the “evidence” for option 1 seems contrived. At the funerals and remembrances I have attended, the devout are the ones who tend to celebrate most. Still, a devout family member could still mourn that she must endure the rest of her earthly life without the deceased until she meets him in the afterlife.
That said, I believe option 1 to be true for many religious people. In fact, I have heard many devout Christians express their doubts.
I can’t tell because the Pew Forum website, with the raw survey data, has been down all night.
It seems like the guy upstairs wasn’t pleased with the results.
Btw, your observation that Catholics don’t know that Jesus body tastes like cracker was geniusly well put. Someone needs to ask the Pope why Jesus is so delicious.
“This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased.”
How utterly retarded. Or maybe it’s because, y’know, people are sad their loved one is gone for that brief period of time. Even more relevant, it’s consistent with the Christian doctrine of the Fall- death is something not right, not natural, and we feel it.
More importantly, if Christians morn, they are following their leader to the letter; for Jesus wept at Lazarus’ funeral.
Why would Jesus mourn Lazarus’s death?
Please don’t answer that.
The mental acrobatics the devout have to put themselves through trying make sense of the nonsensical is so beyond my comprehension that I find it a miracle that anyone still believes.
Option 1 and 3 remind me of Daniel Dennett’s observation that there are no good reasons to believe in god, but plenty of good reasons to say you believe in god.
In a USA Today column the author reviewed these results and then asked if they really mattered. She seemed to suggest that the questions they asked don’t get to the core of faith. So there might be an Option 4: People just believe what they want to believe. But this leads us to ask, “Why call yourself Christian/Catholic/Jewish/etc.?”
I suspect that many religious people would not understand your criticism. When asked what was important in their religion, young adults (students) tended to respond with things like truth, but older people said things like community. The truth of their religion is not that important to many people. Those young seekers after truth, should they continue, eventually come accross the contradictions and inconsistencies in religion, or at best discover there is no way to determine the truth of religion. They must then either abandon religion, or abandon truth seeking. Many will prefer to continue with the community and support benefits of religion. We all tend to have illogical constructs in our heads, it is just that religious people are a bit more obvious about it.
Someone posted a few days ago that they did not know that Hindus thought Judaism was wrong. Well of course they do, or presumably they would be trying to become Jews. One alternative is that they think Judaism is right, Hinduism wrong, but choose to remain Hindus anyway. The other is that they think Judaism and Hinduism are both right. If they are both right, then that makes almost every detail of their religion wrong, almost all religious practice unnecessary, and only some very, very vague generality remaining.
Adherents perhaps believe that they only need to get the essentials right to be saved. They are a little hazy on what is essential, but I think Catholics will believe that God will give them quite a bit of leeway if they get a few details wrong. So many think it is important to take communion, but perhaps appreciating transubstantiation or understanding the Trinity is not quite so crucial.
What I found a bit surprising in the survey was the sheer number of sub-divisions for Christianity.
Mental acrobatics are required of anything as complicated as death, and just about any issue. And the extent of the acrobatics on each issue depends on your worldview. For example, I can criticize the atheist for saying the universe spawned because of multiple multiuniverses, instead of the simple-complicated explanation of it beginning with a God outside of time and space.
You would object and say those mental hurdles are required because it leads to the truth. I would say the same thing, but to different issues.
Side note (but not really because it has to do with the main topic): I would like to know how much each atheist knows about how the universe was created by itself (to help disprove God), and all the major contributing scientists. Or is that not a fair comparison?
For the most part, this survey just shows that religious folks are often ignorant of the trivia of other religions. It is really not important to know whether Mormonism got started before or after 1800. There are other surveys that show that many people do not do well on questions about historical dates.
This study is completely meaningless and says very little about any religion besides atheism/agnosticism. It seems that however they control for education, it is almost certainly inadequate. While it is a bit shocking that a majority of Catholics do not know some of the tenets of their own faith, you can see through the example of the survey results for Jews, where it is most obvious, that self-reported religion has very little to do with actual beliefs and religiousness.
More so than any other group, being Jewish in America is more a cultural/genealogical identification than a religious identification. Only something like 10-20% of self-identified Jews in America also consider themselves “observant” of Judaism (this includes observant Conservatives) in the sense that they believe and practice some form of Judaism, so the vast majority of Jews surveyed were likely Jewish-atheists or Jewish-agnostics. Jews answer almost as well as the atheists/agnostics themselves on questions about atheism and about world religions. They only answer worse than atheists about Christianity because many ordinary atheists are former Christians, whereas Jewish atheists clearly are not.
While this is most obvious in the case of Jews, I suspect the same thing may be going on in the Catholic category, which has lately evolved into more of a default religion for many common cultural groups such as Italians and Irish.
While I find the results of the poll amusing, I don’t find them at all contradictory to peoples’ avowed faith. Seemingly, one of the benefits of participating in organized religion is that you can rely on a priest, minister, rabbi, etc. to know the details while it’s enough for you as a follower to believe in and follow the basic tenants.
Bryan Caplan’s analysis begins with a false assumption that knowledge of one’s religion determines their eternal fate. Sure, knowledge of one’s religion is an indication of how well a person practices it, but lets face it, most of the important lessons like “love thy neighbor” pretty much go without saying. The more detailed rituals, like how to take communion, there is a priest there to show you step by step how it’s done (or just follow the crowd). Who ever said that understand transubstantiation was a requirement for getting into heaven?
“Atheists” don’t clam to know anything with certainty.
Theists (and I realise I’m painting with a fiarly broad brush here) are the ones who claim to know things that they cannot possibly.
I take it back: Why would Jesus, with all his magical powers, mourn the death of the mortal body of an eternal soul that he supposedly has infinite access to anyway?
Re. Option #1, I know many people who attend church, but do not actually believe in the religion in which they participate. Their rationale is that the church provides a community for their children, or, as Robert pointed out, the church provides a connection to their childhoods and family history.
Also, most people participate in religions in which they were raised, as a default choice. They have no real reason to study the details of their religions or the religions’ histories. In my experience, people who make a concious decision to change religions are much more likely to understand the tenets and history of their religion and other religions they considered converting to.
For example, I know a person who was raised as a Muslim in Egypt, but after he moved to the U.S. he married a Southern Baptist. They wanted to raise their children in a shared religion, so they tried several religions and eventually decided to convert to Catholicism. They are very knowledgeable about religions, because they evaluated many.
Christians don’t claim to know for certain. That’s why there’s faith. And unless an atheist has faith as a starting point as well, he must doubt that he doubts. In essence, he can’t go anywhere at all.
The passage I referred to is in John 11. Butchering the passage in my summary, Jesus says he will revive Lazarus, weeps over Lazarus and other’s tears, and revives Lazarus.
We weep because we have emotion. Deep down, we know that death is not the original design.
Death is a loss mortals feel that an all knowing all powerful superman has no reason to experience.
That reason has no rhyme or reason. An all knowing superman would logically know an experience.
He would also know that Eve would eat the apple, that the
world would need to be flooded to rid of sinners and that Lazarus would die.
Yet he gets angry, vengeful and mournful right after each of these events.
Some rather reactionary given he both knew these things were coming and has complete control over them too.
If a loved one were emigrating and we did not expect to see them for a long time, we may have a little weep at the airport.
You’re smart to focus on people’s knowledge of their own faith. American Catholics lacking knowledge about the faith of most Indonesians doesn’t tell us much.
Where is the evidence that “deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end”?
All this survey shows is that some people mislabel themselves. It doesn’t show that actual religious believers believe that death is the end.
You guys can use the quiz to show that aha! some people who call themselves Catholics might not actually be practicing Catholics. Holy moly, what a newsflash!
You and Caplan seem a bit like an overeager journalist coming across something too good not to print.
Perhaps they feel that belief is what affects the after life, and the knowledge sufficient to have belief is minimal. Of course this assumes they have the right religion to begin with, but I think that’s an assumption a lot of people make.
But God is magic and can see who he wants when he wants for as much as he wants.
In fact if he is everywhere and at everytime, he would have no choice in the matter but be confronted with everything and everyone simultaneously forever.
Giving it more thought, of course it isn’t surprising that people who know more stuff generally – e.g. are educated, and probably like learning – also know more about religion. On one hand, I suspect atheists and agnostics know more simply because they’ve investigated more carefully.
But additionally, I suspect being in a minority belief/nonbelief system puts more pressure on you to know your beliefs and others with which you expect to engage, better than those who don’t expect to be questioned in their beliefs or nonbeliefs.
@jamarama I know that most Mormons attend seminary school every day. Where I grew up there was a large Mormon population and they actually were permitted to leave campus for a class period to attend the seminary. The men also almost universally go on two-year missions, many to foreign countries, where they devote themselves to religious study and proselytizing. With that much study time and exposure to other religions, it is no surprise to me that they scored so highly. I’m not sure I have an explanation for Jews though. Its too bad they didn’t sample more minority belief groups to see if the trend held for them too.
Brian – interesting, I suppose that explains why Mormons would score well on their own beliefs, but why would they know about other religions? Unless their seminary covers other religions too. Perhaps there is simply a correlation between high education levels and Mormons, Jews, Atheists, and Agnostics that doesn’t exist with members of lower scoring religions
Don’t many religions preach salvation based on faith alone? It seems that knowledge has nothing to do with it. After all, absolving followers of the need to think may be more a feature than a bug. This cuts a bit differently from options 1 or 2. Nevertheless, option 1 does seem the best bet which makes religion more about signaling loyalty to a community.
Why should a religious person need to understand how the entire thing works?
Anyone can put a key into a car ignition and start it without knowing that the key completes a circuit that activates the solenoid, while simultaneously energizing the coil. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen…only that the person doing it trusts it to happen without knowing it.
blink and Pat T:
blink says: Don’t many religions preach salvation based on faith alone? It seems that knowledge has nothing to do with it.
Pat T says: Why should a religious person need to understand how the entire thing works? Anyone can put a key into a car ignition and start it without knowing that the key completes a circuit that activates the solenoid…
But wouldn’t you want to be sure you’d chosen the right religion? And wouldn’t this require knowledge?
To continue Pat T’s analogy: If I believe that my life depends on my getting into a car that starts properly the instant I turn the key, and if there’s a choice of cars to get into, I sure as hell am going to devote some very serious effort into understanding how those cars work, if only so that I can choose the right one.
I say: Surely
I am not an atheist, but I share the frustration about ignorance and religion. Hope my account is insightful to you.
I was Mormon a missionary for 2 years in Cambodia. One thing that frustrates every missionary is a conversation that goes something like this:
Missionary: Families can be together forever through…
Investigator: Oh yeah I strongly believe that too…
Missionary: Will you come to our church on Sunday?
Investigator: No thanks I am a baptist (or a catholic or buddhist etc.)
Missionary: But your religion teaches that you are married only until “Death do you part” (or that you will be reincarnated and can’t be with your family…)
Investigator: I know, I just don’t believe that part of my religion.
Missionary: Wouldn’t you rather join a religion that teaches the truths you already have a conviction of?
Investigator: No, I like where I am…
This happened all the time. Most people are not looking for the truth — they are more habitual and interested in signaling their alliances etc. I think that it is human nature to be like this — to live the unexamined life.
It would be fallacious to conclude that all religious people are that way, of course.
What’s more important, do be book smart about your religion or practice it’s principles? Who gives more money to charity (religious and secular)–that would be the devout. Who gives more time to charity (again, religious and secular) the devout. Who gives more in kind donations to charity? You guessed it, the religious. Not a believer? Read, Who Really Cares. Documents the giving of the religious and non religious chapter and verse.
Frankly the study smacks of smarmy liberals.
Bryan Caplan (and presumably you, since you quote that bit) misunderstand mourning, and the purpose of funerals. Mourning is expression of the sadness one feels at the loss of the deceased. Regardless of whether or not they’ve gone on to ultimate paradise they are lost to us and we mourn that loss.
Funerals, likewise, are for the living. An opportunity to say goodbye (whether to the person or simply to their earthly body doesn’t matter) and to experience some form of closure, both of which are satisfying and necessary for those who remain, again regardless of the ultimate fate of the deceased.
(And, for the record, Jews score nearly as well as atheists in this study. There’s also a strong apparent correlation between level of education and score on this survey and a well-known correlation between Jewish identity and the pursuit of higher education.)
Alan Wexelblat:
Bryan Caplan (and presumably you, since you quote that bit) misunderstand mourning, and the purpose of funerals. Mourning is expression of the sadness one feels at the loss of the deceased. Regardless of whether or not they’ve gone on to ultimate paradise they are lost to us and we mourn that loss.
I agree with you. Bryan does have this part wrong, and for exactly this reason.
@destin re: side note
not a fair comparison. unless the said athiest is also claiming to be a scientist that has devoted some time to thinking about the origin of the universe.
im an athiest. i call the agnostics ‘pine riders’..riding the fence..just in case..
i like to imagine a box with a lightbulb inside..i cant see the light..how would i know if it is on or off? maybe i could measure the temperature of the box knowing that lightbulbs also emit heat. or i could measure the magnetic field of the box knowing that (electric) lightbulbs produce magnetic fields..either way..i am drawn to know the state of the light. i think i would be wrong to believe that maybe the light is on.
the burden of proof lies with the believer. give me some evidence that the light is on.
side note: im no scientist, but in my imaginings, the universe is a probability. what is the probability of dividing by zero? if before the universe = 0, then the origin of the universe = /0. thankfully, the adam probability function and the eve probability function are on opposite ends of the universe because if they ever meet..thats the end of the garden of eden for all of us.
Dave,
You said “the burden of proof lies with the believer. give me some evidence that the light is on.”
That is too easy to turn around.
The burden of proof is on the believer, give me some evidence the light is off.
With no other way of obtaining evidence, until the box is removed, the only answer a true skeptic (someone who believes only that which is proven) can give is “I do not know whether the light is on or off”.
Which would be the Agnostic(or your pine rider) position.
Earlier you claimed that ‘“Atheists” don’t claim to know anything with certainty.’ But I take it from the tenor of your posts that you BELIEVE that there is no god. If that is true then how do we decide who has to prove what. Do religious people have to prove that there is a god, which is impossible? Do Atheists have to prove that there is no god, again impossible? It all has to do with an individual’s initial hypothesis which in this case cannot be rejected.
Please drop your self-righteous attitude toward those who believe something that is unproven.
I am getting tired of evangelical Atheists. At least after listening to evangelical Christians I normally get some good down home food.
PaulRoscelli:
Who gives more money to charity (religious and secular)–that would be the devout
I have wondered before if that statistic includes believers’ tithes to their own churches. That donation might give benefits back, like a club membership.
Steve Landsburg: About Option 3, I have it from a Catholic priest that the Catholic doctrine of dignitatus humanae holds that everyone has the right to worship God in his or her own way. (I find this attitude a vast improvement over the Inquisition.) In other words, according to the modern Catholic Church it is not essential to get the details right.
This reminds of David Friedman’s remark — I can’t find the reference — that while any particular set of religious doctrines struck him as very improbable, the idea that there was some truth behind all the various sets of religious doctrine seemed less improbable. I don’t remember how far he went along those lines, and I hope I’m quoting the sense of his comment correctly.
By the way, in this blog and in your book you don’t seem to take into account the existence of religious believers with uncertainty (that is, the occasional doubt). I would lay heavy odds this kind of religious belief is quite common.
Steve Landsburg writes: “This makes no sense, because religious believers should surely think that a) it’s important to have the right beliefs and b) the doctrines of their church contain (perhaps imperfect) information about which beliefs are right. (Otherwise, why subscribe to a religion at all?)”
The essence of religion is not whether or not the individual believes or puts effort into verifying whether or not it is right. Setting aside that many religions, especially Eastern ones, recognize other belief systems as equally right, the issue of what one believes is not about whether or not the system itself is right.
The essence of religious belief in its broadest sense, including atheism, agnosticism, or any other choice to believe or not believe, is that humans innately recognize that there are intimate parts of their inner selves that are ultimately unshareable with others–not even, to use an overused term, with a “soul mate.” Some of our innermost hopes, desires, thoughts, drives, feelings, concerns, wishes, etc. simply cannot be expressed, known, or shared with others. Words may not exist in any language–not even the language of mathematics–or we may be unable to find the best words; we may be unable to bridge a gap in communication or understanding; or, commonly, we may even be unable to dredge these innermost feelings, thoughts, or drives out of our own consciousnesses. (Else every mathematical theorem would be immediately obvious, or we would instantly understand why we sometimes have fleeting moments of wishing ill on those we sincerely love. False thoughts occur to us along with true ones.) Fundamental to our consciousness is the consciousness to understand that at some level, in some deep parts of ourselves, we are separate from others. We are alone.
At that level of our thoughts, we do not “subscribe” to anything. Our thoughts, motives, and desires simply are. They are data, neither right nor wrong. In these, our most intimate moments, there is only an innate desire to connect with our own selves to find out what it is that we think or feel. That there may be a God who will understand, hear us–even without our ability to have words or even without our ability to understand these deepest parts of our own selves, is at those moments as rational a desire, hope, unanswered question, or belief as that there may not be a God at all. It is up to us, alone, to figure it out.
That there are things we do not know, no matter how hard we strive, is the essence of religion. Or of no religion. These moments of aloneness are intimate, private moments of communication with oneself, with God, or both, in which no one can intervene or answer for you. For the non-religious, those moments can be profound moments of discovery of oneself and of how one’s inner thoughts relate to a given framework. For the religious, those moments can be the basis of the most profound moments of prayer, direct connections with God with no one else standing between.
The key is that in those moments, the framework is given. In the moment when one does pass judgment on one’s own thoughts’ rightness or wrongness, it would be the paradox of the set of all sets to ask if the system itself is also either right or wrong.
That science has a procedure for rejecting some kinds of hypotheses is not the same as saying as saying science can determine what is fundamentally true about all things. To say that religious believers should think it’s important to arrive at a “right” or “true” set of beliefs is to miss the point about the ultimately private, profoundly unshareable experience of what religion addresses. Whether you use history, science, faith, family upbringing, culture, introspection, reading, economics, mathematics, religious precepts, interpretations of a religious leader, inborn leanings, habit, etc., to arrive at how you handle your thoughts is irrelevant to anyone else. Right, wrong, and even whether determining right or wrong are important, are, in that moment, yours alone to contemplate, including whether or not your thoughts might cause you to question any system, religious or not, to which you may hold. In that moment, when you are alone with your thoughts, no other person can either partake or judge.
“If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion…”
I think is a straw man. I don’t think many of the religious believed their eternal fate hinges on the knowledge of their religion. I think it hinges on the belief.
Seth:
I think is a straw man. I don’t think many of the religious believed their eternal fate hinges on the knowledge of their religion. I think it hinges on the belief.
But it hinges on having the right belief, and it seems to me that if you thought it was important to have the right belief, you’d start by finding out what the standard beliefs are.
I don’t think that Catholicism or most forms of Protestantism think salvation depends on their knowledge of theology or its details.
Seth already covered my comment, but you really don’t get it if you think faith requires you to research what the correct beliefs are. If you are going to believe that you might as well be a scientist and atheist. The secret of faith is to believe and follow – investigation is inimical to that.
@awp
my box arguement included two examples of evidence that could be obtained to determine the state of the light without removing the box. it is clearly an imperfect analogy. only a self-righteous athiest evangelical would have the hubris to compare the omnipotent, omnipresent creator of all we survey to a box. please pass the cornbread.
if i were to code myself into a program, could i leave this earthly body behind and spend an eternity (as long as nobody pulls the plug) of (relative) bliss?
thx to roger schlafly for the link that i followed to nick bostrom’s page. that is one sharp tack. if/when i do get(realize that i have already been) uploaded, you both will get credit. =]
Steve – I agree with you about the “right belief”. I didn’t read that as what Caplan meant. Or maybe I didn’t understand how the knowledge of the body of Jesus Christ tasting like a cracker was a key fact.
I think belief in religion is kind of like support of a sports team. There is a cost to switching teams, even if you know another team is better. Betraying your side or your team or your family is considered by some to be among the worst things a person can do. Of course the entire problem of sin undercuts the argument of religion, if you believed your soul was at stake why would anyone sin?
Ultimately the faithful are mostly too easy on themselves, they start with the assumption that they will get into heaven. From there they figure their good deeds outweigh their sins (whatever the real tally might show) and that they have chosen/been born into the right religion. The car will start not because of the car or the key but because they believe they are special.