I posted over on John Quiggin's blog re Paul's articles mentioned below. I was a bit puzzled by a paleontologist's foray into social/religious research and wondered how good the research was - so I wanted a second opinion. I got a worthwhile opinion from Neil here. I replicate it below for your interest and edification.
Neil Says: October 1st, 2005 at 2:02 pm
Brigid,
The research isn’t earth-shattering, so far as I can see. Yes, Paul is a paleontologist – a free-lance one at that. Nevertheless, his work in his own area seems respectable (perhaps better than respectable – it’s hard to tell from outside). The Journal of Religion and Society is refereed, but fairly low in the pecking order.
Paul’s aim is fairly limited: he calls it a preliminary study, and that seems fair enough. He aims only to establish a correlation between religious belief and various social indicators. He finds that across the Western world, homicide, rates of abortion and STDs, and health statistics. The problem that Paul simply sets aside is that correlation does not establish causation, and that therefore there may be some third factor at work, and also that the set of data is not really big enough to be sure that what we’re seeing isn’t an artifact.
I don’t think Paul has shown (or claimed to have shown) that religious belief causes social ills. He has, however, done something valuable: that there is little evidence for the virulent meme that the opposite is true: that decline in belief causes immorality. The best we can say for the research is that it helps shift the burden of proof on this particular debate toward the ‘religion is good for morality’ camp.
