Friday, October 31, 2008

 

Figuring Figurers


Razib Khan of Gene Expression has a short piece up at the Guardian about the errors of those who use statistics while wearing glasses of their favorite tint. While he notes that predictions that Europe will soon be dominated by Muslims are wrong, he focuses on those who predict it will soon be atheistic:

Conservative commentator Mark Steyn declares that Europe will soon be dominated by Muslims. The polemicist Sam Harris observes that half of Swedes are atheists, portending a godless future. They can't both be right, but they are both making the same mistake. ...

[O]ne should be exceedingly cautious about games of prediction. Across the west the 1960s was a period of cultural change as church affiliation dropped precipitously. If one extends that decline out from the interval 1960-1970 Christianity should be extinct, and yet it is not. The decline in religiosity slowed by around 1980. Why? The will of God? A more plausible explanation is that social pressures which enforced religiosity before 1960 no longer operate, so those who were never particularly devout are more honest with themselves and society.

Labels matter a great deal here. It is not true that modern societies are divided between atheism and institutional religion. Sam Harris implicitly assumes this model when he says that half of Swedes are atheists, and it allows him to rig the game. In reality a February 2005 Eurobarometer survey (pdf) reported that 23% of Swedes did not believe in God, 20% did, and 53% believed in a spirit. A quick survey of European nations shows that the decline of traditional institutional religion has benefited both atheism and unaffiliated spirituality, but the latter has grown more robustly than the former!

As always, the universe turns out to be more complex than we might hope.
.

Comments:
Hi there mates, its fantastic paragraph about educationand completely explained, keep it up all the time.


Here is my web blog premium worpress themes
 
Hi friends, good post and nice arguments commented at this place, I am genuinely enjoying by these.


Feel free to surf to my blog - root canal treatment
 
I just arrived in Chiang Mai. I needed to publish on my blog, at Blogspot, but all of the headings are actually in Thai, not English.
Will be the issue with my computer, or perhaps the hotel's wi-fi service, or what? How do i get things returning to English again?.

Feel free to surf to my website - Paxil Attorney
 
Excellent post. Keep writing such kind of information on
your site. Im really impressed by it.
Hello there, You have done an excellent job. I will certainly digg it and in
my opinion suggest to my friends. I'm confident they'll be benefited from this website.


Here is my blog ... Psn Code Generator
 
Cleaning company Khamis Mushait
Every woman suffers from the daily cleaning of her home but she may not get the perfect cleanliness she wants. So a cleaning company in the mother of sahk offers my lady the perfect solution to clean your house or villa without bothering you and the desired cleaning. Efficiency, and through our company you can get the floors of a bright and neat house and clean water tanks and walls are very clean while preserving the colors, and also the marble and marble all this and more found in تنظيف مجالس بخميس مشيط
تنظيف موكيت بخميس مشيط
تنظيف كنب بخميس مشيط
تنظيف سجاد بخميس مشيط

 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

. . . . .

Organizations

Links
How to Support Science Education
archives