Science Fair Experiment: Are Christians More Moral?
Possum Mama reproduces a science fair project created by a sixth-grade Christian boy:
Project Title: Better Living Through God
Question: Do unchristians make less moral choices than Christians?
Hypothesis: The Bible is the perfect guide to life that shows us how to be moral people. Without believing in the Bible you can't know God and he can't guide you and give you rewards for being a good person. I think people who aren't Christian will be less successful.
Experiment: I will interview thirty people and ask them if they are Christian. I will give them the same questions so I have a control sample. I think they are immoral if they score lower than 15.
There are almost too many problems here to list, much less explain. Where is the control group and why does it qualify as a control? What is an "unChristian"? The "hypothesis" is mostly an assumption that Christianity is superior and it is also circular because it basically says: the Bible is the best moral guide, Christians are best at following the Bible, and therefore Christians are more moral. What, exactly, is being tested: that the Bible is best, that Christians are best at following the Bible, or that Christians are more moral? The hypothesis that is supposed to be tested is the third, but it's meaningless if it depends upon assuming the truth of the first two.
I'm just scratching the surface and there are already too many basic problems to take the experiment seriously. Here are a couple of the twenty questions asked:
2. Have you ever killed another human being?
4. Have you ever had relations before marriage?
5. Do you go to church every Sunday or once a week?
9. Do you listen to rap or heavy metal music?
10. Have you ever had an abortion or been pro-choice?
12. Do you see movies with unwholesome content?
It's important to note here that some of the questions appear designed to give Christians an edge. How many non-Christians go to church at all, much less once a week? How many non-Christians are worried about movies with "unwholesome content" or rap music?
The student was surprised by the answers — apparently, non-Christians weren't any less moral than Christians despite being given extra help in the wording of the questions. What does this tell us about the original hypothesis?
Conclusion: We are all sinners and need to ask God's forgiveness and repent. Since Christianity shows us how to do that, it would make people more moral if they became Christians.
So, since the data contradicts the hypothesis, the student just ignores this and makes something up to salvage the original belief. Saying that people would be "more moral if they became Christians" just repeats the original hypothesis as if it hadn't been refuted by the data (however flawed). In fact, if we eliminated the questions that give Christians an extra edge, I wonder if they would end up as less moral — but that, too, probably would have just been ignored.
Possum Mama includes commentary with most of the above points, but the commentary at the end is especially insightful:
The tragedy isn't that this kid is a Christian. The tragedy, to me, is that he (and likely his parents) somehow thought an appropriate project for a sixth grader was interviewing people around him about their sins and then setting arbitrary criteria for morality. The project is flawed not because it's based on religion...but, because his conclusion doesn't reflect the hypothesis. If this were truly a science project, then the conclusion should've said something like "Christians are no more moral (by these standards) than "UnChristians"". But, he monkied the conclusion to reflect his bias. That's not how it works. To me, it shows the complete bastardization of mixing the evangelical, creationist agenda with science.
It might be argued that most attempts by evangelical Christians to use science to "prove" their religious beliefs look much like this — but it's all usually expressed in a more sophisticated way to better mask all the problems. We have an unscientific "hypothesis" that incorporates assumptions about the truth of the desired conclusion, tests designed to give an extra boost to the desired conclusion, and finally a dismissal of all the data in order to restate faith in the original position. Either this science fair project is much more advanced than it looks, or the efforts of so many evangelical apologists haven't moved beyond the level of a sixth grade science project.
Comments
I think regarding to the last question raised by Austin, the latter hypothesis is the only true one. Before I reached this last paragraph I was already thinking of the comment I was going to post, and that included something like “it would be fair to say that a sixth grade student succeeded in making as good an argument as any of the most “revered and respected” theologians of all times!”.
It never ceases to amaze me the importance the average american Joe or Jane gives to such a ludicrous and outdated “cult”, “belief”, “way of life”, whatever you want to call it.
Finally, following the Possum Mama’s posted commentary, underneath the tragedy of it all, I bet that with that brilliant conclusion to his “experiment”, the teacher would be fired by the schoolboard, if he or she graded the project with less than an A+.
Sincerely
The kid was probably ‘taught’ not to think critically (the ‘Critical Thinking Is Bad For You’) article comes to mind.
This reminds of a link posted to a creation science fair website a member of our local atheist group submitted. One of the ‘experiments’ had some girl had her uncle standing in a booth, if he refused a banana then he was not a monkey. I guess if a monkey refuses a banana then apparently it is a man by that line of thinking. The whole idea of a creation science fair should say something about the movement grasping for straws.
To even begin a study of morality of Christians vs “unChristians” you first need to define what morality is. Unfortunately, that kid chose to slant the study by using the Christian definition of morality. Fundamentalist Christian morality at that. Rap, heavy metal, movies with “unwholesome content”, Harry Potter and the Golden Compass? What the crap? I hope that kid got an F. Though, I’m sure that kid goes to a religious school, and probably got a gold star…
I think what’s more ridiculous is that since some Christian child came up with the incorrect conclusion to a dumb study, the author makes his own dumb conclusion that since one Christian kid screwed up, all Christians screw up the same way.
Cranky:
Austin wrote: “_It could be argued that_ most attempts by evangelical Christians to use science to ‘prove’ their religious beliefs look much like this — but it’s all usually expressed in a more sophisticated way to better mask all the problems. We have an unscientific ‘hypothesis’ that incorporates assumptions about the truth of the desired conclusion, tests designed to give an extra boost to the desired conclusion, and finally a dismissal of all the data in order to restate faith in the original position.”
He isn’t saying that since this child drew bad conclusions from a bad study that all Xians share this failing. He’s merely making an observation that it mirrors attempts by older, supposedly more sophisticated apologists to use science to justify their own conclusions.
I’ve dialogued with a good number of Xians, in addition to being raised on the Bible in a Xian environment, and I’ve never seen any other Xian mindset when it comes to trying to incorporate science as justification for belief in god’s existence.
What’s really interesting is that if science truly justified belief in god’s existence, I would expect that the more one understands the natural sciences, the more theistic they would be. However, when compared to the general population, the level of belief among the people we call “scientists” is much lower.
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/050811_scientists_god.html
This article is actually somewhat supportive of the idea that science and religion are not incompatible; however, that’s extremely different than trying to claim science helps to justify a belief in god.
Note that the level of belief declines even between scientific disciplines, with scientists who study and work in natural sciences–physics, chemistry, biology–having much lower levels of belief than those who are not involved in the natural sciences.
I don’t have problems with someone believing whatever they like. And I don’t mind Xians saying that they have nonliteral Bible beliefs that don’t make science and religion mutually exclusive for them. But when I see Xians trying to make public arguments that science justifies their beliefs, it becomes abundantly clear if you speak to them that science simply doesn’t; and they end up having to make leaps and accept fallacies in order to hold to that. Austin is just saying that this child’s experiment is mirroring this reality.
It’s painful to watch, and I sometimes even feel badly when I’m publicly dialoging with such people, because I am not sure it’s kind to allow them to dig a public hole for themselves that ends up making them look so foolish in such an open and public fashion.
What really pains me is that it’s totally unnecessary, because they can legally believe whatever they like–and it’s nobody’s business so long as they’re not hurting anyone. Ultimately, they are the ones who put pressure on themselves to be able to “prove” what they believe; but it’s not provable, and that’s why they end up making themselves look as ridiculous as this poor child referenced in the article. A kid can be forgiven. But an adult simply has no excuse to fall back on.
Would you care to cite where, specifically, I offer that conclusion?
I’ll save you the trouble and point out that you can’t — I offer on such conclusion at all. All I do is note that “most attempts by evangelical Christians to use science to “prove” their religious beliefs look much like this.” If you read the words, you’ll notice that they are unambiguous in not referring to all Christians at all times. There is absolutely no way that a person might reasonably misinterpret those words in the way you did.
Which, frankly, doesn’t leave many explanations outside of deliberate misrepresentation.
I think they are certainly powerful moralizers.
I’m a non-Christian and I rarly miss attending my Unitarian-Universalist church.
Gotweirdness,
Perhaps the uncle refused the banana until lunchtime and then he became a monkey. And that was only the first day. Cripes we got it all backwards!!!
Tracieh,
This article can neither support nor refute the idea that religion and science are compatible, because such an endeavor would involve a discussion of science and
religion themselves. The discussion of the rates of religious adherence of scientists only tells us about what these scientists do or do not believe, which is distinct from the compatibility of science and religion.
Scientists≠Science.
EJ,
Yeah, I guess all of us who accept evolution must be backwards to think monkeys and humans are related due to DNA studies. Apparently, we humans were popped perfectly out of thin air despite some flaws in our skeletal structure such as the lower back.