Hallucinations can arise through sensory deprivation, drugs, illness and fever, a lack of REM sleep, changes in brain chemistry, and so on.

The Psychology of Christianity 2.2

There is a connexion between death and sexual arousal. The sight or thought of murder, or people dying can give some people a feeling of sexual excitement.
George Bataille, Eroticism (1962)

God and Morality
The Herd-Instinct and Religion
Christianity and Sexuality
Science and Belief

There is something strange about Christians objecting so vehemently to such things.

Abstract

Pious Christians like to believe in the religious instinct because God or Jesus speaks in their heart. Christian professionals manufacture this religious sense by suggestion, not to explain religious belief, but to induce weak people to convert, be faithful and ignore skeptics. It is a delusion which can, in some people, become psychotic. Is the religious sentiment love? In the Catholic Church, a nun’s love of Jesus or a young monk’s love of Mary might have a subconscious sexual content. Some Catholic girls fasten upon the confessional as a sexual outlet and dwell over their remorse for their sexual sins—some priests encourage it. A desire to have sex with the priest is not an uncommon result. Sex is a basic cause of people taking to religion. It is not necessary to keep people in it. Religion removes the cause of the sexual guilt in that they are assured it will not stop them from being saved, and they feel greatly relieved.

God and Morality

Christians claim that religion is necessary to keep people good, and they maintain this in the face of two millennia of Christian wickedness. Civilized people are able to control their instincts by their intellect, and generally are expected to do so. It is called being moral. Morality is sticking to socially desirable rules even when you would rather not. If they do not, society provides the law to give them an incentive to apply their intellect to their instincts and to become moral, with punishments doled out if they refuse. Animal studies show that instincts not expressed weaken and sometimes just disappear. So people who practice controlling their atavistic urges usually find it gets easier with time.

Religious people think that the social rules and laws are given to us by God in a revelation of some kind. On this basis, anyone who rejected the notion of God would not feel any obligation to remain moral, and would be wicked. Religious people are moral and irreligious people are immoral. It is far from the truth. It sounds valid but is disproved empirically. Careful studies have shown that people who lose their religious belief mainly stay moral, and people who never had any religious belief are mostly moral people. The truth is that religion has been useful to rulers to maintain order in their counties and kingdoms, and so itself is a social construct and is preserved for that purpose. Certainly, any good God that exists must want people to be good and therefore to uphold the rule of law, but the law came first. In fact, the hypothesis of God is unnecessary. The law was devised to help society to function to everyone’s mutual benefit. That is sufficient reason for law to exist.

Men might wish they could fulfil an instinct to club any young woman they fancy and drag her back to the cave by their hair, but society has decided otherwise. Sex with young women without their consent is illegal, and most men have no problem with it. Curbing the instinct might seem hard when young but it gets easier. The churches want to make the rules more stringent and stop any sexual activity outside of marriage, but that is simply to give the pastors and priests power over their sheep. It is going too far. It has been tried and leads to lives of misery, usually for the poor because the wealthy always were able to divorce when they wanted to, church or no church, because bishops allowed anything if the price was right.

People are aware of the need for law and order if society is to work, and feel vulnerable at any sign that order is breaking down. This is the ground upon which the moral argument for God is built. In this argument, there could be no morality unless it came from God. The dualism of the natural world reflected in religion simply has added to it the dualism of the social world—those who obey the law and those who do not. The formulation of social rules is added to God’s functions of making and maintaining the natural world.

The moral argument makes God a lawgiver and a judge, but lawgivers and judges are often perceived as stern and unmerciful people, so the legal God is often a stern and unmerciful god, the god of the Calvinists and Jansenists. It has proved useful, especially in bringing unruly children to order in societies like the Wee Frees’, with threats to them of hell fire, and it is useful to the monstrous revivalists in exaggerating guilt to bring about conversions. This is God the bogey man. Unfortunately it often produces a morbid morality, like that of the Wee Frees, that is, presumably, counter to the original intention. It can produce cruel and insensitive people in a world where cruelty and insensitivity becomes the God-given norm, and anything but good by any reasonable criteria.

Psychologically, this comes about by “the law of reversed effect” whereby excessively strong feelings produce in people’s psyche the opposite of what is desired. It is like the fear of heights. Any normal person can walk along a low wall but many could not walk along a wall of similar width at the top of a skyscaper. Their fear of falling makes them fall though there seems no reason that they should, and their ability to walk the low wall proves it. There is nothing to fear in falling at ground level, so they do not fall. At a height, they think, “Do not do it, you will fall”. The autosuggestion that they will fall enters their head so strongly out of fear, that they do indeed fall if forced to do it. Similarly, the enforcement of goodness by cruel means makes people cruel and that is not good.

The Herd-Instinct and Religion

The mass of religious people throughout the world believe and worship because the rest do. It is a herd instinct. They inherit religious beliefs as they inherit beliefs about good manners, politics and right and wrong—from their parents and peers.

Human beings are gregarious like sheep and enjoy gathering together. Individuals identify with their fellows, their village, their tribe, their country, their religion. They tend to accept easily what their fellows accept especially when it relates to the group identity. It is a source of racial, religious and national intolerance—the latter made acceptable as patriotism. It is the herd instinct. The instinct is that the herd has to be united in response. It is a group survival instinct. Putting criminals into isolation cells was a punishment. Most people do not like isolation. They feel the lack of human company when they are alone, and so feel incomplete. They need to be restored by a group activity—congregating—in church, at football matches, at the cinema and theatre, but then they enjoy gathering in bars too.

The individual thinks that they can better feel themselves in relationship with God when they seek Him in company with others. It is the effect of the herd creating a depth of emotion not felt by most people in private prayer. In a crowd they feel something is more important than they are. It is their instinct that the group itself is, but it gets mistaken for God. So it is that coming together in a group to worship God is satisfying. It is a well rehearsed communal activity that fulfils the herd instinct. The solemnity of the church service also gives a gravitas to the proceedings that people feel appropriate to God’s presence.

Unlike the sex instinct that is a large component of religion, the herd instinct is not normally suppressed but is fulfilled by religious communal worship. Even so the idea of its suppression is not absent from religious thought, and hermits, anchorites and monks rejected human companionship denying themselves another natural instinct to sublimate into useless worship. Thomas à Kempis combines here sexuality and solitude:

Go in and bar your door, and call upon your loved one: “Jesus! Come to me.” Stay in your cell with him. Elsewhere you will not find such rest.
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Herds have no intelligence of their own, they only have the intelligence of their individual components, yet they can act in a united way. Mob rule is when crowds seem to take on a life of their own, when people in them are carried away by the herd instinct. The herd instinct makes the individuals in a crowd susceptible to respond to the behaviour of others, to do what the crowd does, and this undoubtedly affects religious behaviour. Soldiers are trained to be disciplined and stand firm when the herd instinct dictates that they should flee, and once one does, the others are likely to respond similarly. So, too, in the modern world, instinctive reactions in a crowd are often maladapted to the situation. People ought not to panic in an aeroplane, say, because it makes any danger all the worse. These instances show that intellect and training can overcome the herd instinct when people are wary, but preachers and demagogues make use of it for the unwary.

The herd instinct has evolved for quick responses, when there is no time for every individual to study the situation and decide separately what is best. Even if there were, they would decide upon different actions. The response has to be united, and so the signals are primitive, emotional and often symbolic. Preachers know that people in crowds respond to easily comprehended phrases, primitive and infantile suggestions and emotional allusions. They also respond to others in the crowd, so demagogues and preachers, rather like Dutch auctioneers, plant supporters in the crowd to initiate appropriate responses. The others soon follow.

Psychologists at Harvard did tests on subjects to see how they responded to social pressure. People were asked to judge whether a drawn line matched in length one of three others presented to them. Tested separately people were able to do this simple task accurately. Tested in a group in which all the members except the subject were collaborators with the psychologist and deliberately agreed on a wrong answer, subjects strongly inclined to the view of the herd, and so got the answer wrong. Even when the wrong answer was quite obviously wrong, almost two fifths of participants preferred to agree with the herd than to defy them! Solomon Asch wrote that reasonably intelligent people are willing to call black white to conform with a group. It is the herd instinct.

The suggestibility of crowds is shown by their response to orators whose arguments to any individual would seem risable. Each person in the crowd has more than the oratory to respond to. There is also the approbation or disapprobation of the crowd. Preachers want to get a crowd response and so invite it. To skeptics the constant calls of “hallelujah” sound manic but but to the Christian in the crowd it is a sign of identity with it. Rhythmic clapping, and making the sign of the cross for Catholics serve the same purpose of identity and approval. Mob oratory has two main elements, both common in preaching—affirmation and repetition, as this address by Charles H Spurgeon to aspiring pastors shows:

Spurgeon’s Guide to Mob Oratory

Go on with your preaching. Cobbler, stick to your last. Preacher, stick to your preaching. In the great day, when the muster roll shall be read, of all those who are converted through fine music, and church decoration, and religious exhibitions and entertainments, they will amount to the tenth part of nothing, but it will always please God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. Keep to your preaching, and if you do anything beside, do not let it throw your preaching into the background. In the first place preach, and in the second place preach and in the third place preach. Believe in preaching the love of Christ, believe in preaching the atoning sacrifice, believe in preaching the new birth, believe in preaching the whole counsel of God. The old hammer of the gospel will still break the rock in pieces. The ancient fire of Pentecost will still burn among the multitude. Try nothing new, but go on with preaching, and if we all preach with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the results of preaching will astound us. Why, there is no end, after all, to the power of the tongue! Look at the power of a bad tongue, what great mischief it can do, and shall not God put more power into a good tongue, if we will but use it aright? Look at the power of fire, a single spark might give a city to the flames. Even so, the Spirit of God being with us, we need not calculate how much, or what we can do: there is no calculating the potentialities of a flame, and there is no end to the possibilities of divine truth spoken with the enthusiasm which is born of the Spirit of God… Go on! go on! go on! In God’s name, go on! for if the preaching of the gospel does not save men, nothing will.
Cited by R H Thouless, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion
from M Le Bon, The Crowd

Thouless counted thirty one instances of the same thought repeated in only thirteen sentences. in his book, The Crowd about the psychology of crowds, Le Bon advises revival preachers always to be positive, neither timid or fearful, but “cocksure of their ground” and, like Christ, they must speak with authority. Their preaching “must be directed towards the heart and not the head” and his advice is “get hold of the heart and the head yields easily”. The aim is not to develop thought or invite consideration or to argue at all closely. The core message is simply repeated unchanged in content, in different words and by allusion, so that the crowd cannot fail to get the message—and that is that they need to be saved! Thouless drily comments:

Nowhere in the world have these [techniques of persuasion] been developed in such an extraordinary way as in America.

A description of Billy Sunday preaching against “Booze” near the beginning of the last century sounds alike a modern wild pop band on stage. He crawls, leaps, falls prostrate, bounds about as if on steel springs, “with eyes flashing, face scowling, a picture of hate” (an Illinois newspaper report cited by Thouless) he whirls a kitchen chair above his head, smashes it to the floor, raises the broken remnants up again and threw them into the crowd, which set about smashing them into smaller bits to share amonst themselves. Later, members of the crowd were waving bits of the chair and cheering. More recently the pop bands did the same with a guitar. The psychological technique is the same.

The emotional excitement of such crowds can lead to hysterical behaviour. Once someone breaks down into hysterics, it spreads like a contagion—screaming, jerking of the body, barking, weeping, glossolalia, falling into a faint. Not infrequently spontaneous sexual indulgence too, and it is Christians, sometimes ministers, attending the revival who have reported it. Revivalist preachers have been known to take advantage of it. When young people are in a highly suggestible state, any suggestion made to them can have a positive response! Thouless even reckons that somepeople have been sent permanently mad in revivalist meetings. And the powers that be try to discredit cannabis as dangerous to mental health! Surely revivalist preaching should also be banned. Spurgeon, though he advocated these psychological methods in preach making, regarded the hysteria and immorality they produced as the work of the Devil. Yet modern US Christians like it. Who then is their God?

Those who are more religious than others are more emotional or brood more over religious ideas than others. The same variations of emotional intensity occur in the political world—the Hindu is more fanatical about politics than about religion—and no special psychological explanation is needed of the piety of many of these mass-believers, though it can be seen that religion can be used easily as a political tool of unscrupulous politicians.

Christianity and Sexuality

The question then is whether religion is more than its component parts. Christians think their religion came from God. Where does God come into it if religion can be shown to be a manifestation of the sex urge?

Literally may we say “God is love”—sex love, sometimes in disguise and indistinctly recognized as such, by the lover whose lovesick longings even now create a god to take the place of the undiscovered and much craved human lover.
T Schroeder, American J Religious Psychology 6

Schroeder thought religion was entirely subjective, personal and emotional albeit wrapped up in the doctrinal and ceremonial wrappings of a superbeing. Christianity has taught throughout its history that sex is disgusting, and morally wrong except in marriage. It is the attitude that creates the guilt that drives adolescent people in certain Christian communities to “convert”. The conclusion is that it is essential to the preservation of Christianity, at least as far as the prelates are concerned, and that is why it persists. It must be transparent to everyone, even the thickest among us, that if God made us at all then He was the one who made us sexy. Why then is sex a sin?

Sex is essential to the continuation of the human species. Yet marriage is only a social custom, and Christian marriage has only existed for the last 2000 years. Before that everyone must have been living in sin by God’s own design, according to Christian doctrine. It is absurd. Sex is natural, whether people choose to have their relationship recognized in society by a bit of paper and a magical ceremony or not. God’s primary role in it, if He made us all, was to make us sexual animals, so pious believers in God ought to rejoice at sex, and should say a grace when the have it, as they do when they eat dinner. Sex is not the least bit disgusting, and Christians who say it is are hypocrites when it is obviously God given. The hypocritical Christian leader of the UK encourages girls, though unmarried, to have children by doling out to them ever greater child allowances and easy access to housing while responsible couples are left waiting for years to be housed. His concern is that the UK population is not growing fast enough!

Sex is not morally wrong and is not disgusting, but is a powerful instinct that has an important role in driving people in to Christianity. Christian characteristics that suggest a connexion with sexuality is that they:

commit to religion at the time of their lives when sexuality is emerging—conversion often occurs when the sex drive is emerging in adolescence
express themselves in the language of the sex instinct—mystics particularly, but hymns too, express their sentiments in terms of human sexuality
disapprove of and suppress sexual behaviour—Christianity attaches great value to chastity
are inclined to revert to an uncontrolled sexuality, both in groups and individually—religious excitement passes quite easily into sexual arousal and license.

Adolescent conversion emphasises emotions and puts little emphasis on teaching. The teaching, though, in childhood has already hit its subconscious target. It has produced an irrational sense of guilt in the adolescent child. Christians point to instances of mystical or conversion experiences in pre-adolescent children. It would be interesting to know how they could be sure of this. Adolescence happens at different ages in different people. As it is subject to the normal distribution, some children reach adolescence early and some late. It would take a close and continuing medical study to be certain a child was not entering adolescence early. But let it be. No one claims that exceptions do not happen. Everyone who gets lung cancer is not a smoker, and everyone who gets a sense of guilt does not get it over sex. A child might get an overwhelming sense of guilt for wishing a parent dead who actually dies. That could bring about a convcersion experience independently of the sex urge. The evidence is that many children feel guilty over sex and that motivates them to convert, and it is indisputable.

Christians counter argue that people remain religious when the sex drive fades. It is a deliberate misreading of the psychology. The argument is that sex is a basic cause of people taking to religion. It is not necessary to keep people in it. Religion removes the cause of the sexual guilt in the sense that they are assured that it will not stop them from being saved. That is why they have a great sense of relief and of being pardoned. Their sexual energy might be sublimated into the church, but then other factors become influential such as the false hope of living forever, of self-righteousness, of the necessity to maintain faith if salvation is to be assured. Those factors concerned with salvation and eternal life ought to get stronger as people get older and lose their sex drive. So a piety that was motivated by sexual guilt is maintained for other reasons.

Georges Bataille (Eroticism, 1962) explains that Father Louis Bernaert (Mystique et Continence, 1952) emphasises “the aptness of sexual union to symbolize a higher union”, and that “the phenomenology of religions shows us that human sexuality had a religious significance in the first place”. Bataille adds, “the sacred world did not assume until quite late on the unilaterally lofty meaning it has for the religious man of today”. A Father Tesson, writing in the same volume, argued that sexuality conformed with God’s purpose:

Two forces attract us towards God. One, sexuality, is “written into our nature”. The other one, mysticism “comes from Christ”.

Men pursuing the paths of mysticism often find they are “sullied with the liquid of the carnal flux”, as S Bonaventure put it. It is something mystics consider part of their experience.

A mystical impulse of thought may always set off involuntarity the same reflex that an erotic image would.
George Bataille, Eroticism (1962)

Hindus have sought a mystical experience through sexual excitement in tantrism. With a young, beautiful, and, naturally, devoutly spiritual partner, they pass from the profane and carnal embrace to spiritual ecstasy, being careful not to spoil it by ejaculation! As an example of the mystical style of devotional poetry, Thouless cites this extract:

On my flowery bosom, Kept whole for Him alone, There He reposed and slept; and I cherished Him, and the waving of the cedars fanned Him.
As His hair floated in the breeze, That from the turret blew, He struck me on the neck, With His gentle hand, And all sensation left me.
I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on my love; lost to all things and myself, And amid the lilies forgotten, threw all my cares away.
S John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul

Who would recognize it as a religious work and not an amorous one? It is in the language of sexual love, but presented as divine love. It is a love poem, and who knows that it was not written as one?

True piety is earthly love transcendentalized, and the saint is the lover purified, refined and perfected.
G Stanley Hall, The Psychology of Adlolescence

Even Christian hymns often use the language of love. There is a lover, a betrothal and a marriage, all spiritual of course, and immensely attractive to adolescent girls. Cultured young girls like to identify with troubled young poets like Rupert Brooke, Lord Byron, and Lord Jesus, especially presented in this fashion. The experience of S Theresa was:

In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans, and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, now will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share. So sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying I beseech God, in His goodness, to give him the same experience.
S Theresa

This penetration through the heart to the entrails with a golden spear is called by the divines a “transverberation”, a fine word, but describing something much more like a woman’s orgasm. Bataille attributes a story to Marie Bonaparte of a woman friend who, aged 15, had a crisis of belief, testing her faith. Then, on her knees before the altar, she had felt the delight of God himself descending into her. Later in life, having experienced normal sexual pleasure with a man, she recognized her mystical experience had been an orgasm. Chaste S Theresa never had normal sex, and so never recognized what her mystical experiences were.

Why does Christianity put so much emphasis on chastity? Paul conceded that marriage was necessary for some but chastity was the ideal. The philosopher L A Feuerbach puts it thus:

Marriage in itself is, in the sense of perfected Christianity, a sin, or rather a weakness, which is permitted or forgiven…

The highest ideal for Christianity was chastity and that was the aspiration of monks and mystics who felt that denial of human love somehow brought them closer to God. Christianity has always had this idea because it came out of Essenism, and the Essenes, at the highest level, rejected human sexuality in their endeavour to be perfect like the angels. Christ himself explained (Mark 12:25) that angels were not sexual creatures, nor should they have been since they had no need of sex as immortals. But sexual abstention was often accompanied by fasting,and that is known to bring on hallucinations when severe.

The corollary of abstention and sexual guilt is that it can break out into violence and licentious or rapacious sexuality. A man took over an Amish school house, evicted the boys and shot eight young girls, killing several. No explanation emerged but the clues are that the man had some sexual hang up and guilt related to young girls. Suppression of his feelings in a deeply Christian community seems to have had this tragic consequence. The Amish must be one of the few Christian sects that actually practice the teachings of Christ. They were outstandingly noble, but redneck America will have considered them wimps.

Carl Jung thought religion was characteristic of an inadequate or unsatisfactory love-life, and so was sexually driven. The consequence is a regression to a child-like state of dependence on parents, in which God is the father, of course. So religion is a form of infantilism encouraged by the Christ of the gospels telling his followers to be as children. It emerges in hymns such as “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “I Rest my Soul on Jesus”.

Christian belief requires no analysis. Love of Jehovah, Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha is the same emotion as was once love of Ishtar or Tammuz or Zeus.

Science and Belief

Curiously, the religious beliefs of physical scientists are not as low as one might imagine, showing that many scientists are willing to adopt double standards. As Will Provine said in 1988, according to Massimo Pigliucci, scientists who go to church have to check their brains at the church door. Psychologists and sociologists, whose own pursuit gives them an adequate non-religious account of life, are the least religious professions. Why natural science does not give an equally good account of life is hard to understand.

According to a survey by A E Bergin and J P Jensen (1990), 72% of the general population claimed religious faith as the most important influence in their lives whereas only 29% of the mental health professionals that were surveyed viewed religious matters as important for therapeutic work with clients.

R H Knapp and H B Goodrich noticed in 1951 that very few successful scientists were produced by Roman Catholic universities in the US, but liberal colleges produced them in profusion. One does not expect prominent soldiers to have graduated from Quaker colleges, or doctors from Christian Scientists colleges. Religious schools will not produce quantities of graduates with views that the school does not hold itself. The church that produces scientists is the Unitarian Church, but it does not produce many soldiers or politicians, suggesting it has high moral values. Episcopalians are rarely scientists but are often soldiers and engineers.

F Bello in 1954 found that, among US scientists, over 20 times as many had no religious beliefs (45%) as the population at large (2%). Less than one percent of the scientists were Catholics compared with 26 percent of the population. Two thirds of the US population professed Protestantism, but only a quarter of scientists. Three percent of the population were Jews compared with nine percent of scientists.

James H Leuba in 1916, set out to test the hypothesis that the more people were educated, the less likely they were to believe in God. In a classical survey, he asked 1,000 American scientists their beliefs and his results confirmed the idea that scientists as a group are much less likely to believe in God than the general public.

Edward Larson, a science historian, and Larry Witham, a Washington Times reporter, attempted to replicate Leuba�s study as closely as possible in an article called “Scientists are still keeping the faith” published in Nature in 1997. Larson and Witham did not feel compelled to mirror the original research that closely, but they considered the same number of scientists, divided among biologists, physicists, and mathematicians, and got their sample from the same source used by Leuba, the directory published in American Men (and Women) of Science.

The result was that scientists have not changed their opinion much. Physicists have supplanted biologists as the leading group of atheists, but pretty much the same percentages were found by Leuba in 1916. Larson and Withan�s conclusion is that scientists “kept their faith” after 80 years, a peculiarly Christian way of reporting the outcome. Scientists have a much lower probability of believing in God than the general public, and it is this that has remained unchanged throughout the past 80 years. The percentage of believers in human immortality decreased from 51% to 38%. While 34% of Leuba�s interviewees had answered that they would like to be immortal in some sense, only 10% of modern scientists did.

Considering that science was a minority profession all those years ago but now is a common profession, its extension into the general population might heve been expected to dilute the skepticism of the average scientist, but it has actually kept the same or increased. Leuba himself thought more education would increase skepticism, but it seems to be increasing gullibility to judge by the popularity of astrology and the hysteria over UFO abductions. Interestingly, Larson tells us that Leuba’s findings were one of the sparks which started Williams Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the teaching of evolution in the 1920s, which culminated in the infamous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. So his own research provoked a reaction against Leuba’s own hypothesis. That scientists’ beliefs have stayed generally unaffected by all this is a tribute to them.

In 1934, Leuba separated scientists into ones noted for their originality and success, and journeymen practical scientists. Half of the journeymen believed in God compared with a third of the prominent ones, and two thirds of the journeymen believed in immortality compared with just over a third of the famous ones. It is surprising enough that a third of deep thinking successful scientists still believe in God and life-after-death, and it shows what a psychological grip these fancies have even on great thinkers, but the trend is neverthless clear. The deeper the scientific thinker, the less likely they are to be enslaved by nonsensical beliefs. Leuba also studied psychologists and found that famous psychologists were the least religious of all, only one in seven believing in God, comapred with one in three journeymen psychologists.

A Roe in 1956 studied the religious views of 64 “eminent” scientists. he found that none came from Catholic families, a few had a Jewish background but most were of Protestant background. Despite their upbringing, 61 said they were not interested in religion and were not involved with it. The other three were active in a church!

So, about half of common-or-garden physical scientists surprisingly are Christians, but eminent ones rarely are. Christianity is logically incompatible with science, and Christians only convince themselves the two are compatible, in some sense, with weaselly explanations intended to justify their own actions, notably when they decide science is a better career option that being a coalminer or a lorry driver. Michael Argyle and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, in The Social Psychology of Religion, confirm that the low level of belief among eminent scientists is because “the scientific or scholarly approach to the world” is “incompatible” with “a religious world view”.

The particularly low rating of Catholics among scientists seems to be due to several factors, one of which is that Catholics are more inclined to be taught that science and Catholicism conflict. G E Lenski reported in 1963 that a third of Catholic graduates said science was in serious conflict with church teaching, double the percentage of Protestant graduates. The Catholic Church is authoritarian and hierarchical, Catholics being told that authority is the basis of belief not investigation. The outcome, J Kasa found in 1969 was that Catholic medical students were less concerned with exact analysis and using higher abilities than others but sought a sure outcome and to avoid mistakes.

In the general domain of intelligence, studies show that religious conservatism is inversely proportional to intelligence. Several studies have shown that Baptists and Catholics are less intelligent than Episcopalians and Jews, but Catholics and Baptists come from poor and large families, so there is a class division at work. Curiously, for Catholics, it seems possible that a factor in low intelligence is breeding, in that the more intelligent males in poor societies choose to be priests and have few children or none. Over many centuries, the overall IQ of the Catholic population could have fallen.

R Hassinger, author of a book on Catholic education, found that sectarian schools had a lower quality of students, faculty and educational programmes. E C Lehmann Jr studied almost 3000 graduates in the USA and reported in 1972 that those who conformed religiously placed less value on intellectual creative and scientific achievement.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.