New data on the religiosity of U.S. states and its correlation with accepting evolution

February 12, 2017 • 9:00 am

Back in 2013 I put up a post showing a negative correlation between the religiosity of American states and their acceptance of evolution, a relationship that also holds among European countries (see original post for figures). At that time, I had access to religiosity for only the 10 most and 10 least religious states in the U.S., but all of the former were in the bottom half of the “accept evolution” list, while all the the latter were at the top. That kind of result needs no statistics to be significant. Here’s a figure I show in some talks:

Now this is a correlation, not a proof of causation, but I think there’s a third factor that explains both: social well being. People tend to be more religious when their social conditions make them feel powerless or marginalized, and we all know that rejection of evolution is based almost entirely on religiosity. In terms of social well-being, states in the South tend to be lower than others on many indicators. Thus the relationship above—and a similar relationship among 32 European countries, which would be even stronger had I data from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa—suggests to me that acceptance of evolution is ultimately tied to socioeconomic factors that promote religion. That in turn suggests that perhaps the best way to increase acceptance of evolution (something we’re all pondering this Darwin Day) would be not to teach evolution better or more pervasively, but to reduce the influence of religion.

Here’s a bit of evidence for this supposition: the Gallup/Healthways data for well-being among America states in 2016 (see full data here), data that takes into account many measures of social “health”:

While the data don’t line up perfectly with religiosity, I’d be willing to bet there’s a correlation among all the states, for states with the highest well being tend to be less religious, and vice versa (given historical factors, we don’t expect a perfect relationship). Perhaps some reader will plot this relationship, as well as correlating acceptance of evolution with the newest data on religiosity in the US released four days ago by the Gallup organization.

In its new survey, Gallup polled 174,969 people, with at least 480 in every state, and sorted them by religiosity as follows:

Gallup classifies Americans as “very religious,” “moderately religious” or “nonreligious” based on their responses to questions about the importance of religion and church attendance. Very religious Americans say religion is important to them and report attending services every week or almost every week. Nonreligious Americans are those for whom religion is not important and who seldom or never attend religious services. Moderately religious Americans meet just one of the criteria, saying either religion is important or that they attend services almost every week or more often.

Here are the most and least religious states, classified using the “very religious” criterion (data for all states is at the link above):

If you put the new religiosity data on the graph above, there is still no overlap between the two groups of states. Thus, with respect to acceptance of evolution, the least religious states continue to all rank higher than the most religious states.

For comparison, here are the Gallup data from 2009:

The rankings are more or less similar to those for 2016. Among most religious states, Utah joined the list this year (Mormons, no doubt), and Mississippi tops the list for the ninth year in a row. As usual, Alaska and states in New England and on the Pacific coast (and, surprisingly, Nevada), come off as the least religious states. Here’s a map showing the religious landscape for the latest data (greener = more religious).

Well, we don’t expect either religiosity or its upshot, acceptance of evolution, to change much over 8 years, but it’s useful to remind ourselves from time to time of this relationship, as well as of the relationship between low social well-being and high religiosity. In that respect, I think, Marx was right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Finally, the data show a slight increase in secularism in the U.S. Overall, Gallup found that the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as very religious has shrunk from 41 percent in 2008 to 38 percent in 2016, while the number of nonreligious people has increased from 30 percent in 2008 to 32 percent in 2016. That’s not much of a change, but it buttresses other data on “nones” (those who don’t formally identify with a church) showing what I think is an inexorable march towards the de-religionizing of the U.S.

A weird CfI workshop suggests that science is too laden with emotion and needs to adopt the more rigorous standards of “religious truth”. WTF?

October 11, 2016 • 10:45 am

I have to say that although I support the work of the Center for Inquiry in America, I haven’t been a huge fan of their organization. A while back they went through a repellant Social Justice Warrior phase (they seem to be recovering), and sometimes they do stuff that’s just plain weird. (By the way, this doesn’t hold for CfI Canada, which I support unreservedly.) Here is one example, brought to my attention by reader Gary. His comment:

I’m concerned about a strange sounding workshop from Center For Inquiry- Los Angeles. It may be of interest to you, even for a note on your website. If it is, I’d be very interested in your comments and comments from your readers. The title is this:

Beyond Reductionism:
Confronting Both Religious Fundamentalism and Scientism to Be Better Freethinkers

And here’s the complete description of the two-day workshop, which costs $25. I’ve bolded a few bits.

All of us who value science and reason as indispensable remedies with which to challenge ignorance and largely emotional behavior around us take stable comfort in the power of scientific methodology to keep us safe from the biasing effects of human emotion. But in practice, can science itself fall prey to the same kinds of emotional pitfalls, fallacies, and even fanaticism we more often associate with religious literalists and fundamentalists? The word “scientism”—used to refer to any worldview that attempts to answer all human questions with science, often allegedly at the expense of other resources in the humanities—is considered an irritating but ultimately empty insult by many scientists.

However, given the capacity of every human being to be swayed by emotions and appearances in contrast to hard evidence, would it not be prudent to hold our practice of science and reason to the same standards of scrutiny that we apply to religious truth claims and thinking? Is there not some value in working towards a common set of standards for meeting any of the foreseeable challenges and questions we may face as a species?

In this workshop, academic philosopher of science Dr. David Koepsell, author and professor specializing in the philosophy of religion J.I. Abbot, and phenomenologist and poet Dr. Charles Stein will lead panel discussions and small group sessions on the range of topics in the emerging “religion and science” field that can be food for thought in facing such present and future human hurdles. A keynote lecture by Dr. Stein on the evening of Friday, November 4, 7pm on the history and philosophy of science will set the parameters and tone for the exchanges to follow all day Saturday, November 5, from 9am to 4pm.

Now this sounds like a workshop funded by the John Templeton Foundation, though there’s no indication of Templeton dosh here. But in fact the description is invidious if not disingenuous: of course science can fall prey to emotional pitfalls. Many scientists are so wedded to their theories, which of course buttress their reputations, that they are loathe to give them up in the face of evidence. The debate between Brasier and Schopf on the supposed earliest microfossils are one example, as is Steve Gould’s unconscionable adherence to punctuated equilibrium as a mechanistic as well as a descriptive theory of evolution.

The thing is, though, that science has an inbuilt methodology to guard against such confirmation bias: the practice of testing assertions, of replication, of building consensus through reason and observation, and, above all, of doubt.

Religion has no such way to check the veracity of its claims. That’s why, of course, different religion have not only divergent claims, but conflicting ones. (How many gods are there? Is there a Trinity? Was Jesus the son of God/God, or just a prophet? Is evolution true? Is there an afterlife? A hell? Can women be priests? These are the questions that have repeatedly fractured religions into sects and cults over the last 20,000 years.) Religion is, as I argue in Faith Versus Fact, the very instantiation of confirmation bias. Yes, some religions can change their claims, like accepting evolution, but they do so only after science has shown these claims are wrong.

So it’s incredibly insulting to science and rationality for these authors to suggest, with their faux naiveté, that science and reason need to adhere to the same (presumably more rigorous) standards used by religions to adjudicate their truth claims. Let me give you some news, Drs. Koepsell, Stein, and Abbot: religion has NO rigor in its truth claims, but an emotional commitment to deities and their will that lack any supporting evidence. It is science that has the hard standards, and religion that should adhere to the standards of science when adjudicating its claims.

Of course if religion did that, there wouldn’t be any religions—except for ones that don’t accept the supernatural. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hindusim—gone in a poof!

Now it’s possible that the “we” in the bit above means “rationalists and skeptics” rather than “all people, including believers.” If that’s the case, though, and the workshop is asking us to apply uniform standards of skepticism to all empirical claims, then my response is this: WE ALREADY DO! So what’s the point of this workshop?

This workshop is not just silly, but mendacious, insulting, and misguided. If I were a member of CfI, I’d complain bitterly about it.

Reader Gary added this comment:

I have always trusted CFI to stick to the rational, but this workshop makes me wonder. The qualifications for the instructors include references such as “Western Mysticism and Esotericism” and “Indo-Tibetan thought”. I find this very discouraging as I have been a paying member of CFI.

And I’ll put below the mission of CfI from its webpage. It certainly doesn’t comport with the workshop above!

Why the “nones” leave religion: US and UK getting less religious

August 27, 2016 • 11:45 am

The Pew organization, which certainly has no bias that I can detect against religion, had reanalyzed some data from its 2014 U.S. “Religious landscape study,” asking people who said they were both “nones” (those not affiliated with a church) and also had formerly been raised as church members but later abandoned that membership. The results are described here, and the methodology (apparently a phone survey of 5,000 people) here.

What they did, as you can see in the chart below, is divide those who abandoned their childhood faith into five groups based on the reasons for their apostasy. To wit: don’t believe in religious claims, dislike organized religion in general, those who are “spiritual” or “seekers” and are classified as “religiously unsure/undecided”, and those who still believe but are too busy to do the church thing. Each of these five, given as a percentage of the total, is in bold in the first column below, and then within each group the reasons are further subdivided (still first column):

Right off the bat you can see a problem: these reasons are overlapping, so how did they group people into categories? Further, the numbers in bold in the first column don’t add up to 100%, as they should (they add up to a bit more than 103%).

Well, okay, there are some problems, and there are also problems of self-report. That said, we can still get something out of the data above. The main lesson, which probably isn’t an artifact of self-report, is that 49% of people say they left their childhood faith simply because they no longer believed in the claims of that faith.

Pew also gives a table of quoted reasons for people falling into each of the five categories (below), and add this in the report:

About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack of evidence” – or simply say they do not believe in God.

Those who claim there’s no conflict between religion and science now must tell us why learning science drives people away from religion, and I don’t see how they can do it except by accepting my thesis in Faith Versus Fact: science and religion both make statements about how the cosmos is, but only science has a way to test those claims. And by instilling the habit of doubt as part of its toolkit of understanding the Universe, science automatically leads to weakening religious belief, which, after all, rests on no evidence at all but is simply fabricated wish-fulfillment and a means of social control.

Here are some representative quotes. At the FFRF meetings in Pittsburgh I’ll talk about why evolution in particular tends to turn people into nonbelievers.

Finally, they divided members of each of the five classes as to whether they considered themselves atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular”. Again this is a problematic classification if based on self-identification, but does show strong associations with reasons they left the church.

As Pew says:

Religious “nones” are by no means monolithic. They can be broken down into three broad subgroups: self-identified atheists, those who call themselves agnostic and people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Given these different outlooks, it is not surprising that there are major gaps among these three groups when it comes to why they left their childhood religion behind. An overwhelming majority of atheists who were raised in a religion (82%) say they simply do not believe, but this is true of a smaller share of agnostics (63%) and only 37% of those in the “nothing in particular” category.

In fact, while this latter group certainly includes many nonbelievers, it also has substantial shares of people who, alternatively, are opposed to organized religion (22%) or who could be described as religiously unsure or undecided (22%). And more than one-in-ten people with the “nothing in particular” label (14%) say they are either non-practicing or too busy to engage in religious practices, compared with zero atheists in the survey and only 3% of agnostics.

*********

More heartening news, this time from Britain. In an article in the “This sceptic isle” section of the Economist, the always anonymous writer argues that “Britain is unusually irreligious, and becoming more so. That calls for a national debate.” First, the heartening facts—to nonbelievers, that is:

Last year the church reported a “sharp upturn” in such disposals [churches getting sold off because there aren’t enough parishioners to support them]. That hints at a milestone that Britain reached in January, when figures for weekly church attendance fell below 1m for the first time, as well as one passed in 2009, when the proportion of Britons saying they had no religion (49% in the latest data, for 2015) overtook that saying they were Christian (43% in 2015) in NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey. Other figures also point to this spiritual sorpasso: since 2004 church baptisms are down by 12%, church marriages are down by 19% and church funerals by 29%. A 65-country study by WIN/Gallup last year found a lower proportion of people are religious in Britain than in all but six other countries.

The country is littered with evidence of the change. Everywhere deconsecrated churches are reopening as bars and restaurants. Five hundred churches were turned into luxury homes over five years in London alone. Shrinking congregations and growing repair bills are typically the fatal combination: about a quarter of Sunday services are attended by fewer than 16 parishioners. The Church of England is doing its best to manage this trend. Christmas-only parishes, catering to the once-a-year crowd, are one avenue. A new app enables cashless millennials to chip in to a virtual collection plate.

All this despite the fact that the percentage of Brits who describe themselves as “religious” remains pretty constant: about 80%. But it’s clear that they’re religious in a different way—a way verging on nonbelief. Britain is in fact is becoming very secular very fast, and faster than the U.S.

Sadly, the article then devolves into a soul-searching discussion of “how can we possibly replace religion?” The author tortures herself with thoughts like “What will we do with the Bishops in the House of Lords?”; “Who will give us a place for moral guidance and communion?”

The Economist fails to consider that we don’t really have to worry about these matters. The lesson of other secularized societies, including France, Sweden, and Denmark, is that religion gets replaced by a natural social evolution that somehow meets the needs of former believers. In fact, as society improves and becomes more empathic towards its most deprived and despised, the need for religion largely vanishes. All the Economist‘s soul-searching, and its claims that Britain must “lead the way” in helping the world secularize, is just so much hot air.

Tennessee legislature repeals religious defense for parents who hurt their children by withholding medical care

April 20, 2016 • 9:45 am

We have two pieces of good news today from the American South—both from Tennessee. One refers to the subject of reports in The Tennesseean and the Knoxville News Sentinel: the Tennessee legislature has repealed a state law that gives parents exemptions from hurting their children by withholding medical care in favor of faith healing. As do many states, Tennessee has such an exemption on the books, though it’s a felony crime to hurt your kids if you don’t have a religious motivation. As The Tennessean reported previously,

It is a crime in Tennessee to fail to provide medical care to children, with an exception, known as the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act, for parents who want to rely on “spiritual means through prayer alone,” according to state code. State Sen. Richard Briggs, R-Knoxville, filed SB 1761 to repeal the exception.

The current code reads: “Nothing in this part shall be construed to mean a child is abused, neglected, or endangered, or abused, neglected or endangered in an aggravated manner, for the sole reason the child is being provided treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone, in accordance with the tenets or practices of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner of the recognized church or religious denomination, in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.”

The bill applies to treatments and does not apply to vaccinations, although that may come up in the course of debate, Briggs said.

A Republican! How unexpected!

These laws are not uncommon. They were originally put in place by the states in 1974 as a result of a new federal policy mandating that states would not receive government money to prevent child abuse unless they also enacted laws allowing these religious exemptions. That was unconscionable and, in fact, the requirement was rescinded in 1983. But in many states the laws remained on the books. As a result, many children died, and still die, from religiously-based medical neglect; and their parents are either let off the hook or given only a slap on the wrist. As always, as with vaccination—47 of the 50 states allow religious exemption from getting children vaccinated before attending public school—religion gets an exemption that endangers people’s lives.

The exemption laws were buttressed in 1983. As the estimable organization Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD) notes,

In 1996, however, Congress enacted a law stating that the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) did not include “a Federal requirement that a parent or guardian provide a child any medical service or treatment against the religious beliefs of the parent or guardian.” [42 USC 5106i] Furthermore, Sen. Dan Coats, R-Indiana, and Congressman Bill Goodling, R-Pennsylvania, claimed during floor discussion that parents have a First Amendment right to withhold medical care from children.

Unbelievable! And Bill Clinton signed that law! But the results stand: in most places if you injure or kill your child because you deem conventional medical care contrary to your religion, you don’t get punished. As I noted in my Slate piece a year ago, “Faith healing kills children,”

Forty-eight states—all except West Virginia and Mississippi—allow religious exemptions from vaccination. (California would be the third exception if its bill becomes law.) A similar deference to religion applies to all medical care for children. As the National District Attorneys Association reports [JAC: link no longer works, and I can’t find the document, so go here], 43 states give some kind of criminal or civil immunity to parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds.

Well, make that 42 now, for six days ago the Tennessee House concurred with the state Senate in repealing the noxious Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act. As the News Sentinel reports:

The repeal bill, Senate Bill 1761, is sponsored by Sen. Richard Briggs, R-Knoxville, a cardiac surgeon, and Rep. Andrew Farmer, R-Sevierville, a lawyer. It won unanimous Senate approval in March and an 85-1 vote Thursday in the House and now goes to Gov. Bill Haslam, who’s expected to sign it into law.

. . . Briggs and Farmer introduced the bill this year in an attempt to repeal the exemption. Briggs cited his experience with a similar case years ago, when he was a general surgeon in another state and a teen boy was brought to see him with a ruptured appendix. His parents initially opposed surgery on religious grounds but later agreed to treatment.

The bill was backed by a Kentucky-based group, Children’s Healthcare Is Legal Duty (CHILD), that works for repeal of similar spiritual treatment exemptions across the country. Its President Rita Swan issued a statement thanking lawmakers for repealing the exemption in Tennessee.

Rita Swan is a hero, and has been recognized as such by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (they also filed a brief in the Tennessee case), which gave Swan its Lifetime Achievement Award. Swan and her husband, once Christian Scientists, let their son Matthew die of meningitis in 1977 because they were obeying the no-doctors tenet of their faith. Since then, Swan, horrified at what she did, founded CHILD and has worked tirelessly to get these religious laws overturned. But progress is slow.

I’m hoping now that a Southern state has removed its medical-exemption laws (or will when the governor signs the bill, as he surely will), other states will follow suit. It’s absolutely unbelievable that over 80% of American states allow parents to injure their children—children too young to enact their own decisions—by favoring religious healing over treatment that works. To me, this is one of the most noxious and injurious results of America’s privileging of religion. It kills people! Can any person, even a Regressive liberal, be in favor of those laws?

If you’re an American, it’s likely that your state has such exemptions (see the CHILD list to check). Do what you can to repeal them, and, if you can, donate money to CHILD, which is fighting the good fight.

And now—on to vaccination.!

Here are the states with religious exemptions (from CHILD); click to enlarge:

We Got Scared: a paean to science and rationality

January 3, 2016 • 1:00 pm

This nine-minute piece was created by DogmaticCure, which has produced a number of rationalist videos. It touts rationality and science as a palliative for the fear and divisiveness produced by ideology and religion. It’s essentially a visual presentation of Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, though it doesn’t really mention the decline of violence in the last few centuries. I also like to think of it as the victory of fact over faith.

Sadly, among the byproducts of human rationality that this film promotes is the realization—unique among all species—that we’re going to die. And that makes us scared in a way that’s hard to overcome. So long as we can’t, religion will stay with us.

Sean Carroll debunks the “fine-tuning” argument for God

December 31, 2015 • 2:00 pm

I don’t know how many readers watched Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll debate theologian William Lane Craig on whether cosmology gives evidence for God, but nonbeliever Carroll clearly won (I’m not unbiased, of course!). Here Carroll takes apart the argument that the so-called “fine tuning” of the physical constants of the Universe constitutes evidence for God (the “FTA”). Since, as Carroll notes, this is the most “sophisticated” argument for God in theologians’ poorly stocked arsenal, it’s incumbent on us to understand why it’s wrong. I deal with this in Faith Versus Fact, but here’s a nine-minute primer. You might want to watch it before you get drunk tonight.

Carroll is a fluid and eloquent speaker, anticipating and then answering his audience’s objections before they’re even uttered.

Carroll’s written summary of the debate, including the fine-tuning argument, can be found in his post at Preposterious Universe. Here are his five arguments (in his words) why the FTA doesn’t prove theism:

We don’t really know that the universe is tuned specifically for life, since we don’t know the conditions under which life is possible.
Fine-tuning for life would only potentially be relevant if we already accepted naturalism; God could create life under arbitrary physical conditions.
Apparent fine-tunings may be explained by dynamical mechanisms or improved notions of probability.
The multiverse is a perfectly viable naturalistic explanation.
If God had finely-tuned the universe for life, it would look very different indeed. [Carroll considers this his most important point. Here he goes into not only the cosmos, but the nature of human culture which, Carroll avers, comports much better with naturalism than with theism.]

He goes on in his post to explain his own intentions and to dissect Craig’s responses.

I should add that Sean is giving the prestigious Gifford Lectures in October of next year in Glasgow. That lectureship, originally endowed to promote the study of “natural theology” (the observation of nature as evidence for God), has had some prestigious honorees. They include, for example, William James, whose talks became The Varieties of Religious Experience. Other lecturers included Paul Tillich, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Eddington, Reinhold Neibuhr, Carl Sagan, J.B.S. Haldane, and Steven Pinker. You can see that there are some lecturers, like Haldane, Sagan, and Pinker, who weren’t espousing natural theology at all, but talking about straight naturalism. Kudos on the organizers for starting to include nonbelievers, who, after all, probably have something more substantive to say.

When I asked Sean if he was going to turn the lectures into a book, which I believe is expected, he said he already had. And indeed, the book is already on Amazon, scheduled for publication by Dutton in May. Click on the screenshot to go to the listing:

I expect that this book will be very good, summarizing Carroll’s views on the implications of particle physics and cosmology for philosophy and our own self-image. Here’s the advance summary:

In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level–and then how each connects to the other. Carroll’s presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.

I’ll be reading it for sure.

Are any criticisms of theism kosher? (Open Thread)

June 7, 2015 • 1:00 pm

by Grania Spingies

In the wake of complaints such as this one and angry reviews of Jerry’s new book Faith vs. Fact, one has to wonder whether any criticism of theism is acceptable or valid to a believer. One of the complaints that irks Jerry the most is the charge that he – or indeed we – as fellow atheists, have not read the right theology books, or not enough of them, or that we haven’t understood them properly.

The charge continues: therefore we haven’t truly understood religion, and therefore we lack the credentials to rebut it.

Of course, the charge is bogus. At very least, Jerry has read more theology than the average human being, more even than the average church-going believer. Tomes of Sophisticated Theology are rarely if ever referenced by ministers and priests in their sermons and homilies, because they know that those in the pews have not read them and don’t intend to either. The notion that the real answers to difficult questions lie between the covers of such books is simply a security blanket proffered where the congregation appear to be of above-average education and perhaps don’t literally believe in talking snakes chatting up naked women.

Perhaps because most theology books are rarely read, the champions of theology as Christianity’s best argument aren’t always aware of the fact that, for example C.S. Lewis (still so very popular after all these years, perhaps simply because he writes more accessibly than the average theologian) has been very comprehensively taken apart by other theologians.

However, I maintain that most theology is dead in the water from the outset. Here’s why: they all operate off the base assumption that God is real, and is moreover the Christian God of the bible. This is why theology fails to convince anyone who isn’t already in the club.

Lewis actually tried his hand at “proving” God with his infamous “liar or a madman” argument. Basically Jesus is God because he said so, and he wouldn’t have said so unless it was true, because we know he wasn’t a liar or a madman. Plenty of people have pointed out that those aren’t the only two other possibilities. And any non-believer who has read the bible can attest that in fact some of Jesus’s doings come across as quite mad (figs, anyone?). In any case, anyone can spot a circular argument. Cosmological arguments and Pascal’s Wager don’t get any better even though some of them use really long words with lots of syllables.

Anyway, the point here is to have a discussion about whether it is possible to satisfy a believer that your lack of belief is not owing to a lack of theology. If not, why not?

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