James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
A paper due to be published next month by Adrian White, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, makes a sincere effort to compare global happiness rates. This sort of thing has been done before, and surprises are few. As you might expect, happiness is correlated with health, wealth and education. But what happens if you compare the happiness rankings with religiosity?
Well, I'll show you.
Back in the early days of the Island of Doubt, I wrote about an attempt to find any correlation between social well being and religious commitment. Self-taught sociologist Gregory Paul's study found no connection at all. If anything:
higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion....This was followed by a study from someone with a bona fide degree in the subject. Phil Zuckerman, an assistant professor of sociology at California's Pitzer College, also found that the less religious the population, the better off the people are. Zuckerman went a little further, concluding that his findings "render any suggestion that theism is innate or neurologically based untenable." That may be going a little far. I still have soft spot for evolutionary explanations for humanity's tendency to extract supernatural patterns where none exist. But whether or not the god gene is a meaningful idea, the new happiness study only seems to add weight to the argument that faith and happiness are not necessarily connected.
Here's the top 20 countries on White's list of happy places to live, along with some of the lower-ranked nations. To the list I have added a statistic -- drawn from a variety of sources, but primarily Zuckerman's collection of surveys -- that offers estimates of the rate of atheism, agnosticism or just plain "no religion" among that country's population.
| Nation-state | % Irreligious |
| 1 - Denmark | 43-80 |
| 2 - Switzerland | 17-27 |
| 3 - Austria | 18-26 |
| 4 - Iceland | 16-23 |
| 5 - The Bahamas | <10 |
| 6 - Finland | 28-60 |
| 7 - Sweden | 46-85 |
| 8 - Bhutan | <1 |
| 9 - Brunei | < 1 |
| 10 - Canada | 19-30 |
| 11 - Ireland | 4-5 |
| 12 - Luxembourg | <10 |
| 13 - Costa Rica | 1-2 |
| 14 - Malta | < 3 |
| 15 - The Netherlands | 39-44 |
| 16 - Antigua and Barbuda | <2 |
| 17 - Malaysia | < 1 |
| 18 - New Zealand | 20-22 |
| 19 - Norway | 31-72 |
| 20 - The Seychelles | <1 |
| Other notable countries | |
| 23 - USA | 3-9 |
| 35 - Germany | 41-49 |
| 41 - UK | 31-44 |
| 62 - France | 43-54 |
| 82 - China | 8-14 |
| 90 - Japan | 64-65 |
| 125 - India | 6 |
| 167 - Russia | 24-48 |
| 177 - Zimbabwe | <1 |
| Notes: Source for Bahamas is here; Costa Rican estimate was taken from a collective rate for Latin America; Source for Seychelles is here. | |
I haven't gone to the trouble of plotting these results for a mathematical relationship, but I think it safe to conclude that there is no evidence that high rates of religious devotion are associated with higher levels of happiness.
I also stress there is no attempt to establish causation here. I don't think it is encumbent on those of us who are skeptical of the value of organized religion to supply evidence that religion makes anyone unhappy. If anything, the faithful should be able to show that there is some benefit to their faith. Which is something that's getting very hard to do.
Comments
huh, I did the exact same thing, looking at evolution acceptace a while back, here:
http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2006/08/x_axis_happiness_y_axis_accept_1.php
Lemme know if you get any stats! I stopped with a rough correlation.....mostly because I couldn't get the full country/happiness list until Whites paper comes out in Sept.
Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 23, 2006 10:52 AM
If anything, the faithful should be able to show that there is some benefit to their faith. Which is something that's getting very hard to do.
You've really just summed up a lot of my feelings in a far more elegant way than I've done. Nicely said - show me the benefit if you're going to claim it.
Posted by: DragonScholar | August 23, 2006 11:03 AM
Shelly's effort to graph the relationship between acceptance of evolution and happiness was a nice try. But I try to avoid graphs when the source material is so disparate. In the surveys of levels of atheism and agnostism, for example, the results were mostly ranges of values drawn from very different survey questions. Sometimes people were asked to identify as an atheist, while in others it was a more vague "Do you believe in a personal god?"
In any event, I refer back to the central thesis of my post (and Gregory Paul's paper): we don't need to show correlation between anything and anything else. That's up to the proponents of religion.
Posted by: James Hrynyshyn | August 23, 2006 12:31 PM
Very true!
Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 23, 2006 12:36 PM
Japan's 90th ranking is puzzling. What factor is bringing them down? They have education, health and wealth comparable to any in the 1st world don't they?
Posted by: MRB | August 23, 2006 7:10 PM
Japan's 90th ranking is puzzling. What factor is bringing them down? They have education, health and wealth comparable to any in the 1st world don't they?
It might have something to do with the high cost of living and the intensely competitive nature of Japanese society. Then again, that's just a guess.
Posted by: Justin Hirsh | August 23, 2006 8:05 PM
Along similar lines but staying in the United States, I've compared data for teen mortality by homicide, suicide, and accidents to state mental health spending. The Pearson Correlation is between -0.5 and -0.6.
Also compared teen mortality and mental health spending patterns between the Red States and Blue States, according to the 2004 election.
Posted by: John | September 6, 2006 9:51 PM