Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Dec 4, 2009, 4:04 pm
Here's a Friday evening paradox for you. For most atheists, the abundance of suffering in the world is a pretty clinching argument against the existence of a moral god. Yet religion seems to thriv...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 30, 2009, 4:15 am
A series of studies over recent years have found that if you make people feel uncertain or anxious, they'll respond by turning up the intensity of their religious faith. Quite why this happens is...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 26, 2009, 4:02 pm
Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a social scientist at Harvard, has been looking at religion and happiness around the world. What he's found is really quite remarkable. First, some background. Previous stud...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 23, 2009, 3:50 pm
If anybody has a handle on global religious trends, it should be Tom Smith, co-founder of the International Social Survey. He's just produced a report, Religious Change Around the World, that summ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 20, 2009, 9:35 am
I've done a few posts recently about fertility, so how about the next stage, parenthood? How do non-religious parents differ from religious ones? Here's a study by Bart Duriez, from the Cath...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 17, 2009, 10:10 am
Here's a brain-scanning study with a difference. Most such tudies try to work out which parts of the brain are activated when people have religious thoughts. This new one looks at whether religiou...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 14, 2009, 4:25 pm
Rabbi Johnathan Sacks has been hitting the headlines recently with his latest warnings on the perils of nonbelief. Michael Blume has dug out the transcript of his speech, so you can get it from the ho...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 10, 2009, 3:50 pm
In the previous post I wrote about new research linking income inequality to religious attendance. The supposition is that the stresses and bad social conditions that are often found in nations with h...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 7, 2009, 9:13 am
The Dutch press is reporting a new study with an international perspective on what drives church attendance (the authors are Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Nov 3, 2009, 4:07 pm
The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. Basically what they've done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 31, 2009, 5:54 pm
You might have seen the recent study which found that the subtle smell of Windex (a brand of window cleaner) makes people more charitable. Time magazine, for one, carried a report - which got up the n...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 28, 2009, 4:01 pm
An earlier post looked at the connection in the USA between religion and a high teen pregnancy rate. High fertility and religion often goes together, and whenever this topic comes up the immediate que...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 25, 2009, 3:58 pm
This Fridays' Guardian reports on a new survey which found that a third of doctors in the UK have taken treatment decisions they thought would hasten a patient's death. The sorts of patients ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 22, 2009, 4:47 pm
Here's a study that Razib over at Gene Expression picked up on last month. Basically, it's a very simple regression of religiosity versus teen births in US states. Importantly, it's an ec...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 21, 2009, 3:17 pm
As we all know, social media like twitter and Facebook are slowly eroding society as we know it and destroying our children's brains. Now I've brought the end of the world one step closer by s...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 18, 2009, 3:49 pm
Probably the most famous thing that GK Chesterton never said was that: When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.Even if he never did say those wo...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 15, 2009, 3:34 pm
This is a post about psychology, and about the how stress, anxiety and uncertainty might lead people to be more religious - and the consequence of that. What triggered it was a NY Times article featu...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 11, 2009, 4:39 pm
The last post was on religion and work ethic. So to follow up here's another new paper on a similar topic: religion and volunteering. Religious people do more voluntary work than non-religious pe...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 8, 2009, 4:45 pm
At the start of the 20th Century, the sociologist Max Weber came up with a famous theory to explain why Northern Europe and North America were so prosperous: the Protestant Work Ethic. Basically, the...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 5, 2009, 4:23 pm
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief. Harris and his colleagues were interested in two questions. Firstly, how does the brain p...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Oct 1, 2009, 3:03 pm
There was a study in the New Scientist earlier this year linking what people look like with their personality (I blogged it a few weeks ago). It turned out that it was possible to spot the religious w...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 28, 2009, 4:01 pm
Here's an interesting graph. It's from a study comparing religious and secular communes in 19th century USA. Michael was talking about this study in the comments so I thought it would be nice...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 25, 2009, 4:40 pm
In the previous post I mentioned the idea of costly signalling. And that's prompted this post, which has been gestating for a while, about the 'costly signalling' explanation for religion....
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 21, 2009, 4:24 pm
Here's something interesting from the papers last week. First we've got the philosopher Julian Baggini, an atheist, arguing in The Guardian for the virtues of a childless life. Then, in respo...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 18, 2009, 4:39 pm
In the last post, I reported on a study into whether religious people are more likely to support the Supreme Court to judge matters of right and wrong. Apparently they are. This is in line with the we...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 15, 2009, 3:16 pm
It's well known that religious people are more likely to be authoritarian than non-religious people. By 'authoritarian' I mean someone who's predisposed to follow the dictates of a str...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 12, 2009, 4:29 pm
It's a pretty shocking fact, but pretty much everything we think we know about human behaviour derives from studies of US undergraduates - the psychologists' 'lab rat'! These people ar...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 8, 2009, 4:30 pm
People who pray more are also often more grateful about, well, stuff. For instance, they're more likely to agree that "I have so much in life to be grateful for" (here's a Gratitude Scale, wit...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 5, 2009, 3:46 pm
Does this look like a religious woman to you? According to a study by Prof Richard Wiseman in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I've only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Sep 2, 2009, 3:48 pm
Bruce Hood has a post up about the atheist bus ad controversy in the US state of Iowa (OK, it was a couple of weeks ago, but I've been away...). What caught my eye was a comment by Konrad: The th...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 23, 2009, 12:05 pm

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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 19, 2009, 3:50 pm
Despite a few wrong turnings, I managed to make it on time to Broadcasting House this afternoon to take part in Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed radio programme. If you missed it (shame on you!), ...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 18, 2009, 11:53 am
I'm going to be on the Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed tomorrow, 4 PM UK time. Along with David Voas of the University of Manchester, I'll be talking to Laurie Taylor about the causes of so...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 16, 2009, 5:44 pm
In the comments, Dheeraj has been arguing for Christianity as a civilizing force in human society. Now that's a big question with a lot of arguments on either side. But here's a new study that...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 12, 2009, 3:28 pm
Most people have got a reasonable idea of what's meant by the word 'religion', even if it's hard to tie down precisely. But what about 'spirituality'? It's an important que...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 9, 2009, 4:06 pm

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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 6, 2009, 3:30 pm
Earlier this year I blogged about a study done by Luke Galen, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University. Well, he's now written an account of it in Free Inquiry - you can download it free he...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Aug 3, 2009, 4:20 pm
This is a timely new study by Gregory Paul. Back in 2005, he published a controversial paper showing that religious societies seem to be more dysfunctional. In a paper just published on Evolutionary P...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 31, 2009, 4:24 pm
An exhibition at Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow is proving to be just a bit more controversial than the organizers had hoped for. One of the exhibits featured a bible, and a pen, and an encouragemen...
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Tom R. posted an article on Epiphenom - Jul 28, 2009, 3:12 pm
Here's a rather painful case reported in the Singapore Medical Journal - a 45-year old woman brought into hospital unconscious. The doctor explains: The relatives revealed that she had been suffe...
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