You can take a short form of the quiz here. Let me know how you get on!
Now, atheists tend to be better educated than the religious, but the differences held even after they adjusted for demographic differences like education and income.
So it seems that the non-religious are genuinely more knowledgeable than the religious - at least in terms of this kind of knowledge-based quiz.
What makes this interesting is the charge, often made by religionists, that the 'New' Atheists don't even understand what is they're attacking. They don't understand religion. Now, to a certain extent that's true. Theological rationalizations for the existance and nature of the various gods can be esoteric in the extreme, and few atheists will have spent the time to understand them.
But of course by this standard most religious people don't understand religion either, which rather begs the question of what religion is. Are these 'ordinary' religious people simply uneducated? Or, if confronted by the rarefied, intellectual and theologically correct version of religion, would they reject it?
In other words, is the ill-informed, theologically incorrect version of religion more real than the true religion?
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
I think I might have mentioned to you how in February I gave a talk in Budapest on cognitive science of religion and a theist philosopher of science asked me what my talk had to do with the religion of St. Augustine. I answered truthfully - not much. But, then, neither does what most 'believers' 'believe' in. Boyer makes this a big point of this in the context of minimal counterintuitiveness, Slone has written a whole book on it and McCauley also is careful to distinguish between religion and theology. In short, you're aboslutely right that if the new atheists don't know what they are talking about then neither is over 99 per cent of theists, old and young.
ReplyDeleteKonrad
Mind you, there's another way to think about these results - by evidently focussing on facts atheists show that they do not understand the true nature of religion. And the same goes for theologians and philosophers of religion.
ReplyDeleteKonrad
Speaking only for myself (80%, but includes one lucky guess) ... my thought is that I've picked up a bit about many religions, but not a great deal about any single one. The test was broad rather than deep, catering to that knowledge pattern. I would hypothesize that a typical member of a given religion might (or of course might not) know a great deal about his/her own religion, but not so much about others. That gives me an advantage on the specific test, but doesn't necessarily mean I know more than the typical member of a religion.
ReplyDeleteDon, that's a good point and there's some truth to it but even when just limiting the questions to those that deal with Christianity the atheists end up near the top of the pile, much higher than Catholics if I recall correctly. Also, something that has not been stressed is that the questions are multiple choice so many of those who answered correlty some of the questions would have been in your situation of having guessed correctly. This is particularly striking in the case where only two options were provided. For example, only 55% of Catholics answered correctly that holy communion supposedly becomes the body of Christ. Given that the only other option offered was that it is just symbolic of Christ's body, the interpretation that 45% of Catholics did not know this is way too generous. Assuming that those who did not know answered randomly and so half of them got the right answer by luck suggests that 90% of Catholics don't know this central dogma of their own faith. Of course, this is too much in the other direction as those guessing are much more likely to go for the rationally more plausible option, i.e. communion wafers are just symbolic. Still.
ReplyDeleteUnless I have missed a subtlety of the methodology used.
Konrad
This atheist scored 100 %, but then I teach both British and world literature and must familiarize myself with the historical, cultural, and religious contexts of the texts I assign. In British literature, I teach the earlier periods (Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English) when most of the literature was written within the context either of Catholicism or of early protestantism. In world literature, authors we have recently covered include Azar Nafisi, Arundhati Roy, Naguib Mahfouz, and Salman Rushdi. Context: Hinduism and Islam. Oddly, in the case of British literature, I invariably know more about the Christian religion than my students, almost all of whom are putative Christians.
ReplyDelete100% for this GNU atheist.
ReplyDelete93% for this atheist.
ReplyDeleteTake home message - know about that which you would argue against. Now, can we do a science test for the faithful?
I got 14 out of 15 questions right (97% percentile). I'm a Christian, but one of those "outsider" types who questions everything.
ReplyDelete13 out of 15 for this new new atheist. Who the fuck is Jonathan Edwards? Never heard of this guy.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little disappointed with the questions in that test.
ReplyDeleteNone of them here 'hard', but some were either worded poorly, or US-centric.
#9 asks, "What religion WAS Joseph Smith" That is ambiguous. Do they mean what religion was he BEFORE he invented Mormonism, or do they want 'Mormon'?
The two near the end regarding U.S. supreme court rulings were both guesses on my part.
I am intrigued by the idea of Biblical knowledge as bits of trivia, vs. Biblical knowledge as metaphors or parables for moral lessons. I just finished "The Year of Living Biblically", and the idea of using the stories as a jumping-off point for a concept (or, treating the bible as literature rather than holy writ) is something I must give some thought to, rather than the blanket dismissal I've given it until now.
Oh, and this Atheist got 97%
32/32 for this emerging Gnu Atheist, including a lucky guess on Edwards. And I can't now re-find where the full 32-item test was posted; I think maybe on the Guardian site somewhere, but my Google Fu is failing me.
ReplyDeleteAnd I have no special qualifications to aid me aside from decades of fairly wide reading, particularly when I was falling away from my conservative Christian upbringing. That same phenomenon may be the source of a good deal of the difference between Christians and atheists on the survey.
There's another potential explanatory factor, too. I've noticed a complementary phenomenon in the conservative rural community I live in: there's an active antipathy toward learning about alternative religious views. A while back I offered to loan my copy of Francis Collins' "The Language of God" to an evangelical acquaintance. He asked if Collins accepted Genesis. I answered that Collins is an evangelical Christian who accepts an old earth and evolution. My acquaintance then declined the book, saying he didn't need to read something he didn't agree with. An anecdote, to be sure, but suggestive.
I've come to understand religion more as a heuristic that places everything within a social-causal framework. If I am correct, these results are what should be expected: the specific propositional knowledge is of less importance to believers than the interpretive application to real life.
ReplyDeleteI've also come to see that many atheists and non-believers tend to overlook this deeper structure of religion and instead focus on its propositional claims. Again, it seems this is born out by the results.
I got 15 for 15 (guessing at either Edwards or Finney). However, I'm shocked at the score distribution. As was pointed out before these are NOT hard questions. Most were simple general knowledge questions that I learned in High School. That the score for the overall population was 50% makes me very sad.
ReplyDelete100% on the religion quiz.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I don't think I could pull off quite the same with a science or mathematics test.
Well, I got only 13 - got the Jewish Sabbath (Friday, who knew?)and that Jonathan Edwards one wrong (I thought he was a triple jumper).
ReplyDeleteThis kind of pop quiz misses out a lot of what religion is really about, as several people have pointed out. Many of the questions weren't really about religion, but more a general knowledge quiz.
For most people religion is a lived experience, rather than knowledge-driven. But that's rather the point, in some ways. Theology is irrelevant to most religious people!
However, if religion is supposed to be a choice, rather than an inheritance, then how can people choose if they don't know the basics. The answer, of course, is that they don't.
For anyone who isn't familiar with Jonathan Edwards: Google "Jonathan Edwards Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God".
ReplyDeleteIt is his most famous sermon and a hoot to read. The metaphor of an Almighty God dangling us poor sinners over the flaming pit of Hell much like a spider hanging by thread of silk is particularly memorable. He was a fundamentalist preacher, but at least he had literary acumen unlike the dullards we have today.
Another gnu for 13. Sabbath starts Friday???
ReplyDelete100%, but the last one was just a guess.
ReplyDeleteI agree the questions are rather general knowledge, but as religions are capable of splitting and even going to war over such 'trivia', arguing that they don't touch the 'true nature' of religion.
The Jewish Sabbath starts sundown on Friday and ends sundown on Saturday. The Jewish calendar counts days as sunset to sunset, rather than midnight to midnight as in the Gregorian calendar.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, traditionally Christian holy days follow the same pattern, hence the term Christmas Eve - the evening of the 24th was Christmas. Of course, it's since been reinterpreted as referring to the entirety of December 24.
Christina, so it's a trick question! The Jewish Sabbath starts on a Saturday. It's just that the Jewish Saturday starts on a Friday...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I got a 100% but I don't think knowing those things are valuable or should be taught in school at all.
ReplyDeleteIt is like when my patients understand a lot about medicine, it usually is because they have been sick for a long time. Sad.
14/15. (Sabbath question.) Also, I did a lucky guess at the last one. I've never heard of the "great awakening", but then it happened on the other side of the world.
ReplyDeleteAlso, #2, Desidaimon, I think that facts in no way are in opposition with understanding "the true nature", and anyone arguing such a case would loose big time (in a world where reson prevails).
This has been brought up to some extent all ready, but I'd really be interested to know what the break down is of
ReplyDeletea) percentage correct to type of religion (as opposed to religion vs atheism)
b) which questions members of each faith got right and wrong
The explanation for this could very easily be that religious people don't like learning about other religions, while atheists don't mind as much. This makes a certain amount of sense. If you view your religion as a correct and divine worldview, then everyone elses is heresy and wrong. If you don't believe in religion at all, then if you study it you're much more likely to just get the overview. You aren't putting in the effort to understand a single faith the way one of the faithful would, but because you can read it all as mythology, or as an academic subject, getting the cliff notes of a range of religions (what the quiz looked at) becomes much easier.
I'd like to see a follow up study comparing knowledge of specific faiths, in detail, between different faiths and between faithful and atheists.