I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin

Paul Bloom writing in Slate Magazine asks, “Does Religion Make You Nice? Does atheism make you mean?”

Bloom has done a good job of finding weaknesses in a study reviewed in Science, in which psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss experimental findings that suggest morality requires belief in God. But he has missed an important point, as have Norenzayan and Shariff: There is a real difference between being nice and acting nice. Acting nice (charitable, compassionate, etc.) may stem in part from fear of God, fear of what others think or any number of other psychological reasons. There is simply no valid reason reason to think that Atheists might be any less nice, generous or compassionate than Christians or other believers in God. In fact, orthodox Christian theology does not support the idea that Christians are nicer. And history proves that is so, individually and collectively. Bloom starts out:

Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in God—otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires. In The Ten Commandments, she approvingly quotes Dostoyevsky: "Where there is no God, all is permitted." The opposing view, held by a small minority of secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, is that belief in God makes us worse. As Hitchens puts it, "Religion poisons everything."

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

Are measures of behavior really measures of underlying qualities and motives? For that matter, what is nice?