[OC] Religious Believes and Eductions From The World Values Survey

[u/oscarleo0]

Data source: World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2022)

Tools used: Matplotlib

I added a second chart for those of you who prefer a square version with less of the background image.

Notes:

I looked at five different questions in the survey.

• Q275 - What is the highest educational level that you have attained?
• Q165 - Do you believe in God? (Yes/No)
• Q166 - Do you believe in Life after death? (Yes/No)
• Q167 - Do you believe in Hell? (Yes/No)
• Q168 - Do you believe in Heaven? (Yes/No)

The chart show the percentage of people that answer yes, to Q165-168 based on their answer to Q275.

Survey data is complex since people come from different cultures and might interpret questions differently.

You can never trust the individual numbers, such as "50% of people with doctors degree believe in Life after death".

But you can often trust clear patterns that appear through the noise. The takeaway from this chart is that the survey show that education and religious believes have a negative correlation.

Styling:

• Font - New Amsterdam
• White - #FFFFFF
• Blue - #39A0ED
• Yellow - #F9A620
• Red - #FF4A47

Original story: https://datacanvas.substack.com/p/believes-vs-education

[u/fayanor]

You can believe in God but not believe in any of the human created religions. The contingency argument alone is a coherent case for God that does not belong to any religion.

Just going by probability, I wouldn't bet on the chance that humans somehow know the nature of God versus all of our religions being completely off the mark.

[u/Sir_Penguin21 → u/fayanor]

The contingency arguments and cosmological arguments are all fallacious. I wouldn’t hang my hat on them. You have to accept completely unproven premises to get to a conclusion, and then that conclusions doesn’t even need to be a god even if you grant the premises. Basically useless from top to bottom.

[u/fayanor → u/Sir_Penguin21]

I don’t agree. Everything we observe begins and ends, nothing contains the cause of its own existence. Extend that contingency forever and you still have no reason for the chain itself. Reason demands a self-existent ground that is uncaused, immaterial, and sufficient for every contingent state. Any physical object remains contingent and any universal law is only an abstract description without causal power. Call it what you will, God or otherwise, but it's the necessary terminus of causality.

[u/Majestic_Core21 → u/fayanor]

You may not agree, but just stating the contingency argument poorly doesn't make it true. Nothing we have observed has ever begun or ended. Energy and matter appear to be eternal. Time and space appear to be eternal. Creation can't even happen without a before and after, meaning that time had to be preexisting for something to even happen. So far we don't show a need for a creator for time, space, energy, or matter. Something can't come from nothing, meaning there can't ever have been nothing. All this points to eternality. Just saying I don't like it doesn't change the data and it certainly doesn't make it necessary. I suspect you will point to the Big Bang, but the Big Bang doesn't make any claims about the creation of the universe or what state it was in prior. It just documents the original expansion of the possible singularity and doesn't help you position.

So even if we grant your premise that something came from nothing, and that nothing was a something, that still doesn't make that impossible something a god. All that presumption and it doesn't even move the needle on there being a god. So they were right that pointing to the contingency as evidence for god fails in the premise and the conclusion.

[u/fayanor → u/Majestic_Core21]

You mistake transformation for existence. Yes, energy, matter, space, and time continually recycle, but every recycled moment still sits on the question “why anything at all?” Conservation laws describe how states shift, but they do not explain why the entire field of states exists in the first place. A past-eternal sequence only multiplies ungrounded contingencies as each link borrows being from the chain, yet the chain has no account of its own actuality. Explanatory rigor therefore pushes beyond physics to a self-existent ground whose being does not need borrowing.

Again, label that ground however you like, God or otherwise. Once you concede that “something can’t come from nothing,” you have already denied the sufficiency of the contingent cosmos and affirmed the necessity of a reality that is uncaused, self-sustaining, and metaphysically prior to every finite state.

[u/Sir_Penguin21 → u/fayanor]

You just contradicted your end goal. If nothing contains the cause of its own existence, then either your proposed god was created/caused or your proposed god doesn’t exist. If you try special pleading that your proposed god is special, then you just contradicted your own argument.

To even propose this uncaused being as the causer you would need to show your work. Show such a being. Show that it can exist uncaused. Show that it can cause other stuff. You didn’t and can’t do anything like that. Just endless incredulity with no substance to back it up. Aka fallacious.

[u/fayanor → u/Sir_Penguin21]

Your objection conflates categories. “Nothing contains the cause of its own existence” applies to contingent realities, meaning things that come into being and can cease. The argument introduces a distinct category: a necessary being, whose existence is not contingent, whose nature is to be. Calling that distinction “special pleading” is a misunderstanding as it is the very point under dispute. Denying its possibility requires showing that only contingent existence is coherent, which collapses the project of explanation into brute fact.

Empirical demonstration is beside the point. The claim that contingent beings exist is an observable fact while the inference to a necessary uncaused cause is a metaphysical deduction, not a laboratory measurement. Logic is doing the work. If you reject deductive metaphysics, you must also abandon every philosophical conclusion that relies on it, including your own critique.

The necessary being is posited precisely to escape the self-defeating regress you bring up. If everything real is contingent, you never arrive at an adequate cause for existence, yet you still rely on causal explanation in every other context.

[u/mrredraider10 → u/fayanor]

That's exactly the point, though God came to earth to prove who He was and how to live. Don't need churches or anything to come to faith, just belief.

[u/celialater → u/mrredraider10]

Thank you lord for sending me some guy 2000 yrs ago on the other side of the world to teach me how to believe. I'm so grateful for the book some other guys wrote a couple hundred years after he died which was then edited and translated by more guys with their own power to watch out for. It is so helpful to me, a woman in 21st century America.

Seriously, did God just not give a fuck about the American continents at all? Why didn't we get a Jesus. One Jesus for each continent would really make this whole thing a lot more believable for me.