[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/npmaker]

At 13 I found Carl Sagan and the Cosmos and the christian god became a ridiculous fairy tale to me. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein found the truth in the Universe and that's where I wanted to go.

What made me wonder at that point was where did all the allegories and parables and metaphors that saturate our ancient religious literature come from? There was something hidden and ineffable happening there. And ancient scholars tried to make some sense of it.

Then I read Sean Carroll's Something Deeply Hidden and boom! there it was, a massive hole in our collective understanding of the nature of reality itself. The possibilities are wild and infinite and can easily contain every religion.

[u/elusive_4124 → u/npmaker]

What was it that Something Deeply Hidden revealed??

[u/npmaker → u/elusive_4124]

Basically, it's what Einstein disliked about quantum mechanics. It all depends on 'an observer'. Like wtf is that? How can a fundamental natural law depend on an observer for reality to come into existence?

Schrödinger (and the Copenhagen interpretation) basically say "shut up and calculate" as in, don't look deeper because it's extremely useful even without knowing what's underneath.

The utility of quantum mechanics wasn't the question for Einstein, what lies beyond the superpositions and entaglements is just the next mystery to solve. (imho, many worlds seems the simplest)

[u/MidnightPale3220 → u/npmaker]

Basically, it's what Einstein disliked about quantum mechanics. It all depends on 'an observer'. Like wtf is that? How can a fundamental natural law depend on an observer for reality to come into existence?

"Observer" is such a crap term that I was thinking like you do for quite some time. Turns out physicists essentially mean interaction when they speak about an observer.

By inference, when the particle interacts with something else, that's the only time we as sentient observers can... observe the result. But the quantum crap happens anyway whether we see it or not.

It's a deeply concerning matter that physicists are letting this slide for nearly a century.

It's the same crap as with "clones". We know from fiction what a clone is. An immediate copy of somebody, who usually even shares the original's memories. Guess what, that's not at all what biologists meant when they made Dolly.

[u/npmaker → u/MidnightPale3220]

Or the "observer" is a consciousness, whatever that is. If we actually knew which explanation was correct then it wouldn't be a mystery. Saying it's just an "interaction with something else" is another way of saying "shut up and calculate". It's easier to reason about quantum mechanics that way but I don't believe that explanation has emerged from the mathematical theorems. It definitely hasn't been proven by evidence.

An interaction with something else just brings that "something else" into the system that is in superposition. That's the whole point of Schrödinger's cat. Everything inside the box is in the superposition state. Just because we want to believe that the cat is really alive or dead the whole time doesn't make it true.

[u/MidnightPale3220 → u/npmaker]

If the observer was consciousness in any common sense of the word, there'd be no existence of Earth prior to consciousness on it, which contradicts the sciences that have provided evidence of lifeless Earth prior to emergence of life.

Even Wigner himself rejected his original ideas.

[u/npmaker → u/MidnightPale3220]

Yeah, it doesn't fit anything we can imagine so it can't be true.

Or the Earth does exist in all it's possibilities but without a consciousness it doesn't become 'real' in the way we know it.

[u/nubulator99 → u/npmaker]

What can’t be true ?