Transport yourself back in time six hundred years. Look up into the sky and see the sun. You don't know what it is but you know it gives off huge amounts of heat and light—enough to warm and illuminate the entire planet.

As you gaze at this celestial monster there is one thing you are sure of—something as powerful as that and so essential for human life could not have happened by accident—it must have had a designer. A designer who created it and put it in the perfect orbit to give the exact amount heat and the exact amount of day and night necessary to sustain all living things on Earth. At that moment, you fall to your knees and thank your god (whichever god you happened to believe in).
...

Returning to the 21st century, we have moved on. We understand our sun very well indeed. We know its chemistry and the physics that formed it and sustains it. We understand how it formed, how long it will live, how it will change over its lifetime and how it will die. And we know all of that is caused by natural, unguided processes.

We have learned so much in the intervening years that there are only a few deep mysteries remaining, such as the origin of life and the cause of the Big Bang.

But one thing has not changed. Still billions of people assume their gods are responsible for things they don't understand. It is wise to learn from history rather than repeat it. Don't be on your knees when the true origin of life is finally discovered. Get up, brush yourself off, and withhold belief until we actually know how it happened.

After all, trousers are valuable, and so is your dignity.

Let's do a thought experiment. I'll start by inventing a god, I'm going to call her Ninfinity. She is very beautiful and she will answer your prayers. Not every prayer though, she will first decide if you are deserving and if you really believe in her. If you are, she will definitely answer your prayers 100% of the time. Ninfinity is very, very powerful. In fact, she can do ANYTHING that is logically possible.

As a second step, I will persuade some Facebook friends that Ninfinity is real. This is not hard. I was top salesman for five consecutive years at Boomah's Pussy Treats. I can sell anything to anyone.

Once I have some believers they will begin their prayers to her. Ninfinity answered her first prayer with ease. A believer was late for a job interview and struggling to find a parking space. He uttered the words, "Please Ninfinity. I know you can find me a space, please find me a space." Before he finished his prayer a car pulled out right in front of him leaving a free space.

The delighted believer, posted on Facebook his success with the car parking space and something even more amazing—against his expectations he was offered the job and he had not even asked his goddess to help. Clearly she knew what he wanted—she could read his mind.

With this answered prayer, Ninfinity's list of believers grew. And so did the list of positively reported prayers. Eventually she reached more than a million Facebook followers. As her popularity grew, so did her power and people reported ever more amazing answered prayers. People survived car wrecks, terminally ill people even recovered from cancer!

Of course, Ninfinity is imaginary, so she cannot really be answering prayers. It is obvious that people are just attributing successful outcomes to her and overlooking the prayers that were not answered. Nevertheless, many people find Ninfinity totally convincing. They love her and are certain she helps them. Some people feel they couldn't live without her and they tell their children all about her powers.
...

If you think this story is absurd, it is not. This is actually how billions of people think. The only difference is they don't believe in my invented god, they believe in a god invented 3,500 years ago by Hebrew tribesmen. Different god; same flawed thinking process.

The problem is, an invented god cannot answer prayers. So before you attribute your answered prayers to a god, first make sure that particular god exists. Arguing that answered prayers PROVE your favourite god exists is circular reasoning—you are ASSUMING your god exists and then attributing answered prayers to it.

Flawed thinking gives invalid conclusions. No answered prayer is ever proof that a god exists. Period.

Viewing from a distance can often reveal things that cannot be seen close up. To gain a sense of perspective, it is interesting to look at our species, not for a few generations but for our entire existence.

The best evidence available suggests our species has roamed the earth for at least 200,000 years, probably more. Most of that time we were itinerant hunter-gatherers. We used sharpened sticks and flaked stones as tools and weapons.

Things changed very slowly indeed for our Stone Age ancestors until about 12,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. That was when we started to grow our own food which forced us into permanent settlements, and gave rise to much larger communities.

An unintended consequence of the agricultural revolution was that people could own land and charge rent and leaders could levy taxes. So, we saw the emergence of a tier of wealthy property owners and rulers.

The next big change, starting just over 5,000 years ago, was the discovery of bronze. Smelting copper and tin produced a metal that could be forged into tools and weapons and were far superior to their stone equivalents.

The invention of bronze tools for cutting wood paved the way, around 4,000 years ago, for one of the most important inventions of all time—the wheel.

And soon after this came the invention of writing and mathematics.

Bronze was a ground-breaking invention but it was a relatively soft metal and sharpened blades blunted very quickly. But some 3,200 years ago we discovered how to smelt iron and the Iron Age was born.

There were more revolutions to come but the foundations for our modern society were almost in place 3,000 years ago with the inventions of agriculture, the wheel, writing, mathematics and iron. Just one more foundation stone was required and it took another 2,000 years. That was the invention of science, which started with Thales' extraordinary idea that everything that happened could have a natural explanation and culminated in a reliable process for investigating natural things, now known as the scientific method.

Now for the perspective. For at least 94% of the time our species has existed, we have been Stone Age hunter gatherers. For more than 99.5% of our time here we had no reliable method for understanding our world and we relied on gods, magic, stars and superstition.

In the 0.5% of our time on Earth since then, we have been through the industrial revolution and we have started our journey through the information revolution. We have walked on the moon, sent craft to the outer reaches of our solar system and created machines that can look back in time to the beginning of the universe, more than 13 billion years ago.

We can travel to any place on Earth in less than a day and can talk to people on the other side of the planet, as though they were in the same room. We have eradicated diseases, like smallpox, that used to kill three million people yearly and we can transplant failed organs to repair people who would otherwise die.

All these advances, from the industrial revolution onwards, have relied on science. Not a single advance has been given to us by the gods, magic, stars or superstition that our ancestors relied on for hundreds of millennia.

We must not forget that we are not just related to those Stone Age men and women from 200,000 years ago—we ARE those people. We are the same species, made of the same stuff and to the same design. We have evolved slightly over those years but negligible changes have occurred in the last 1,000 years. We could still mate with one of our Stone Age ancestors and produce viable offspring.

This perspective may explain why, after the scientific approach has thoroughly proven itself and gods, magic, stars and superstition have been equally thoroughly discredited, that 85% of us still want to believe that gods, magic, stars and superstition are real and valuable. They are not.

That is our inner caveman speaking. It's time to let him go.

There is no corruption-free country in the world—every country experiences some level of corruption. But the huge differences in the level of corruption between countries is striking. This much is well known.

What is less well known is how corruption is related to religiosity—the most religious countries tend to be the most corrupt countries. But how do I know this and what conclusions can we draw from it?

The chart shows public sector corruption vs religiosity for 140 countries (this is every country for which both corruption and religiosity data are available). See "Methodological notes" below for a fuller explanation of the datasets used.

The chart clearly shows that the most corrupt countries (Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan) are very high on the religiosity scale whilst the least corrupt countries are very low on the religiosity scale (Denmark, New Zealand and Finland). It can be seen that this general relationship holds true for most countries.

It is interesting to look at the outliers—countries that are more corrupt (or less corrupt) than expected for their religiosity. I've drawn diagonal dotted lines to show the outliers. The countries that are more corrupt than their religiosity would suggest are all communist or ex-communist countries. I have marked Russia, Vietnam and Czech Republic but all the countries below the lower dotted line fall into this category.

The countries that are less corrupt than expected are a mixed bunch. Qatar and UAE are both Muslim countries but Malaysia and Singapore have many religions—Muslims being the biggest single group in Malaysia and Buddhists holding that position in Singapore.

It would be interesting to map GDP/capita (income) vs corruption. That may correlate even more closely than religiosity vs corruption. Nevertheless, the chart does illustrate the point that highly religious countries tend to be much more corrupt than irreligious countries.

Finally, correlation is not causation. So I am not saying that being religious MAKES people corrupt. It may, but this data cannot establish that. However, there is one conclusion that we can draw from this data; being religious does not make people honest and not being religious does not make people dishonest.

...........

Methodological notes.
Corruption is abuse of power for private gain. Transparency International is an organisation set up to monitor and expose corruption around the world. It has published the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) annually for 20 years.

The CPI rates the level of public sector corruption in a country on a scale of 0-100 where 0 is the highest possible level of corruption and 100 means totally free of corruption. Of course, corruption is hidden so it cannot be measured directly but the CPI uses multiple indicators and cross checks and is respected by governments and international organisations.

I have used the 2014 CPI data for my analysis which is the latest available.

A link to Transparency International's website is given below. There you can find a full description of their methodology and detailed data for 177 countries.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

I use Gallup Poll research to measure religiosity. Gallup runs a poll from time-to-time which asks respondents "Is religion important in your daily life?" The least religious country measured in this dataset was Estonia with only 16% answering "Yes". There were three countries in which 100% of respondents answered "Yes"; Bangladesh, Niger and Somalia.

This Gallup data was from 2009 which is the latest available. Since both religiosity and corruption change slowly, it is unlikely the difference in collection dates will distort the correlation to a material extent.

The full dataset is available here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w…/Importance_of_religion_by_country

In a letter to Robert Hooke, written in February 1676, the great Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Newton borrowed the expression from Bernard of Chartres who, more than 500 years earlier, remarked we are as dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. We see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.

This was not Newton engaging in false modesty. It was profoundly true that his achievements were possible only because his education included a thorough grounding in the works of Greek natural philosophers who lived 2,000 or more years before him.

Thales of Miletus was the first person known to fully reject supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena and to claim that every event had a natural cause. From a 21st century perspective it is easy to think that was no big deal. But it was. It was quite extraordinary at a time when everyone, from kings to paupers, believed that everything that happened had a supernatural cause. This is why Thales is now regarded as the father of science.

Following Thales were great men like Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus and a clutch of others. These men did not get everything right but they developed a revolutionary approach to understanding the world and gave us the basic tools of logic, maths, epistemology and rational investigation which are the foundations we stand upon today. And they were the foundations Newton stood upon.

Thales developed his ideas 2,600 years ago. Over the intervening years we have proved him right time-after-time—we have discovered the natural causes for thousands of phenomena from earthquakes to lightning, from the movement of the planets to the trajectories of comets, from conception to disease, from anger to ecstasy.

Yet, all these years later, billions of people still refuse to accept his basic tenet. They cling to the idea that SOME things have a supernatural explanation. The ground these people occupy is ever shrinking as a wave of knowledge surrounds them. They stand firm on their shrinking island despite the fact they have no evidence that they are right and no way of studying the supernatural phenomena they claim exist.

I wonder how many years will pass before they concede that Thales was right and they are wrong?

It was quite a stroke of luck for the Jews. Out of all the peoples in the entire world, the 12 small tribes of Israel were the chosen people—they were personally chosen by God, who created the entire universe some 13.8 billion years earlier.

As if that was not enough, God promised them the lands of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites AND he gave them permission to slaughter, rape, take slaves and pillage to conquer these lands. Incredibly lucky that God was so understanding.