lundi 12 février 2018

Do religious people have fewer traffic deaths?

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, and it is in Danish, so for most readers here, it is irrelevant anyway: Hvorfor dør religiøse mennesker sjældent i trafikken? Passer Gud på dem?
The title translates as "Why do religious people rarely die in road accidents? Does God protect them?". This was a surprising article to get with the Sunday papers, so I digged into it. The claim is that for every 39 male traffic deaths in Denmark, only one is a religious believer, whereas the numbers for females is 2 out of 25. The researchers from the University of Southern Denmark claim that they have adjusted for the relative numbers of believers vs non-believers.

It would be quite spectacular if we finally could get fool-proof evidence for the existence of God, and we could use such figures to determine if God is Protestant or Catholic, or if God is Muslim. We could perhaps also find out if God really hates atheists, or if the polytheist heresy is worse ;)

Well, most of you will probably, like me, wonder how on Earth they determine the belief of the dead in the traffic? It turns out that this was one result of the case study of the health of baptists and adventists. So there is nothing about the strength of belief, only about the registered membership of these churches.

The figures was published in table format as part of a study is from 2011 but has only now drawn the interest of the media. Apparently a larger study is being prepared. The researchers themselves are aware of the many confounding factors that should be taken into consideration, such as do religious people drive more carefully? Do religious people drive less often, and so on.

But despite these reservations, the article stresses that the researchers cannot explain the result, and scientists tend to shy away from the question of the existence of God.


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2G6UBR4

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