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Notes -
Even in Nordic cohorts, there are gains from religious participation in the forms of charitable giving and civic engagement. There is also a twin study showing that prosociality is increased by religiosity in a US sample. It stands to reason that even the Nords benefit from religion. I don’t think we should extrapolate “humanity doesn’t need religion” from “Nords do quite well without religion”, because we ought to be concerned with maximizing the Good, not being comparatively better than peers, and there may be some other factor that leads to Nords having a high floor of prosociality. Perhaps both Nords and Namibians benefit from prosocial rituals, but starting from a different floor of behavior. (In the same way that the East Asian appears to have a low ceiling of violent criminality, while there is still likely some intervention that would either decrease or increase the rate).
It makes sense that the cohort who is hyper-selected for rational ability would have some reduction or deficiency in other kinds of social-cognitive processing. I imagine if you surveyed the best artists and musicians, you’d find that they make fewer rational decisions than their STEM peers. Would these scientists cease being rational about science if the state enforced religious belief? Probably not. If these scientists believed that they would be judged by how truthfully they relay findings, would they produce more trustworthy data? Probably. Should we change the fabric of society because of research scientists, who compose like 0.001% of all citizens? Probably not. Consider that there have been losses to the mathematical community due to antisocial behavior, like what caused Grigori Perelman to flee academia from a sense of injustice. This affects the very best at the very top of cutting-edge science.
It really is possible that religious social technology which reduces scientific fraud is the new frontier of science. We have National Academy of Science members causing billions of dollars in lost progress through fraud. The National Academy of Science itself believes that fraud is a serious issue that is increasingly rampant in the field.
We already have all this external stuff! The peer review process and academic accreditation system have “coercive ideology” and “ingroup enforcement” and “strong social institutions”. The problem is that it’s easy to fake through all this, and there is no supernatural motive to care about honesty. What’s missing is the internal stuff. Western religion does not really do in-group enforcement but is predicated on introducing intrinsic commitments to behavioral proscriptions. The reason you don’t fabricate results isn’t because you’ll get caught (this will only lead to more subtle fabrications), but because behaving honestly is supernaturally pleasant and honorable and supernaturally socially-reinforced through a supernatural peer, while dishonesty is detested as being cataclysmic. “My university mentor would be ashamed if he found out I committed fraud” is much weaker than “my universal mentor who perceives the most subtle movement of my heart as if it were an entire solar system is counting on me to be absurdly trustworthy”. It is really easy to get people to believe the second, if just requires forgetting rationality in favor of a God Delusion.
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