Do you remember the Gregory S. Paul study? Sure you do. It was that study that purported to show that there is a correlation between the religious belief and the dysfunction of a society, but it was shown to be riddled with errors by statistican Scott Gilbreath as well as by my fellow Telician Mike Gene. Now, none of this has prevented the "study" from being featured in Skeptic Magazine, where Matthew Provonshan uncritically repeats Gregory Paul's flawed claims. This has caused Scott Gilbreath to write another post about the article, finding even more howlers than he did at first.

The claim that Paul utilised "a database of 800 million people" is laughable. The sample size of Paul's study was precisely eighteen: one data point from each country for each data series. To claim this represents the combined population of all the countries is like the market research firm Ipsos Canada conducting a survey of 1200 Canadians and then claiming they accessed a database of over 32.5 million people.

(HT: Tom Gilson)

As Mike pointed out, almost a year ago, this paper suffers from so many flaws that, had it been an intelligent design paper, critics would have been screaming bloody murder over it, hunting down the responsible editor, like they did with Richard Sternberg. Yet on this paper, the self-proclaimed Defenders of Science have remained silent. I wonder why.

Update: Turns out the paper is also being featured in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Grey Thoughts and Verum Serum has more.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Intelligent Design, Religion, Shoddy Science, The Critics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/the-silence-of-the-critics/trackback/