To the church, he’s public enemy No. 1

The only point to demonstrating a correlation is to lay the groundwork for further study. Dr. Jennie Robinson Kloos, a specialist in assessment methodology at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., said you would then examine whether one factor causes the other, whether a third entity might be causing both or whether the correlation is a coincidence.

Paul said that’s exactly what he intended. His paper was “a first, brief look at an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists ...,” he wrote. “It is hoped that these original correlations and results will spark future research and debate on the issue.”

But others — including statisticians consulted by MSNBC.com who tentatively endorsed his work — aren’t so sure. Unless you have a point to make, why go to all that trouble?

They point to a lengthy segment in Paul’s paper that suggests a second correlation between belief in evolution and lack of religious faith. The statisticians remarked that — regardless of whether that was true — it was an odd point to make in a paper about social pathologies.

“One might argue that it’s silly to take a statistical measurement indicating belief in God and another indicating acceptance of evolution, draw a correlation, and extrapolate tons of conclusions about what this means for the state of these nations,” Kloos said.

But when you consider Greg Paul himself, it begins to make sense.

An author open about his biases
Paul, 50, a widely admired authority in dinosaur paleontology, is firmly in the pro-evolution, anti-creationist camp. “I‘m an agnostic, and I do have a viewpoint,” he said. “That’s important for people to know, and I don’t hide that.”

But it’s also irrelevant to whether his research is sound, he said. All that matters is whether it holds up.

The Journal of Religion and Science is a peer-reviewed, or “refereed,” journal, so Paul’s article would have been read and approved by a panel of outside experts. Because Paul was not identified in the article beyond his name and because he has not published previously on the subject, the panel most likely would not have known that he is not trained in sociology or religion, nor that he holds a strong anti-creationist view.

“It came back with the normal criticisms [and] suggestions for changes,” Paul said. “We went back and forth, and eventually it ended up being in publishable form, and there you go.”

Paul said he got the impression that the reviewers “might have been a bit uncomfortable, but they couldn’t find any major flaws with it, so they did the proper thing and published it.”

The journal’s editor, Dr. Ronald A. Simkins, did not reply to e-mail and telephone requests for an interview.

Seeking out the spotlight
If anything, Paul is happy about the controversy, even the attacks. They only serve to draw more attention to his research, which he says is unprecedented.

“I started looking at the literature, and I couldn’t find anything, and I started calling up sociologists and they said, nope, nobody’s done that sort of thing,” he said. “So I actually ended up opening a new field of research.”

Tim Cupery, a sociologist of religion at the University of North Carolina who otherwise dismisses Paul’s findings, said that on that score, he’s right. “A lot of American Christians have just kind of expected that European democracies which have low rates of religious faith would have more social problems,” he said.

“The question is very interesting,” Cupery said. It’s too bad, he added, that “half the statements [in Paul’s paper] are wrong.”

But Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist seminary — even as he questions Paul’s academic credentials and data — now says it doesn’t really matter whether he’s right or wrong. His paper sends the wrong message because it asks the wrong questions.

Sure, he’s concerned that “there were those trying to make the argument that a society made up of secular citizens would be better off than one made up of Christian citizens,” he said.

But “I also wanted to warn Christians that the argument for the truth of the Christian faith is independent of the social science statistics. It actually has very little to do with suggesting to a society that if you adopt [Christianity], you will better off as a people,” he said.

“I would go so far to say that I would not want a person to become a Christian because they want to see a lowering in social pathologies, but because they’ve come to believe in Christ.”

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