Religion apparently makes people happier.
From the article:
individuals who turn to religion over time become, ceteris paribus, more satisfied, while those those turning away from it suffer a loss in their quality of life.
It could be that theists make non-theists unhappy, rather than religion making theists happy. Did they rule that out?
Not that I can tell, but that's an interesting suggestion. How would that work? What would it predict for societies with many religious people but few non-religious people, and vice versa?
Religion apparently makes people happier. Is that evidence for the truth of religion, or against it?
(Of course, it matters which religion we're talking about, but let's just stick with theism generally.)
My initial inclination was to interpret this as evidence against theism, in the sense that it weakens the evidence for theism. Here's why:
We could also put this in mathematical terms, where F represents an increase in the prior probability of our encountering the evidence. Since that prior is a denominator in Bayes' equation, a bigger one means a smaller posterior probability--in other words, weaker evidence.
OK, so that was my first thought.
But then I had second thoughts: Perhaps the evidence points the other way? If we reframe the finding as "Atheism causes unhappiness," or posit that contrarians (such as atheists) are dispositionally unhappy, does that change the sign of the evidence?
Obviously, I am confused. What's going on here?