"God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes."
That semicolon contains a big jump. Most people who believe in some higher power do identify that power with good, or morality, or perhaps merely as its source (morality is a gift from God, therefore, without him there would not be good). However, "there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes" - you seem to define that as to mean that most religious fundamentalists believe that...
I've found that hitting either (E) or (I) entails a bit of (W). If you're running regressions on some enormous dataset creating some elasticity estimates, and you're pretty sure that the estimate should be positive and not negative, and you find it's negative you can either hit (E) - systematize the anomalous result: what's driving it and why is this set of datapoints not what the theory would predict - which I suppose is joined by the sentiment toward God that's either (W) God, why the f--- did you make this universe so f----- complicated or (W) thanks b...
Calcedonian:
The empirical evidence using micro datasets that I have read about does dispute much of the theory about religion and morality. Prison populations are much more religious than average. The Southeast has higher crime rates, etc. There's even the aphorism that "there are no atheists in the foxholes." The people who we, as a society, pay to kill people have higher religious service participation rates. On the other hand, charitable giving is perhaps higher among believers. My point there was that overall is that one of the most com... (read more)