1st: http://www.regent.edu/acad/under ... rtments/government/
The Department continues to experience steady growth. Its course offerings, talented faculty, and Christian vision attract talented and passionate students......
Gerson Moreno-Riano, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Government
More details:
http://www.infidels.org/library/ ... ism/more-moral.html
And the wiki tells the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_S._Paul
Paul authored a paper in 2005 entitled "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look".[2] He states in the introduction that the paper is "not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health".[3] This paper has been criticized on statistical grounds, for conceptual ambiguity , its indirect measure of "religiosity" (the author's term) and its "chi-by-eye" interpretation of scatterplots rather than quantified measures. Summing up in a published article in the same journal, Moreno-Riaño, Smith, and Mach wrote that "[Paul's] methodological problems do not allow for any conclusive statement to be advanced regarding the various hypotheses Paul seeks to demonstrate or falsify."[4] Note: Moreno-Riaño, Smith, and Mach, were, at the time of their paper, from Cedarville University, OH. This Christian University requests adhesion to a binding Doctrine Statement [5] that constrains the freedom of what a member of the faculty or a student could conclude in matters touching the University religious tenets.
Gary F. Jensen of Vanderbilt University is one of the scientists who criticizes the methods used by Paul, including that "Paul’s analysis generates the 'desired results' by selectively choosing the set of social problems to include to highlight the negative consequences of religion". In a response [6] to the study by Paul, he builds on and refines Paul's analysis. His conclusion, that focus only in the crime of homicide, is that there is a correlation (and perhaps a causal relationship) of higher homicide rates, not with Christianity, but with dualistic Christian beliefs, something Jensen defines as the strong belief in all of the following : God, heaven, devil and hell. Excerpt: "A multiple regression analysis reveals a complex relationship with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it." |