Let’s say you wanted to know whether a certain concept was being invoked more frequently in the public sphere these days than it had been in the recent past. You might, for example, look at the archives of the New York Times, and ask how many articles mentioned that concept.
But there’s an obvious problem: maybe there are just more or fewer articles in the NYT from year to year. So you want to control for that. But maybe you don’t know the total number of articles.
So the sensible strategy is to pick some other word that should appear with the same frequency from year to year, and divide the number of articles with you meaning-laden word by the number with that neutral word. Here, from Eric Rauchway at Edge of the American West, is the ratio of appearances of the word “God” to the word “January” in the New York Times, between 1901 and 2005. Methodology borrowed from Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin. Click for closeup.
I’m still not sure about the choice of “January,” though; see original thread for methodological hashing-out. What if there are more articles in the sports section, and they tend to refer to dates more frequently?
Also, we seem to be talking about God a lot more these days.
Looking at the low points during the Second World War, it appears there are atheists in foxholes after all.
“January” is indeed an odd choice. I wonder why Eric picked it. I would have preferred something like “and”, “the”, “is” or something along this line. And maybe more than only one word.
However, if this trend is really there, the future looks gloomy… Unless the word “god” is being preceded by “there is no” or followed by “delusion”
😉
Funny, WWII was the first dates I looked at also. The graph really starts to trend upward with the age of Peace, Love, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. I never associated God with the Age of Aquarius.
I think that the increase of the word “God” is related to the secularization and religious differentiation. After all, when everybody believes in the same God, there is no need to write about it, is there?
Even if the word “January” appears more frequently in the sports section, don’t we only care that “January” appears with the same frequency (relative to the number of articles) each year? The graph gives only the relative frequency of the word “God” from year to year, not the actual ratio of “God”-articles to total articles. So multiplying the number of occurrences of “January” by three, for instance, won’t really change the conclusion of the plot. The word “January” would have to occur more frequently during one period than another for there to be a problem.
I agree with Pieter; religion isn’t much of an issue when everyone has the same religion, so we shouldn’t expect people to be writing about God before the 1960s.
Pieter, I was thinking the same!
ooh,God!
One must also consider that some pious individuals are reluctant to use the word “God” in a cavalier manner. I could imagine a spike in the early 1980’s being related to the “Valley Girl” craze (I mean, like, ohmiGOD, that was so bitchin’!) which has nothing to do with faith in any direct or conventional sense. My grandparents almost never said “Oh my God!”. They usually said my goodness, my heavens, my stars, land sakes, goodness gracious, etc. Could this be a side-effect of a secularized populace feeling no compunction about tossing around references to the almighty.
Recently I saw Wikipedia provide the idea that if there are more than one god, than it is polytheism as opposed to monotheism. It surprisingly and shockingly went on and asserted that in terms of structure, it is pantheist or panentheist. Looking up earlier pantheist and panentheist, I was very puzzled and in denial ( not on account of God but on account of that categorical classification) I read somewhere Albert Einstein is pantheist. I gather pantheist do not go for salvation at the Cross, or trinity of God, but they see God created the universe and becomes the universe. That should mean that when a scientist explores the stars global clusters etc, he or she is exploring God. But that would also mean that the person on death row is also God (or part of God depending on how pantheists see it). It was said somewhere Augustine (the Catholic father of antiquity who wrote a lot) said that if a child is being spanked or punished, is God then being punished? I was puzzled and rightly so, as it turned out that Christian God is not part of the universe nor becomes it. Christian God creates the universe but is separate from it. This begs the question in what way is a pantheist Albert Einstein different from the majority atheist physicists of today? Before going into that, panentheist, it seems is, about God creating the universe and becoming it, but God is bigger than the universe.
I gather Albert Einstein was committed to principles of science and its mode of investigation, so there would be no difference than between a pantheist scientist and atheist scientist, or for that matter a non scientist (as in lay public) pantheist and non scientist atheist in their approach and attitude to science and principles of scientific investigation/ research.
I gather Albert Einstein was committed to peace, and it was very hard for him to come to terms with the need for atom bomb to bring peace in war time. So a pantheist ( scientist or not) can be committed to peace and a fortiori ethical values, or ethical global values.
What then is the difference between a pantheist and atheist, if the word God is not mentioned. God is a word, but what is the attitude and belief or philosophy that underlies pantheism as opposed to atheism that makes them distinct and different that people claim atheism and nothing to do with theism.
I speak as a non theist, still trying to crack the code, of nature of reality, according to Buddhism, where the Madhyamaka school concerned about nihilism asserted that it is the Middle Path between eternalism and nihilism. Andrew Skilton (1994, 2008) A concise history of Buddhism : speaking of that school at p 117 “…. nothing has ultimate existence, the world which we live in does exist as the product of passing conditions. He attacked the idea of inherent existence, not conventional existence. The conventional world is real, not illusory, but is radically impermanent, and can only be described as conventionally true.” And of the contradictory school , I think it goes something like, there is a permanent core that is ultimately real, and that accounts for the permanent seed of Buddha nature in every person and everything, even grain and a blade of grass. It appears to me there is a close parallel between pantheism and the latter view where there is a permanent seed that is of ultimate reality and a unity ( in Buddhism) if as it appears in pantheism, since God became universe, there is a unity of all things in the universe for it or they are God or part of God.
It seems like humans like or need to ponder over the nature of reality. A kind of seeking to understand our selves, our environment, other people, our role in this 100-120 years on earth. So I do not think the God question will go away, but the nature in which it is pondered over, conceptualized, may take different shape in different environment, and at different times even in same locality.
If you’re worried about the effects of variability in “January” messing your view of the variability of “God” why not choose five or six other words, also compare them with “God”, and see how robust the pattern is? Also, compare them with each other. You might, for example, look at the ranges of all the neutral word/neutral word ratios plotted against each other versus the ranges of the target word/neutral word ratios. If the target word really evolves with the zeitgeist of the age while the neutral words don’t, you should see much larger variation in the target/neutral ratios than the neutral/neutral ratios.
Look at the author’s chart where he picked two more words (blank, meaning all articles, and “the”) there are some funny features. The God/January ratio has the same “smile” shape as the other two plots shown, but the noise is a little different. More disturbingly, although the “God/all” and “God/the” ratios dip and rise in the same places, they are sometimes almost equal, but other times “God/the” is at least 50% higher than “God/all”. If you take that literally, it means that sometimes (in the late seventies, for example) less than two thirds of the articles printed in the New York Times contained the word “the”. It calls into question the accuracy of the data.
It might also be interesting to consider the random components of this data. Imagine that writers have a certain probability of using the word “God” in an article. Then the total number of articles that use the word “God” has an expected value of $latex n=p*N$, with $latex p$ the probability of mentioning “God”, $latex N$ the number of articles printed, and $latex n$ the expected number of articles mentioning “God”. There is also a random error that goes something like $latex frac{1}{sqrt{n}}$. If the Times is printing 100 articles a day, and 1% use “God” (as the plot linked above suggests), then the random error in the fraction of articles mentioning “God” comes to about $latex frac{sqrt{365}{365}} approx 5%$. Eyeballing that chart, it looks like the random variation is bigger than that – from year to year it hops more than 5% (that’s 5% of the value plotted, so from 2.0% of all articles to 2.1%, for example). It would be interesting to do some sort of low-degree polynomial fit to approximately model the “smile”, and then see how large the remaining random errors are, compared to the estimated 5%.
Also funny that “January” appears three times as much as “God”, and yet, nobody gets worked up about January.
That graph could also describe the relationship of the increase in popularity of Heavy Metal music to it’s mentions of the word “God”.
Being a HM fan (and narrow atheist), I’ve always thought it odd that HM totally disrespects the very term that it largely relies on for its very success.
I agree with Pieter Kok. When religion is most powerful, it’s not readily discussed.
Also, they’ve updated the post with comparisons with “all” and “the”, for you January-doubters out there, with no great change in trend.
They should show Science/January and Technology/January also. Just for curiosity.
If anyone’s interested, you can do some searching yourself.
Also note that this only reflects the frequency of appearance in the New York Times. Any further interpretation is an extrapolation.
I think that the readers of this blog would agree that there are an increasing number of atheistic writers in the media, perhaps following the trend shown in Sean’s post for the normalized appearance of the word “god”. So I offer an explanation for the trend noted by Sean: It is that these atheistic writers (like Sean) all seem obsessed about writing about the non-existence of God.
Thank you meichenl for reading the axes.
I see no reason to worry as long as January is greater than God.
Here’s a quote from the Baha’i scriptures that may seem too simple for the “time” book, but I think it’s wise not to be dismissive of philosophy.
“That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today. The world of existence came into being through the heat generated from the interaction between the active force and that which is its recipient. These two are the same, yet they are different. Thus doth the Great Announcement inform thee about this glorious structure. Such as communicate the generating influence and such as receive its impact are indeed created through the irresistible Word of God which is the Cause of the entire creation, while all else besides His Word are but the creatures and the effects thereof. Verily thy Lord is the Expounder, the All-Wise.
Know thou, moreover, that the Word of God — exalted be His glory — is higher and far superior to that which the senses can perceive, for it is sanctified from any property or substance. It transcendeth the limitations of known elements and is exalted above all the essential and recognized substances. It became manifest without any syllable or sound and is none but the Command of God which pervadeth all created things. It hath never been withheld from the world of being. It is God’s all-pervasive grace, from which all grace doth emanate. It is an entity far removed above all that hath been and shall be.”
(Baha’u’llah, Tablets of Baha’u’llah, p. 139)