I remember watching an episode of Penn and Teller’s HBO series “Bullshit!” and reacting to something Penn Jillette said with an enthusiastic “huzzah!”
What had he said? That more people should read the Bible. Because we need more atheists.
Which made sense to me. The first time I read the whole dang thing through as an adult I was amazed by what was in it. And further amazed that people could consider it a holy book.
But I’m not your average reader. In fact, there is no such animal as an average reader. As new research suggests. In, How you read the Bible is tied to fellow worshippers’ education, Baylor researcher finds, I read:
Regardless of a person’s educational background, he or she is less likely to approach the Bible in a literal word-for-word fashion when surrounded by a greater number of church members who went to college, according to a Baylor University sociology researcher.
Oh. So blunt familiarity with the Bible may not help liberate folk. Notice that the finding was not about the individual’s education level, but that of their peers. Social environments matter.
For me this reinforces the idea that atheists and humanists need to speak up more. Why? We are members of many social groups. And a social group can influence the thinking of others, even if it is ever so subtly.
If the human brain is a toolkit, individuals tend to have not only somewhat different kits, but they also have favored ‘tools.’ And perhaps these tools, these capacities, influence how we perceive our world.
Research published in September of last year offers this proposition:
Intuitive thinking may influence belief in God
Does thinking style (variable one), influence belief in a supernatural “numero uno” (variable two)?
First, a nitpick about the news release and actual paper: The consistent, unqualified use of the word “God.” There are quite a few assumptions that go into the use of “belief in God,” or simply “God.” I’ve raised these before. Suffice it to say that a more scientific wording would be “a god” or “an ultimate god.”
That said, the studies that generated the finding were quite innovative and perhaps revealing. In the first study, the researchers from Harvard University measured intuitive problem-solving in individuals, via a number of math problems that lent themselves to intuitive short-cuts that resulted in incorrect answers. The finding:
Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems were 1 ½ times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.
Interesting. Is belief in a god the result of taking a similar sort of mistake-prone, cognitive short-cut? Notice that intuition does not equal true. Nor does it always equal false.
A second study was equally revealing:
In another study, with 373 participants, the researchers found they could temporarily influence levels of faith by instructing participants to write a paragraph describing a personal experience where either intuitive or reflective thinking led to a good result. One group was told to describe a time in their lives when intuition or first instinct led to a good outcome, while a second group was instructed to write about an experience where a good outcome resulted from reflecting and carefully reasoning through a problem. When they were surveyed about their beliefs after the writing exercise, participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.
It seems if we encourage intuitive thinking and the mental short-cuts it entails we are likely to promote more error-prone thoughts and conclusions/beliefs.
Of course, there is way more to the question of why people believe in an ultimate god than this. But thinking style may be a factor.
Sometimes an anchor is a good thing; sometimes it’s not — like when there is a need for progress.
[cartoon thanks to atheistcartoons.com]
[graphic thanks to truth-saves.com, click for larger image]
[cartoon thanks to jesusandmo.net]
[recycled material - first appeared here]
Continuing with the theme of the bogus dichotomy of logical thinking vs. illogical, another important question is raised by these phenomena: alter brain chemicals and you frequently change the behavior of that brain. If person A has high levels of serotonin, for example, and tends to interpret a scenario in a rosy fashion, while low-serotonin-levels person B interprets the same scenario differently, can we say one being more or less logical than the other?
Here’s a problem: we can’t just magically remove all the chemicals that influence the functioning of brains without crippling those brains. This very moment your brain is “under the influence.” And it’s a good thing. Is there an optimal level for serotonin, for testosterone and oxytocin and the countless other neurotransmitters and hormones, etc.?
In a fairly recent article found over at the Huffington Post (forwarded my way, I don’t read the site), I encountered material about religious belief that pertains to the topic of this discussion. In I Know Because I Know – Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 3 of 6, Valerie Tarico makes some very important points. But also seems to fall into the black/white thinking about human cognition.
First the good. Tarico shares the opinion of neurologist Robert Burton -
“feeling of knowing” (rightness, correctness, certainty, conviction) should be thought of as one of our primary emotions.
Other research has likewise highlighted an emotional aspect to conclusions of right/good wrong/bad.
Tarico hits a supremely important nail on the head with this statement:
Nonetheless, it is a healthy mistrust for our sense of knowing that has allowed scientists to detect, predict, and produce desired outcomes with ever greater precision.
Yes, none of us is a cold computer capable of perceiving the world with perfect accuracy. We aren’t logical creatures; nor are we illogical. Logic is the wrong word. However, where we know our thinking can go astray and want to prevent and correct it . . . we have the insights and methods of science.
Lastly, here is where I think Tarico gets it at least a bit wrong. She writes,
Religious belief is not bound to regular standards of evidence and logic. It is not about logic but about something more intuitive and primal.
What regular standards of evidence? And primal? As mentioned before, I love Einstein’s description of science as the refinement of every day thinking. So we don’t have logic here and primal irrationality there. We have a spectrum of thought from more refined to less. If we must simplify a very complicated issue.
I don’t think it is helpful to approach the why of differing conclusions — no god and no belief vs. god and belief — by claiming the two positions rely on distinctly different categories of cognitive processes. Convenient as it may be, I just don’t think that is the case.
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