UQ Evolutionary approaches to psychology group: The origins of religious disbelief

1. UQ Evolutionary approaches to psychology group: The origins of religious disbelief

2. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • The Origins of Religious Disbelief (Trends in Cognitive Science, 17, 20-25) • Existence and Prevalence of Disbelief • Most people are religious • Variation in extent to which people are religious • What about non-believers? • Currently estimated c. 500 million people are ‘atheist’ • “Religious disbelief has not received adequate scientific attention and poses an interesting puzzle to evolutionary explanations that see religious beliefs and behaviors as integral components of human nature. If human minds gravitate towards religion because of innate perceptual, cognitive, and motivational biases, how can the existence and prevalence of widespread disbelief be explained?”

3. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • There are two main reasons for studying disbelief: • Disbelief is a crucial phenomenon to test for evaluating the explanatory power of evolutionary accounts of religion • Atheists are a stigmatized group and therefore increased understanding of atheism may help moderate conflict, etc.

4. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • Intuitive Theism, Unintuitive atheism, One Common Account • Cognitive and evolutionary theories propose hardwired biases result in religious beliefs • i.e. children are intuitive theists, dualists, etc. • Claimed (but not universally) that people who are not religious have engaged in significant cognitive effort against these biases; they overcome their intuitive theism • This is an active cognitive account of disbelief

5. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • 4 predisposing conditions giving rise to religious belief (more detail on next slide if needed): • (i) ability to form intuitive mental representations of supernatural agents • (ii) be motivated to commit to supernatural agents as real and relevant sources of meaning, comfort, and control • (iii) have received specific cultural inputs about deities to believe in (and represent) • (iv) maintain commitment without further analytic cognitive processing • It is proposed that these pathways yield various forms of religious belief and disbelief alike depending upon how the pathways are altered/disrupted

6. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013)

7. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • 4 types of disbelief: • (1) mind-blind atheism (i.e., lack of intuitive support) • Conceptualizing a deity requires mentalizing skills, and therefore those with poor mentalizing skills will be poor in conceptualizing deities • Predict those with ASD and males should show reduced religious belief • (2) apatheism (i.e., unmotivated to find gods) • Conditions of existential security lead to religious apathy/indifference • Absence of input to imitate, be reinforced with, etc. • (3) inCREDulous atheism (i.e., little cultural support for faith in gods) • Imitation and credibility enhancing displays facilitate religious beliefs • Indifference to religious belief due to an absence of religious input via imitation, credible displays, etc. • Secular institutions who may monitor social interactions • (4) analytic atheism (i.e., overcoming intuition) • Actively analyze religious claims • This is the form of atheism assumed to be predominant by past scholars

8. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • These 4 types of disbelief may interact • E.g., scientists are less religious than rest of population • Scientific culture emphasizes materialistic explanations, use of analytical thinking, and postulates that subcultures where science is prominent enjoys high levels of existential security; prestigious scientists are atheists so pressure to conform • E.g., Scandinavia is one of the least religious countries in the world • High existential security, absence of credibility displays, more scientific institutions which encourage analytical thinking

9. Norenzayan and Gervais (2013) • Questions arising • Are children really intuitive theists? • Banerjee and Bloom (2013) claim that children are receptive to religious ideas but are not hardwired to generate them (i.e., spontaneous generation vs theistic explanations of teleology) • Mind-blind atheism and non-human species? • Any similarities to apes in children’s religious tendencies (or lack thereof) up to the age of 4 years? Is over-imitation/ritual an avenue of research? • Passive versus active credibility displays for facilitating inCREDulous atheism? • Explanations emphasize cognition, but what about emotional aspect of religion (and science)? • We know very little about when and how children acquire affective aspect of religious (and scientific) beliefs (Kelemen, 2004) • When do children endorse/understand/question their religious (and scientific) beliefs? Passive vs active acceptance • Little known about this (Keleman, 2004) • Likely to involve metacognition?

10. Other avenues? • What about other avenues for studying religion and disbelief? • Ritual is one possibility……. • I suspect that many aspects of the ritual behaviour being investigated by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse and his colleagues (Nature493, 470–472; 2013) could well apply to academia, and to the scientific community in particular. Science generally operates in what Whitehouse calls the 'doctrinal mode', but the 'imagistic mode' might also be relevant. Examples of the doctrinal mode include the ritual of the weekly lab meeting, the bonding induced by social outings, the ritualized nature of scientific conferences and the stereotypical behaviour of different lab members as they go about their research. For the imagistic mode, what about the agony or ecstasy of having your paper rejected or accepted by Nature? Or the terrified first-year PhD student who has his or her results lambasted at a lab meeting or, worse, at a conference? It is not unknown for people to crumple under the onslaught of such a “traumatic ritual”. Studying the scientific community would be less dangerous than spending seven months in the middle of a civil war, and might encourage scientists to consider their own ritual behaviours. (Alexander, Nature, 494 (314))