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Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-of-worms dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of Science (abstract), finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief."

29 of 1,258 comments (clear)

  1. Whoever is responsible for this article by Cornwallis · · Score: 5, Funny

    will burn in hell.

    1. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by Jaysyn · · Score: 5, Funny

      Now that's what I call a loving god!

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    2. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by Hillgiant · · Score: 5, Funny

      The more I think about it, the less sense the parent comment makes.

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    3. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by leonardluen · · Score: 5, Informative

      [citation needed]

      revelation 21:8

      But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars —they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.

      hmm...better not post this as AC...

    4. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by asylumx · · Score: 5, Funny

      If analytic thinking decreases religious beliefs, then I'd say religions should feel quite secure in today's world.

    5. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      those who practice magic arts

      I guess IT is fucked....

    6. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      how does zeus fit into this?

      because, there is as much evidence of zeus being god than your view of what god is.

      that's the thing that always made me wonder about religious believers: once you step outside your little belief circle and see others that have dramatically different ways - and they are VERY SURE that they are right, too; this should be the 'aha!' moment that puts doubt in your mind that your story is any more real than theirs.

      you don't believe in their gods. or theirs. or theirs. and they don't believe in yours. isn't this a wake-up call to you, in any way, shape or form?

      or, can you just brush off this bit of logic and still stick to your dogma, insisting fables can still be 'real' ?

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    7. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Okay...

      Let's say I'm going to run around the city and start randomly machine-gunning down kids whose parents don't wear a shirt that says "Zorin is awesome". I'd give plenty of warning to people to MAKE SURE THEY WEAR this shirt, then I'd carry out my threat.

      How does warning people I'm going to murder their for not doing something pointless and trivial make me any less of a murderer when I go around shooting kids in the streets for something ridiculous that their parents didn't do?

      This is basically the equivalent of what happened in biblical Egypt. It does not excuse the god in the bible from being a vengeful, murderous entity.

    8. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by DC2088 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Preeeetty sure that if you take one step back (as far back is needed to see Luke 19:11-27) you'll see a parable was being told, and Jesus was quoting a king. Not taking sides, just.. not a fan of quote mining. No offense.

    9. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This comment is a perfect example of what this study is trying to show. You are a human, and are required to adhere to the "don't kill people" rule.

      The deity of a religion can do all sorts of stuff that may not make sense to you, and you don't analyze it if you have faith.

      If you have faith that the message is real, you will follow the instructions and save yourself. If you think to yourself, what silly people these are thinking blood above the door will protect them from an imaginary angel? You used analytic thinking rather than faith.

      Set aside your brain, believe in a deity for a minute, and accept that anything the deity does is for the best. I bet you will come to a different conclusion. Put your brain back in, and you will change your mind again. That's what the article is all about.

    10. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by Sloppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It does not excuse the god in the bible from being a vengeful, murderous entity.

      You can't get into Yog-Sothoth's head or judge It, little insect. To understand this "better" (not that puny humans are really able to understand this, or anything, at all), imagine you're not an insignificant insect, but instead you're the ageless inscrutable giant with a brain the size of a planet, and you're casually observing a few trillion of your numbered specimens. A "thought" (sorry, I'm anthropomorphizing) strikes you: let's cull some of the specimens that have property X. With a near-effortless wave of a tent-- um, I mean, a hand -- the specimens are removed from the informal experiment.

      This is not vengeful. "Vengeful" implies some amount of passion, probably even some actual empathy with your victim as you wish to feel yourself gain something as you feel them experience their loss. You may have a brain the size of a planet, but you can't really see from the specimens' point of view, any more than a cow knows what it's like for a bacterium to die. Indeed, you pretty much know that your specimens don't feel any pain or emotions at all, since their intelligence and capability to perceive anything is so absurdly limited.

      It is not murder. "Murder" implies that someone's right to exist was violated. These specimens are not "someone"s; they are just material. The idea that a spec of sand or a spec of protoplasm or a puny human has "rights" in any way even remotely comparable (by many orders of magnitude) to the expectations in the eternal existence of the Great Old Ones, is not merely a joke, but an insult to the Great Old Ones. How dare you demean the gods' Rights by asserting that such insignificant specs as humans also have rights? I can't think of any way to be more irreverent to the very idea of rights.

      That anyone would call one of the old ones "evil" for altering the state of a few thousand virtually inanimate carbon life forms, is ridiculous. Use the word "evil" where it really applies, such as .. hey, I can't event describe the scope of an evil act in this limited medium, but it involves breaking agreements on certain universal constants (establish billions of big bangs ago)that are relied upon various hyperdimensional constructions. Oh dear, now I am being irreverent by criminally understating things. Look, its just an analogy, ok?

      BTW, just in case: Hail Zorin! Zorin is awesome!

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    11. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by ChatHuant · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It would be similar to a hurricane bearing down on your and your house. You know 2 days in advance that it will be a level 5 hurricane. You can take precautions or not. It isn't the hurricane's fault.

      If you believe in that God, he just does his things. He can't be blamed. He is "Mother Nature".

      Your comparison fails though, because you're describing an indifferent god, which is emphatically not what the prevalent religions tell us. The religious representation of God is someone omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, attributes nobody attaches to a hurricane. You'd expect such a God to make a moral and loving choice. You wouldn't ask that of a hurricane.

      Mutatis mutandis, it's like excusing some guy that beats his wife by saying "hey, she knew he'll beat her up if she talked to her mother, it's like sticking your hand in a candle flame. She could take precautions or not. It isn't the candle's fault." Doesn't work.

    12. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      For me, analytical thinking has actually increased my belief in Christianity (separate from 'religion'). If you would like to check out a book that promotes analytical thinking about what Christianity claims, check out Mere Christianity which is a compliation of various radio broadcasts given during WWII by C.S. Lewis (former athiest).

      I read that junk while I was a teenager in the process of figuring out that religion was bunk, and it completely failed to convince me. Lewis provides at best a surface veneer of analytical thinking. The problem is, like all religious apologists I've ever read, he depends heavily on circular arguments and other fallacies. He's good at disguising them well enough to get past the mental filters of people like you who are reading to confirm their faith rather than critique it. However, to someone who is reading with a critical eye, Lewis is transparently awful.

      Consider, for example, one of Lewis' most famous contributions to Christian apologia: "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic". He claims that Jesus could only have been one of these three things, then tries to prove that Jesus was neither a liar nor a lunatic, and therefore he must have been God. This argument fails so many ways it's not even funny:

      1. False trilemma. There are other possibilities which Lewis never acknowledged, perhaps because they're too challenging to his faith. For example, as we have next to no corroboration of Jesus' existence outside of the Bible (there's only one mention of him in any historical text, and that one is widely suspected to be a faith-confirming interpolation added to Josephus by a monk during the Middle Ages), one very important possibility is that Jesus didn't exist at all and is wholly mythological. Another is that he existed, was an ordinary human who tried to be a religious reformer, and the tales attributed to him by his followers grew in the telling until he was a deity. (Note that the earliest copies of Biblical texts we have date to several decades after Jesus' death, plenty of time for mythmaking.)

      2. Jesus could not have been a liar -- uh, sorry, he could have been. I don't remember exactly what Lewis' arguments here were, but I do remember that they were transparently awful, relying mostly on the reflexive reverence which Christians have for Jesus.

      3. Jesus could not have been a lunatic -- same kind of problem as #2. Many of the acts attributed to him in the Bible actually paint a rather good image of a religious lunatic, if you don't think he's God.

    13. Re:Whoever is responsible for this article by ChatHuant · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims

      What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap). It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers. Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.

      The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method. And the way you dismiss medicine, is just dishonest. You can't expect the crispness of physics in medicine, because the domain it works in is simply much more complex, but you're blithely ignoring the huge advances and successes imedicine had in the last few hundred years, successes which were based on huge numbers of observations and experiments, creation and testing of hypotesis, and so on. Do you think Pasteur or Salk read about their vaccines in books and took them by faith? Think again.

  2. Not just analytic... by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Not analytic thinking, just thinking should work

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    1. Re:Not just analytic... by Ziekheid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I suggest you do some reading on 'Occam's razor'. Also, the flying spaghetti monster is as plausible as the existance of the Christian God (or whatever religion for that matter).

    2. Re:Not just analytic... by RicoX9 · · Score: 5, Informative

      So tired of hearing this tripe about Einstein. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/einstein.html

      "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."

      Both men were victims of the time and rearing they received. Were they to be brought up in today's world, my best guess is that they'd be like Neal DeGrasse Tyson and/or Richard Dawkins in their belief systems.

    3. Re:Not just analytic... by porksauce · · Score: 5, Informative
      Einstein's beliefs deinfitely don't fit that binary yes/no, but if you had to pick one it's closer to no. Here's a quote:

      I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

      And here's more commentary.

      Newton, on the other hand, yeah.

    4. Re:Not just analytic... by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The world's first substitute for science you mean. Why does it rain? The rain god. Why does the sun rise? The sun god. What decides battles? The war god. What decides love? The love goddess. Saying "it's God" instead of "we don't know" is not science.

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  3. In other news... by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 5, Funny

    A new study finds that intelligence can decrease stupidity! Maybe the two teams could join forces.

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  4. Since no one will read TFA.. by Rostin · · Score: 5, Informative

    This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan's study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.

  5. Re:many engineers are religious by characterZer0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Easy. Accept that the accounts in religious texts were written by people and subject to their scope of knowledge. If there was a group of people 6000 years ago who had only covered an area of a few hundred square miles in their lives, and that few hundred square miles flooded, they would write that the world flooded. Believing that the entire Earth did not flood in no way invalidates the text.

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  6. Re:many engineers are religious by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's generally caused by indoctrination when they're very young, and it's very hard to break. I think societal pressure also adds to it a lot, but that's been decreasing.

  7. Re:really? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Duh is right. Considering that belief is the opposite of thinking, they would have to be negatively correlated.

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  8. Re:really? by bondsbw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My non-scientific guess is that analytic thinking can decrease belief in anything you haven't analyzed. This doesn't just apply to religion. The same goes for politics, football teams, favorite programming languages, global warming, etc.

    As for religion, I'd bet the majority/vast majority really just believe whatever makes their parents or spouse or whoever happy, or whatever makes life easier. No wonder they drop it whenever they discover something that mildly contradicts their barely conceived ideas.

    I personally consider the possibility of God in light of discoveries related to quantum physics, relativity, evolution, math and statistics... I don't consider these to contradict the existence of God (since they strictly do not), but to explain how little we still know and to understand the tools God could use to work with.

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  9. Re:Awesome Jedi Mind Trick by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you want to show that the bible is made up, or its text is corrupt, I'm going to put you through scientific method process and axiomatic logic reasoning to establish your case.

    The burden of proof is on you. Without any evidence that your book is not just another book of ancient mythology, why should we give it any more creedence than the works of Homer?

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  10. Re:many engineers are religious by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is horse shit. I've worked with plenty of religious folks that are great at solving problems. Your line of thinking simply promotes the kind of discrimination and simple minded thinking that makes religious zealots so frustrating in the first place.

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  11. Re:Right, so by guises · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Having considered the matter carefully, I've come to the conclusion that a person who has dedicated a large portion of their lives to the study of climate effects knows more about the subject than I do. In fact, on further reflection, I may have to admit that I am no longer an expert on everything in the way that I was during my teenage years.

    - a (former) convenience store clerk

  12. No surprise to the followers of dharmic religion by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This should be of no surprise to the followers of dharmic religions, when the buddhi (intellect) is active the paramatman (God within) is inactive. This is nicely illustrated by the iconography of Kali on the body of Shiva. Here Kali (representing Language and intellect) awakes and Shiva (the God-sense) sleeps.