Regarding the relationship between atheism, rationality and religious belief

An article at OnlySky by social science researcher Will Gervais examines the state of the science. The article, The treasured atheist idea that reason undercuts faith just doesn’t hold up, looks at recent research on the science of atheism and religious belief. Current data sets indicate that (i) a person’s rationality is not a source of atheism, and (ii) applying reason-based arguments against religion does not convert religious people to atheism. 

In 2012, Gervais and fellow researcher Ara Norenzayan published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. That paper got significant public and researcher attention. That paper, plus another with similar results, sparked further research to confirm or deny and further explore relationships, if any, between atheism, rationality and religious faith.

Long story short, Gervais’ original data did not hold up to more rigorous experimentation with larger groups of subjects. He and his research partner disavowed their 2012 paper and its conclusions. The results were a false positive based on too small a sample size and a sloppy research protocol. Recent research data also indicates that instead of appeals to reason (the conscious mind), when one appeals to intuition, emotion and bias (the unconscious mind), that also does not nudge people toward religious beliefs and/or away from atheism.

Science still does not know what factors lead people into atheism or religious belief. Most atheists claim that reason led them to atheism, but the data suggests there is self-delusion in that for most. I thought that reason reinforced my own pre-existing atheism** decades ago, but maybe that is more false than true. Among Americans, there is a small correlation between people who score high on tests of rationality and atheism, but among humans everywhere, the correlation drops from small to negligible. 

** Pre-existing atheism means I think I was an atheist from early childhood (before my rationality kicked in), but maybe that is a personal illusion.

Gervais makes some useful observations. He writes:

Maxine Najle, Nava Caluori, and I recently published a study in which we tested various predictors of atheism against each other in a nationally representative sample of US Americans. We were able to conduct a statistical analysis to specifically pinpoint the relationship between rationality and atheism among those who were most strongly exposed to religion while they were growing up. And among these people most culturally brought up to be religious, the correlation between rationality and religious disbelief dropped to zero.

 
That’s right: among those folks with the most exposure to religion, there’s no reliable correlation between rationality and atheism. This means that among those with strong religious upbringings, the ones who are most rational are no more likely to end up as atheists than are those who are most inclined to trust their intuitions. Far from rationality being a key factor that leads people away from strongly religious upbringings and towards atheism, it turns out that rationality isn’t even modestly correlated with atheism among this subset of people. There is no relation whatsoever.

Rational atheism is (more or less) a myth.

What does it mean that rational atheism is largely a myth? Should freethinkers stop promoting rationality? Hardly! The promotion of rationality may intrinsically bring its own rewards and should be pursued on its own merits without any pseudoscientific pretensions that it will convert believers to atheism. I also firmly believe that abandoning the rational atheist myth may pay secondary dividends if it leads New Atheist allied thinkers to stop trying to use science and rationality to undermine religious faith. These efforts are incredibly unlikely to succeed. Worse still, they have substantial potential to backfire. Dawkins and others have long tried to use science and rationality to pry people away from religion, but they’ve misdiagnosed the source of atheism in the first place. Their efforts in all likelihood do more to drive believers away from science than they do to attract anyone to atheism.

That stuff is good to know. It helps keep atheists from getting too arrogant for their own britches. Two take-home points come to mind:

• Social science research is incredibly complex and difficult because humans are incredibly complex and messy. Scientific results on humans need to be replicated, and data needs to be obtained in well-controlled protocols and analyzed by rigorous statistical analyses. Unconscious human bias must always be kept in mind as a potential confounding factor that gives rise to false positive and false negative data interpretations. Reasonable humility is a good thing to have when doing science, especially science on humans.

• Once again, larger sample sizes show that positive results often melt away into small or non-existent cause and effect outcomes. The positives are an illusion. That has recently been shown for brain scan data, rendering many or most of those research findings suspect. I interpret this to mean that the human brain operates diffusely with thoughts, emotional impulses and biases operating not just unconsciously, but also in large areas of the brain. That makes it tricky to pinpoint small regions of the brain that are believed to cause or at least correlate with behaviors under study.