The Natural Pathways to Atheism: Cognitive Biases, Cultures, and Costs (original) (raw)

Related papers

The relative unnaturalness of atheism: On why Geertz and Markússon are both right and wrong

Religion, 2010

Commonly scholars in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have advanced the naturalness of religion thesis. That is, ordinary cognitive resources operating in ordinary human environments typically lead to some kind of belief in supernatural agency and perhaps other religious ideas. Special cultural scaffolding is unnecessary. Supernaturalism falls near a natural anchor point. In contrast, widespread conscious rejection of the supernatural as in atheism appears to require either special cultural conditions that upset ordinary function, cognitive effort, or a good degree of cultural scaffolding to move people away from their maturationally natural anchor-points. Geertz and Markú sson (2009) identify ways to strengthen cognitive approaches to the study of religion and culture, including atheism, but fail to demonstrate that atheism is as natural in a comparable respect as theism.

The relative unnaturalness of atheism: On why Geertz and Mark�sson are both right and wrong

Religion, 2010

Commonly scholars in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have advanced the naturalness of religion thesis. That is, ordinary cognitive resources operating in ordinary human environments typically lead to some kind of belief in supernatural agency and perhaps other religious ideas. Special cultural scaffolding is unnecessary. Supernaturalism falls near a natural anchor point. In contrast, widespread conscious rejection of the supernatural as in atheism appears to require either special cultural conditions that upset ordinary function, cognitive effort, or a good degree of cultural scaffolding to move people away from their maturationally natural anchor-points. Geertz and Markú sson (2009) identify ways to strengthen cognitive approaches to the study of religion and culture, including atheism, but fail to demonstrate that atheism is as natural in a comparable respect as theism.

Three cognitive routes to atheism: a dual-process account

Religion, 2014

According to recent cognitive explanations of religiosity, belief in supernatural agents is a result of species-universal cognitive modules operating in environments similar enough to those these modules evolved in. Less attention has been given to the cognitive basis of atheism. The author brings together three ways in which atheism could arise that are a priori compatible with recent cognitive explanations of religiosity. One way is reflective and involves the effortful overturning of unreflective modular cognition. The other two ways are unreflective and involve, firstly, the operation of modular cognition in evolutionarily novel environments, and secondly, developmental variation of modular cognition. The author argues that there is evidence for both a reflective route and at least one unreflective route to atheism, and that reflective and unreflective causes probably interact with each other. Consequently, he argues that the cognitive profiles of atheists are not necessarily more reflective than those of believers, nor any less ‘natural’.

Is Atheism a Religion? On Socio-Anthropologic Cognitive Imperialism and Problems That Follow

Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej / Qualitative Sociology Review, 2017

Radosław Tyrała, PhD in sociology, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Humanities at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. His academic interests are focused on sociology of religion and non-religion, sociology of knowledge, sociology of social movements and sociology of medicine (currently he is working on the research project on anti-vaccination movement). The author (in Polish) of the following books: A Taxon Too Many: Race as a Debatable Category (Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, 2005), Opposite Poles of Evolutionism: Arms Race between Science and Religion (Kraków: NOMOS, 2007) and Everyday Life Without God. A Sociology of Atheism and Unbelief (Kraków: NOMOS. 2014). The last one was awarded by The Stanisław Ossowski Prize in 2014.

Analytic atheism: A cross-culturally weak and fickle phenomenon

Religious belief is a topic of longstanding interest to psychological science, but the psychology of religious disbelief is a relative newcomer. One prominently discussed model is analytic atheism, wherein cognitive reflection, as measured with the Cognitive Reflection Test, overrides religious intuitions and instruction. Consistent with this model, performance-based measures of cognitive reflection predict religious disbelief in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic) samples. However, the generality of analytic atheism remains unknown. Drawing on a large global sample (N = 3461) from 13 religiously, demographically, and culturally diverse societies, we find that analytic atheism as usually assessed is in fact quite fickle cross-culturally, appearing robustly only in aggregate analyses and in three individual countries. The results provide additional evidence for culture's effects on core beliefs.

Atheism and the Apotheosis of Agency 1

This paper suggests that biological factors ought to be considered in a�empting to explain distributions of theism and atheism across populations. In advancing our argument, we consider two recent efforts to explain atheism. The first, entered by William S. Bainbridge, is in the tradition of sociological theorizing. The second, proffered by Justin L Barre�, is an example of theorizing within the framework of the recently developed cognitive science of religion. While these two approaches are different in important respects, they both opt for environmental explanations of atheism. We give reasons for regarding purely environmental explanations as unsatisfactory both with regard to atheism and with regard to some (but not all) expressions of religiosity. We offer, moreover, a suggested modification of Barre�'s approach that introduces a hypothesized heritable biological factor into his explanatory schema. By so doing, we enlarge his argument so that it accounts for more of what we know about atheism.

Atheism and Unbelief: Different Ways to Apply the Evolutionary Framework

Studia Humana

Religion has been intensely studied in the last years inside an evolutionary frame, trying to discern to what extent it contributes to fitness or becomes an adaptive entity in its own. A similar heuristic can be tried regarding the opposite tendency: unbelief and atheism, since these cultural phenomena could help to better adapt to some social settings or become an adaptive socio-cultural niche on its own. The present paper examines some scenarios in which that question makes sense: the tradition of sociology of religion, with its different strands, including recent studies on ‘non-religious’; the cognitive; and the philosophical-theological reflection. The proposed venues show to what extent the evolutionary model might reveal neglected aspects in the study of unbelief, and at the same time its limits or the open questions that such application raise.

A cognitive perspective helps make the scientific study of atheism possible

NSRN methods blog, 2016

After more than a century of development, the cognitive and evolutionary sciences now offer scholars a range of theoretical and methodological tools to better understand religion. The use of these tools by anthropologists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars has led to the emergence of what has come to be known as the cognitive science of religion or CSR