Thinking analytically about religion can lead you to question religious beliefs and dismiss them more freely according to a new study published today in the journal Science. The study finds that waning religious belief is found in both skeptics and true believers who think through a problem rather than “go with their gut.”
Social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Will Gervais lead the study which he says is the first major research project to examine the cognitive origins of belief and disbelief.
According to Gervais:
“There’s been a long-standing intellectual tradition of treating science as one thing and religion as separate, and never the twain shall meet,” however recently there has been a push “to understand religion and why our species has the capacity for religion.”
The study focuses on a theory in which humans use two types of thinking, the first being an intuitive response (gut instinct) to arrive at a conclusion, while the second focuses on deliberate analysis to arrive at a sound conclusion routed in careful observation.
By using gut instinct and intuitive reasoning our brain often battles with itself and researchers believe analytic thinking can override intuition if carefully focused.
To find out if religious belief is really grounded in a gut instinct the research team asked college students to perform three tasks in which intuition would lead to a false answer and analytic thinking would bring about the correct answer.
As an example researchers would ask:
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
If you said the answer is $.10 because you quickly examined the answer and went with your gut you would actually discover later on that the correct answer is 5 cents.
After answering the questions students were asked about their belief in religion. The study found that analytically thinking participants had a lower belief in religion than “gut instinct” participants.
Researchers then performed other instinctual and analytic experiments to determine a persons believe system.
You can read the entire study in the recently published edition of the journal Science.
