“Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief.” So says recent research coming out of the University of British Columbia, reported in the prestigious journal Science. Even something as innocuous as viewing an image of Rodin’s Thinker seems to increase rational processing, which appears in turn to undermine belief.
The story has been spun in multiple directions by various blogs and periodicals, so, wanting to get to the truth of the matter, I paid to retrieve the article from behind the subscription paywall. The research seems sound, albeit very short-term-oriented. Its implications are not so simple.
Every responsible psychological research report, including this one, expresses cautions regarding conclusions to be drawn. Correlational studies in particular have to be interpreted with care. Even experimental (non-correlational) studies like this one can be confounded by unexamined variables and by experimenters’ assumptions. These researchers’ beliefs about religion are telegraphed in the introductory section of their report:
Available evidence and theory suggest that a converging suite of intuitive cognitive processes facilitate and support belief in supernatural agents, which is a central aspect of religious beliefs worldwide. These processes include intuitions about teleology, mind-body dualism, psychological immortality, and mind perception.
There’s something important missing from this list. It’s indicative of something lacking in psychological research, in Christianity itself, or both. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Other publications’ reactions have been interesting. In an ironic reversal, Time Magazine published a more responsible summary than two prestigious science periodicals, which seem to hint that the research shows faith is irrational. When I looked at Nature.com, which darkly asked, “Is rationality the enemy of religion?” I thought I was going to find the same thing there again. Early paragraphs supported that expectation, but I was pleased to see in it a note of sensibility later on:
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.
Someone had thought through what’s certainly missing from the UBC research analysis, and from a host of other reports: there are forms of belief that could well be supported, not undermined, by rational thinking. (I will be speaking specifically of Christian religious belief from this point forward.)
The UBC research team missed that possibility, but I don’t hold them entirely to blame. When I was in psych grad school I would have been astounded to hear Thomas Aquinas or Bishop Berkeley mentioned in the hallway. To hear them brought up in the classroom would probably have shocked me so badly, it might have landed me in a different kind of psychological institution altogether. (I’m a little shocked today to see Kant and Hume included among Christianity’s leading intellectuals, but that’s another matter.)
At the risk of overgeneralizing, psychologists know what previous research has shown them, and not much else. In a research paper in grad school I tried to make reference to a credible source of information not based in published social research; and goodness sakes, you’d have thought I’d quoted from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The professor was Not Pleased.
Anyway, I’m actually perfectly willing to accept that previous studies have shown that religion is mostly intuitive. I think for many (most?) Christians it really is mostly intuitive, and for many it’s strictly a cultural thing. As long as large proportions of Christians’ religion is like that, that’s exactly how it will appear under psychologists’ nomothetic research lens. It will look as if it’s mostly intuitive or cultural.
But that doesn’t mean Christianity is only intuitive or cultural, or that it has no strong rational component. I think it likely shows instead that for many believers, the rational side of their faith may not have been adequately equipped and supplied. Here’s what I mean. When some people read Richard Dawkins it engages their rational faculties and they have doubts about their beliefs. When I read Richard Dawkins it engages my rational faculties and my beliefs are strengthened. The difference is that I’ve done a bit of study and I know how sophomoric his arguments are. (That’s actually too easy of an example, but at least it’s a fairly familiar one.)
If many Christians’ belief is mostly intuitive, that doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t make necessarily make it weak. It does make it needlessly vulnerable.
And that reveals what I take to be the real message of this research for Christians: not that the faith is wrong—the research could not demonstrate that even if it were—but that for many of us, our faith could stand a much stronger rational component. We need to study more, test ourselves intellectually more, think more. Leaders—pastors and teachers in particular—need to challenge their classes and congregations more. We need to love our God with all our minds.
As it says in Nature, “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.”
That’s good rational thinking.
