NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS BY AN ATHEIST
This article was published last year but I don't remember seeing it discussed here. Personally this article makes a lot of sense. It looks at religion from an open-minded atheist perspective.
Atheism is not as rare or as rational as you think
Many atheists think of themselves as intellectually gifted individuals, guiding humanity on the path of reason. Scientific data shows otherwise.
On closer inspection, religion is not
an evolutionary puzzle so much as
two evolutionary puzzles. First is the puzzle of faith: the puzzle of how
Homo sapiens — and
Homo sapiens alone — came to be a religious species. Second, there is the puzzle of atheism
: how disbelief in gods can exist within an otherwise religious species. If belief in god(s) is truly an evolved human universal, how is it that millions or maybe billions of people today don’t believe in any? How can a defining feature of our species (which religion most definitely is!) not be a defining feature of
our entire species?
...
“Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.”
...
Atheism is stigmatized but not rare
Results like these — people inferring that serial killers don’t believe in God, or assuming that atheism leaves an indelible stamp of immorality even on people’s faces — are the context in which polls of atheist prevalence exist. Poll respondents might be motivated to conceal their atheism, which would systematically downwardly bias our estimates of global atheist prevalence.
In 2018, Maxine Najle and I estimated how many atheists there are in the U.S. using a task that lets people indirectly indicate their atheism to us, without them having to say it. Using this sneaky indirect measurement technique, our best estimate is that 26% of American adults do not believe in god(s) — more than twice as many as Gallup and Pew estimated at the time.
...
Atheism isn’t just for geniuses
Around 2009 or 2010, Ara Norenzayan and I sought to scientifically test the idea that atheism is underpinned by effortful cognitive reflection...
But the plot thickened. Rigorous follow-up studies repeatedly have been unable to produce similar results to our initial experiments. I have now accepted that the
experiments in our initial Science paper were fatally flawed,
the results no more than false positives. Beyond the experimental failures to replicate, the correlation between rational thinking and atheism turns out to be both
weak and fickle across cultures.
...
Religion is no less an evolutionary product than is a raptor or a ribosome, worthy of the same scientific awe. Through the processes of genetic evolution, we have been endowed with minds capable of imagining gods, and through the processes of cultural evolution, we have evolved intricate structures of beliefs and norms that have helped propel our species to greater and greater cooperative heights. The seemingly bizarre religious rituals that many deride as irrational may in fact be cultural evolutionary tricks that help create cooperative societies.
To me, this intricate cultural evolutionary play is infinitely more fascinating and fulfilling than the shallow, wholesale dismissal of religion offered by vocal public atheists. And to appreciate it, all you need to do is open yourself up to the possibility that over the millennia, religions may have survived and thrived in part because they served an evolutionary purpose. Of course, atheists need not subscribe to a given religious faith to appreciate it; one needn’t accept or praise something simply because it was useful in cultural evolution.
But everyone — including atheists, which I am — can have a more mature, scientifically literate, and fulfilling relationship with religion if we are open to the possibility that it doesn’t poison everything.
